May 10, 2011 • 48 mins
Mountaintop removal mining is (to say the least) a controversial practice. But what exactly is it, how does it work and -- most importantly -- why should you care? Listen in to learn more about the effects of mountaintop removal mining.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant,
(00:20):
and that makes this stuff you should know? Right, that's right.
How are you doing? I am well, sir, How are you?
I'm pretty good. It's lovely here in Atlanta. It is.
It's like seventy five degrees beautiful. It's like San Diego
moved here. Hey. You hear that music? Josh? Yeah, Yeah,
that's Ben Sully, who will meet later. Right, that's right.
(00:41):
I could listen to that stuff all day. Man, that
chilling music. Macleagen awesome. Yeah, let's get into this one,
all right, let's do it. This is the shortest intro
how ever. Okay, okay, but it's it's it's telling. It's
a good one. And you would think that I would
have had it ready since it's the intro, you know.
But I like to play things fast and loose, kind
(01:01):
of by the seat of my pants. And I also
like to see how much time I can fill up
all I look for things, right, like I've done you,
But Chuck, I'm gonna give you a shocking statistic. There's
gonna be a lot of those in this one. In
the great state of West Virginia, which is next to
Virginia just west of it, though, UM since nineteen seventy nine,
(01:25):
the number of employed miners in that state, and mining
is the number one industry in West Virginia. It's coal
mine country. The number of miners um in since nineteen
seventy nine in that state has declined from sixty thousand
to twenty two thousand, according to the state's Senator Robert Bird,
(01:46):
but coal mining itself has dramatically increased over that time.
So how do you explain that Well, as a matter
of fact, the whole podcast that we're about to do
explains it very clearly. A tie of mining process called
mountaintop removal mining or strip mining. What's a type of
(02:06):
strip mining? Yeah, apparently one person called it strip mining
on steroids. UM is very much responsible for the UM
the ability for coal mining to just go through the
roof in Appalachia while requiring fear and fear people. So
while coal has has increased, unemployment has increased as well.
(02:26):
And I guess let's just get right into it, because
this one is chock full of stats and stories and
this is an unusual podcast for us. And by the way,
this one is officially yours, given this one to me.
This you did the you did the legwork for this one. Yeah,
and we should add at the end of this podcast,
we're gonna have a interview with uh in our first
(02:47):
musical guest ever, with singer, songwriter and cello player Ben Soley,
who was an activist for against mountaintop removal coal mining
and uh it's on you know, the subpop label with
his music, and he's gonna interview with us and play
a song and it's gonna be pretty cool to stick around. Yes,
don't go anywhere in the middle of the podcast, all right,
(03:09):
So let's get into it. So, um, chuck. Traditionally, when
you think of mining, you think of basically a hole
in the side of the mountain held up with timbers
that UM men covered in coal dust are going into
with pick axes and headlamps. Extremely dangerous, um job, but
a job that's traditionally um been able to support families. Yes,
(03:33):
long has its roots in Appalachia, right, Um, this is
a totally different kind of mining. Mountaintop removal mining is
where traditional mining you bore into the mountain. With mountain
top removal mining, you blow the top off of the
mountain to expose the coal steam rather than digging in
to get it. Yeah, coal steams run horizontally through a mountain.
(03:55):
So what happens is and this is the how it
works portion. Yeah, and it's pretty amazing how they do this.
And even Ben has told me it's pretty amazing, even
though he thinks it's an awful practice, it's pretty amazing.
On the last they clear cut the forest. They scrape
away the top, soil, lumber, herbs, all that stuff, herbs, herbs, wildlife,
(04:18):
and habitat. The wildlife habitat is destroyed. Vegetation is destroyed.
