I'm reposting this from Dave Scott, a teacher in Saint Louis and former resident of West Virginia. It's a great piece on the city, Peabody, and the very real harm that being in bed with corporations can wreak on communities. If you want to fight back then please try and make it out to a meeting this Thursday at 6:30 PM at the World Community Center (438 North Skinker). We'd love to see you there!
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I’m writing to you today as a
transplant to the great city of St. Louis. It’s been almost ten years since I
said goodbye to the country roads and green rolling hills of West Virginia
where I lived the first 29 years of my life. Since then, I’ve spent nine years
in our schools getting to know the city through the eyes of my students. This is
the time of year when I’m typically arranging new music, and planning
performances for my high school band; however, I received some sad news this week
that's turned my attention back to the Mountain State. I write to you today
in memoriam of the longtime environmental activist, Larry Gibson, from Kayford
Mountain, WV.
Larry Gibson spent his entire life
on the property that had been passed through his family for generations. During
the late 1980’s, when Mountaintop Removal became the primary mining technique
used in the region, Gibson found himself surrounded by the constant blasting
and toxic dust storms created by coal companies as they forever change the
Appalachian skyline. It’s fair to say that he didn’t become an activist by
choice. Watching the life on his mountain home explode into a dusty moonscape
was just the beginning of his ordeal.
You
see, coal isn’t the only thing that lies under the surface in West Virginia. Through
the process of blasting away the mountaintops, many toxins and carcinogens are pulverized
into one poisonous mixture which is either discharged into the wind, or simply
bulldozed onto the rivers and valleys below. The latest study conducted by Dr.
Michael Hendryx at West Virginia University suggests that the airborne sulphur,
silica, and other particulate matter that drifts miles away from the surface
mines is responsible for increases of cancer, kidney disease, and other
‘unexplained’ illnesses that are plaguing the coal fields. Other studies
conducted by Duke University and WVU have also found high levels of selenium, cadmium,
chromium, lead, and arsenic downstream from the mountaintop removal sites, and
in well water nearby. Over 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams, which were once
home to a diverse population of fish and wildlife, have been covered by these
valley fills. In many cases, ground water that had been depended upon for more
than a hundred years has been contaminated.
According to the research performed
by Appalachian Voices in 2006, there is a very direct correlation between
mountaintop removal sites and the most poverty-stricken counties of the region.
This is no coincidence; the more affluent people of New York and Pennsylvania would never stand for the permanent
destruction of the Catskills or the Poconos. The state of West Virginia, which
has been characterized for generations as having the most corrupt politicians
in the country, has allowed coal companies to operate without paying taxes for several
decades. Of all the characteristics of my home state that I would love to see here
in St. Louis, it’s a shame that political companionship with the mining
industry offers the most remarkable similarity.
One
of the responsible parties for the environmental destruction throughout
Appalachia is a familiar name in the St. Louis region, and a part of our own skyline.
It’s from behind the tinted windows above Keiner Plaza that Peabody Energy
operates the corporate machinery used for drilling away at EPA regulations and the
pensions of retired miners. Don’t believe for one second that this apparatus
isn’t being used on St. Louis. According to the analysis attached to the
Peabody tax abatement proposal of 2012, our city’s public schools are expected
to lose 1.96 million dollars over the next decade. That money would be very
useful in hiring more reading specialists, more math specialists, and more
classroom teachers.
As
a teacher, it pains me to tell you how these coal companies have demonstrated
their disdain for public schools in West Virginia. Their operations around Marsh
Fork Elementary forced teachers to remove coal
dust from the chalkboards every morning. In this small rural school, there were
four teachers and two former students diagnosed with cancer over a six year
span. In 2012, the school was forced to relocate due to the building of a containment
pond which houses millions of gallons of heavily polluted water known as coal
slurry directly adjacent to school property. According to coalimpoundment.org,
these earthen dams that are built to hold this toxic sludge have failed sixty
five times over the years, leaving those local communities and wildlife
habitats devastated.
Here
in St. Louis, our public schools may not be in eminent danger of a coal dust
explosion or a flash flood of coal slurry, but they are victims of the mining
industry nonetheless. Allowing Peabody to exist in our city with a free pass on
school funding is nothing short of depraved indifference. While our schools
have been concentrating their efforts on accreditation, they are also responsible
for serving the ten meals that many of our students count on each week in
addition to their one shot at the American dream. Our schools aren’t failing,
as much as our local leaders and businesses are failing them. It’s not the
intentions of this corporate giant to answer the prayers of those who hope that
their children will escape the poverty and crime that curse our city. However,
it is our mayor’s duty to protect us from corporations who would take a
government freebie with one hand while stealing opportunities from our children
with the other.
It’s
evident
that the Peabody Corporation has actually found a source of renewable
energy here in St. Louis. It’s called political power. The utility rates
may run a little higher during the election cycle, but buying elections
is what keeps
the lights on at Peabody- that is unless we, the taxpayers of St. Louis,
decide
to throw the switch. Just like Larry Gibson from Kayford Mountain, we
have no choice
in St. Louis. We can no longer afford to support a mayor who will offer
this
company a tax shelter five hundred miles away from the destruction along
Coal
River, or within one mile of the poverty here in our city. The people of
St.
Louis expect corporations to pay their fair share in taxes like the rest
of us.
That new banner atop the Peabody Building boasts of the company’s record
of
‘helping people’; it seems feasible that someone in the city government
could
demand that they live up to the simplicity of that slogan and pay their
share
in municipal taxes.
Larry Gibson, the man affectionately known as
the Keeper of the Mountains said, “They
tell us we’re collateral damage. Well, I ain’t collateral damage. I’m somebody.”
As a parent and teacher, I’m here to tell you that the students of Saint Louis Public
Schools are somebody too. They don’t deserve to be left behind by City Council,
or the financiers of Mayor Slay’s reelection campaign. Please, make your plea
to end Peabody’s tax abatement in the City of St. Louis. Call the Board of
Aldermen at (314)-622-3287, or Mayor Slay’s office at (314)-622-3201.
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