And in their defense they usually customarily they send a
guy in with a machine gun who just fires into
the air like a full day and then he comes
down the mountain. Then they start clear cutting, so they
do all this. Once they've done all that, they blow
up the top of the mountain as much as eight
(04:40):
hundred to a thousand feet I've seen. The mountain is
just gone. That's why they call it removal. Yeah, and
it's flattened out and it looks like a barren moonscape
instead of a forest in a mountain. Yeah, that's the
that's the term that's used by just about anybody who
has anything to do with either um uh it's supporting
(05:02):
or opposing coal mining mountaintop coal mining. Moonscape is the
word that everyone always uses. That's what I was trying
to get out from that point. Um, they have these
big shovels that come and dig into the soil. U
haul that stuff away into the valleys nearby. Yeah, because
it's not like the stuff that s integrates this this um,
this thing that's called overburdened by the mining industry, which
(05:26):
is you know, rock, soil, dirt, trees. Yeah. Um, Like
it doesn't just evaporate. You have to get rid of it. Yeah,
you gotta put it somewhere. And then something called a
drag line, which is one of the more impressive machines
I've ever seen. Huge. How big are these things? They
said somewhere stories Yeah, um, and they way up to
eight million pounds and apparently they're they're um. Yeah, so
(05:49):
you saw that picture. It looks like an oil rig
on like tracks. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, So the drag
line comes in to expose the coil, digs into the rock. Um,
these machines scoop out the coal. The machines that scoop
are the coal. Their buckets can hold up to twenty
compact sized cars. Wow, that's large. Is there are massive
(06:10):
operations and the result of this is, uh, the narrow
valleys have been filled. It's called valley fill. And one.
We got a bunch of stats. Here's one. Coal companies
have buried more than twelve miles of headwaters and streams,
rivers and streams buried underneath the stuff gone forever. Yeah,
(06:33):
with the overburn, remember the stuff that they blew the
top of the mountain off of may have to get
rid of it. There's two ways to do it. When
you truck it off of the mountain and dump trucks,
which is done, but it's also extremely expensive and time consuming.
Or you move bulldozers up there and you push the
overburden into the valley below in the in typically in
a valley there's going to be some sort of stream
(06:54):
water supply. Yeah. And um, if you have a per mint,
if you apply for a valley filled permit, um, you
you can you're usually granted one and you just push
that stuff into the valley and then start getting to
the coal. Right, And so that's um. There's a lot
of problems with this and we're going to try and
hit on all of them, the myriad issues. It's not
(07:17):
what you think you can just stop right here's probably could.
Another one of the issues is something when they wash
the coal. It's called the result of of the wash
is what they end up was called coal slurry. Right,
And you wash coal because UM coal comes with a
lot of other organic and inorganic toxins metals compounds UM
(07:38):
like nickel, cadmium, mercury that keep it from burning as well. Right, Yeah,
and there's chemicals added to the wash as well which
end up in the coal slurry ponds. Right. So you're
you're you're washing it for market, but this water has
got to go somewhere, and it's extremely toxic. UM mercury
alone would make it extremely toxic. All those other heavy
(07:59):
metals just make it been worse. So you either inject
them into old minds all abandoned minds is one one
thing that we do with cole slurry, or you wash
them into holding ponds, which are basically earthen damns built
into the side of the mountain, which can be precarious,
as we'll find out. Yeah, and if you've seen cole slurry,
(08:19):
I mean, just type it into Google images, it looks like,
uh like soupy um black sludge is about the best
comparison I can make. So these ponds um. One of
these actually busted. The dam broken in nineteen seventy two
in West Virginia a Buffalo Creek and a hundred and
(08:40):
thirty two million gallons of this stuff rushed through the valley,
killed a hundred and twenty five people injured, eleven hundred
and four thousand people were left homeless. And these by
and large are very poor people, which is one of
the keys here that we're gonna keep hitting on. Yeah,
I think Wise County, West Virginia. The um the average
(09:01):
income is like eighteen thousand for a family something like that. Yeah,
graduation rate is about six and the poverty level is
exactly what it was during the was it Eisenhower I
think so Eisenhower administration when he went there and said
we have to end poverty in West Virginia. It's the
same lb J. Yeah, Johnson, Sorry, UM. So once this
(09:24):
whole operation is done, there may be more than one seam,
and there's different ways to get into it. UM, Like
you can dig in from the side high wall mining,
or you can blow the top off the mountain where
you can do both. But once the mountains exhausted, and
these are massive sites. There's one in Virginia, I believe
that's like thirty five thousand acres, which that's one site
(09:46):
that Yeah, that's just one mining operation, or you could
also call it one former mountain. UM. When when the
time was when you left, that was that you got
your coal and you got out of there in the
mining oper oration was abandoned. UM. Nowadays you were supposed
to most most mountaintop removal permits UH come with UH
(10:09):
an addendum that you have to do some sort of reclamation.
And the reclamation process typically is supposed to involve basically
piling rock and stuff back up, UM, regrowing this area
and UM trying to basically simulate a mountain again. Yeah,
and then was when that was first introduced, the Surface
(10:31):
Mining Control and Reclamation Act established standards. UH. They said
back then that the goal was just to get grass
to grow, anything to grow, and reclamation is a good
thing in theory, but one of the knocks that activists
like to point out is that what happens on paper
isn't always what happens in reality. And there's been studies
(10:53):
that show that the soil is still not the same
decades later. It's just not the same. You can't make
it what it was right. Um. There is one sterling
example of what can be done. It's called the Powell
River Project. So the Powell River Project is um in Virginia,
I believe, and it's acres. It's a former um mining site.
(11:18):
UM that was. It's just a leveled mountaintop and some
care was given to it and now it is basically
a wildlife preserve. UM. It has strawberries and blueberries growing
on it and sugar maples and cattle is grazing on
the turf. UM. The wildlife that's come back are screech
(11:41):
and bard owl's, coyote, bear, turkey. UM. They're basically this
this mountain is getting back to nature, right. Yeah. Primarily
financed by the coal industry. Must say to say that, UM,
And I think the deal is if everything went down
like it's going down at Powell River, there would be
fewer is shoes. But that's not the case. Unfortunately, that's
(12:03):
just a sterling example of what could be done. Well,
this is what happens when you spend like decades and
lots of money on this one particular site for the
most case. I think you told me that they just
like throw some grass seed down over the old site.
And that's that, right, And UM, I guess well we
should probably start now talking about the environmental impact. There's
(12:26):
basically two ways, um, you can you can classify the
impacts that this has three ways. One economic which looks
like it should be good, right, but if you look
at the rates of unemployment in the continuous poverty in Appalachia, UM,
you'll actually see that it's not so great. The economic impact, Um,
(12:49):
the environmental impact, and then the human impact. So let's
talk about environment We're talking about cold slurry, right, you
have to put that cold slurry somewhere the earthen damn
like you said, UM, at Buffalo Creek in nine collapsed,
spilled a hundred and thirty two million gallons and killed
a hundred people, right, that's right, and two thousand in
(13:11):
Kentucky there was another damn break two hundred and fifty
million gallons of sludge flowed into the Tug Fork of
the Big Sandy River and affected streams and rivers up
to a hundred miles away. More than a million fish
and other wildlife died. One of the biggest environmental disasters
in this country's history, and a lot of people probably
(13:33):
never heard of it. Yeah, it's apparently the areas of
exposure was twenty times that of the ex m Valdi's disaster. Yeah,
and I believe it was either this one or the
other one. Um. One of the coal company heads called
it because heavy rains is what eventually calls the damn
to break on top of the slurry. Called it an
(13:54):
act of God. Yeah, and I believe that's how it
was left so sort of washing our hands of it.
It was because the heavy rains, and you know, that's
what happened. So you also mentioned Valley phil Um where
streams have been affected just by being buried, which means
no more stream stat for you. There sixty seven hundred
Valley Phill permits in the United States, six thousand, seven
(14:19):
hundred times this has happened. Actually, I think it's more
than I think it's um. Like in the seventy two
hundreds because it was between eighty five and two thousand one.
And we found another one. Chuck, that's um, there's been
about five hundred or so from two thousand one to
two thousand and eight. Yeah, things have really ramped up
here in the last decade. Stars so UM the back
(14:40):
to the streams as well. Apparently there was this um
this uh study in Science where UM twelve environmental science
sciencests got in Science magazine. Yes, you know, in Science
in January last this past you know, January twelve environmental
sciences got together and did a survey of the literature
(15:01):
of on the environmental impact of mountaintop removal mining and UM,
the valleys you said, I think something like twelve hundred
miles of valley valley streams and headwaters have been affected. Um.
These these guys sampled water and seventy three of seventy
eight streams. Um or, they did a study on this
(15:23):
and found that UM, seventy three of the seventy eight
streams they sampled had deformed fish carrying toxic levels of selenium,
which is a heavy metal, which is not good. UM.
And if your fish is deformed, that's not good. In general. Yeah,
the Simpsons, uh episode of Flanky how Many Eyes was three?
(15:45):
Almost sit four, we would have heard it about that. Um.
Drinking water is another problem because the cold slurry. These
earthen dams are temporary solution to begin with, um, but
they can leak and that cold slurry can enter drinking water. Yeah.
And you know, just to recap real quick though on
the reclamation that I did find that study from earlier.
(16:08):
The study said that fifteen years after a mountaintop was
leveled at this one site, trees had still not regrown
because they just can't make the soil like it used
to be. And the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers
and that's for the land. When it comes to the streams,
the Army Corps of Engineers said under oath in their
testimony um that there is not a successful stream creation
(16:28):
project in junction with this. Yeah, or they don't know
of one. Yeah. Like basically, all right, we can try
and reform the mountains to a rough assemblance of what
it once was, but you can't just make new streams
and we haven't found out a way to do that.
It's kind of like um, taking a sword and severing
someone's head and it just kind of balancing it back
on the neck again. It's there, but it's not really
(16:49):
working any longer. Right, Yeah, So that's some of the
environment and where you're also talking about, Uh, it's in
the drinking water. It is um, which kind of is
it's straddles um the environmental and the human impacts. Um.
There are people in this literature that we've been um
researching for this podcast whose families have lived in these
(17:10):
areas for like two hundred and thirty years or so, right,
Like these are straight up Appalachian folk, right, hillbilies they
call them, And um, the Hillbillies have been there for
a while and before I guess it was probably a
very quiet place. But as we've mentioned, with mountaintop removal, mining,
explosives are a major part of it. So when you
(17:32):
blow the top off of a mountain, first of all,
it takes a lot of explosives, but it's very loud. Um. Apparently,
in two thousand three, sixty seven percent of all explosives
produced in the US were consumed by the coal industry,
and in West Virginia alone, that figure led to an
estimated three million pounds of explosives being used a day.
A day to blow up mountains. People live on these
(17:55):
mountains still, the same mountains that they're blowing up, so
you've got the noise. Have a very dangerous condition called
fly rock, yeah, which is exactly what it sounds like.
When you blow a mountain top up. Rock flies everywhere,
and if somebody's living there, it um can go into
their house and kill them. Yeah, And that was the
case in uh two thousand four at two thirty in
(18:17):
the morning, bulldoz are operating without a permit. At two
again to thirty in the morning, because bulldozer was working
on mine site without a permit, it dislodged a thousand
pound boulder, rolled two hundred feet down and crushed three
year old Jeremy Davidson in his bed, who was sleeping
at the time. Yet and the company was fined fifteen
tho dollars for that, yeah, for gross negligence. Yeah. So
(18:40):
I don't even have a comment on that. We'll just
leave that to the listeners. Um. The have some more
deaths here if you want to be dark for another moment.
In West Virginia, fourteen people drowned in the last three
years because of floods and mud slides, in Kentucky, fifty
people have been killed and five injured over the last
five years by cold trucks that were illegally overloaded. And
(19:04):
on the flooding thing, I think they said that in
this one spot in West Virginia that there were three
what they call a thousand year flood or a hundred
year flood in ten days, three year floods in ten
days in this one region. That's not supposed to happen. UM.
And you know you're talking about death's that's just directly
(19:24):
from drownings, UM injury, that kind of thing. If you
take all of the public health hazards into account, UM
as a public Health reports UM Journal study did UH
this year I think last year, I'm sorry, UM. Anywhere
between sevent hundred and thirty six and hundred and eighty
(19:46):
nine people die in Appalachia each year as a result
of the coal mining industry there, right, So there is
a lot of death, but there's also a lot of
potential death too. We talked about Buffalo Creek where the
slurry uh damn, a slurry pond damn broke and killed
a hundred and twenty people. That was a hundred and
thirty million gallons of coal slurry, right killed the people.
(20:10):
There is a place UM called marsh Fork, march Fork
Elementary School. I saw a documentary on the school. So
march Fork has UM I believe two hundred something students
going there every day. And just above the elementary school
there is a coal slurry pond above it on the
(20:31):
mountain side that holds three billion gallons of coal sludge. Yeah,
and there's a whole operation. There's a silo three hundred
feet from the school. Right, So rather than the hundred
and thirty two million gallons, we're talking about three billion
gallons poised behind an earthen dam right above an elementary school.
So there's a lot of potential for a disaster as well. Right. Yeah,
(20:53):
that's a Massy Energy that's one of the bigger coal
companies in the United States. And you might remember Massey's
name by UM the up for Big Branch mine explosion
that happened about a year ago from two days ago.
It was April five, UM that that explosion killed twenty
nine miners and leaving three others trapped. UM. So Massy is,
(21:15):
like you said, big in a traditional mining uh surface
mining and regulation. Actually one of their former executives was
named a Deputy Energy Secretary for fossil fuels a couple
of years back. That's right, President Bush named appointed uh
what was his name? His name was Stanley sue Bileski.
(21:37):
He was appointed in UM two seven December two thousand
seven to the Department of Energy. Yeah, okay, Uh. Back
to March Fork Elementary School. That that actually one of
the documentaries I saw yesterday was on that school specifically,
and uh, West Virginia activists Bo Webb, he's one of
the leading activists on this cause. Found of the parents
(21:59):
are saying that they're chill. Dren are coming home from
school with a variety of illnesses like nausea, diarrhea, vomiting,
shortness of breath, wheezing, asthma, um long term effects, kidney damage.
There's been a lot of kidney damage in that area,
liver damage, spleen failure, bone damage, and cancer of the
digestive digestive track. And um Bo has uh Actually it
(22:25):
wasn't Bo, but one of the other activists there. They
were trying to raise money in this documentary to build
a new school not near you know, not threeet away
from a coal mining corporation. And they were trying to
raise it by donating pennies, and they in the documentary
they marched and had a rally at the governor's office
in West Virginia and it was hardcore. Man, it was
hard to watch. Like literally, the governor gave him a
(22:48):
minute and he's glad handing and talking to people, and
you know, they bring out this little girl from the
school and he's like, well, what are you interested in?
And you sure are cute and what do you want
to be when you grow up? And basically the kids
just like, I don't want to live under a coal
mine and I don't want to be sick anymore. And
they called this guy out, the governor out big time.
And it was really one of those uncomfortable scenes to
(23:09):
watch when politics gets when it's clear that this guy
has no answer and the big coal has their lobbyists
that are you know, on the on the side of
you know, big coal mining, and it was it was
just very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch, but you should
watch it nonetheless. And that was that was marsh Creek
(23:31):
Elementaries in West Virginia, right, yeah, okay, so um, yeah,
it's in Rock Creek. I see um chuck. One of
the reasons why the governor would have been embarrassed or
um felt awkward is because there is a ton of
money at stake here. That one UM Public Health Reports
Journal study. Yeah that that said you know, between um
(23:54):
people die each year from coal mining. Um. It was
an economics paper really, and it said that, um, the
coal industry generates about eight billion dollars in economic contribution
to Appalachia every year, right, yeah, which is a lot.
It's like, you know, you can't that's a lot of
(24:14):
money spent on that area. The problem is this same paper,
using the same model, figured out that um, it costs
about forty two billion dollars in healthcare costs and the
cost of life. So that's a big picture. Yeah. Yeah,
so you're actually losing. And you can just look at
you know, the poverty in Appalachia and see, oh, well,
(24:34):
these people who are literally next to these mines are
not benefiting from this at all. Right, and the uh
there's another stat. Activists will point out that only about
four or five percent of our of our nation's coal
energy comes from mountaintop removal mining. So it's not like, oh,
you know, like of the coal that we use comes
from this practice, so we really really need it. Uh.
(24:55):
They will tell you that conservation alone, we could save
an average of our energy to man's which far outweighs
you know, by what four or five times the five
percent that we're using. Right, I've seen up the ten
percent um comes from strip mining or from mountaintop removable mining.
But that's being used pretty grievingly because we um, the
(25:17):
United States gets about fifty of its electricity. I think
in two thousand nine, I got forty percent of it's
electricity from coal. So usually it's around Yeah, and we're
exporting coal too. It's coal is an important part of
our energy plan. I can't ignore that. So where does
that leave us, Chuck, Well, there's a couple of things, uh, Josh.
(25:38):
One reason that I wanted to do this show, and
that you've got on board and we're way behind it too,
is because oh no, I'm I'm just doing this. Is
because this is a problem that affects poor rural people,
for the most part, people in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, uh,
Tennessee now, and and that they don't have the same
(26:01):
voice that other folks do. UM. One of the leading,
but I think it was bow Webb again said if
this this wouldn't happen in New England. Um that biggest
environmental disaster west of the or east of the Mississippi
River happened in The New York Times didn't report about
it for like four months. So it's and I guess
a lot of the listeners out there probably looked at
(26:22):
the title what is Mountaintop removable coal mining and said, yeah,
what is that? I've never heard of it. But we've
all heard of the Valdez, we heard about the you know,
all these disasters obviously need attention. I'm not saying that
we shouldn't pay attention to things like oil spills, but
it gets a lot more at tension when it's on
the Gulf of Florida with Destin and seaside right there
(26:42):
than it does in the rural mountains of West Virginia.
So somebody needs to be talking about this, and a
lot of people are. And another problem is the coal
lobby and the fact that companies can donate money to
uh political campaigns and getting a pockets of politicians and
(27:02):
favors are paid back. And it's the same old story
with you know, big industry like this. It's just sad
to see it happening. Well, it is. It's a big
it's a there's a big debate going on right now
about just how much the e p A should have
teeth in regards to mountaintop removal mining, right. Yeah, And
the e p as new chief is pretty progressive and
(27:24):
pretty hardcore and not a friend of big business, and
she is making some waves. Um. Coal miners are against
these actions. You're talking about Lisa Jackson. Yeah, and she's
a bulldog. That read that Rolling Stone interview on her,
and she's she said her job is just to look
(27:45):
out for the environment, that that's the only thing she
wants to do. And you know, if you're in her way,
she's gonna try and knock you down. Well, we'll see.
But that's still not enough um for a lot of people.
I think they're the general consensus among activists and probably
people who live in school buses on the side of
a mountain nearby a mountaintop removal UM operation is that
(28:07):
it should be banned outright, Yeah, That that process is
not mining those particular sites, but that that um type
of mining, that method of mining should just be completely outlawed. Yeah.
I mean most of these permits were issued during the
Clinton and Bush administrations UH second Bush obviously, and there
were certain key provisions to the Clean Water Act that
(28:28):
were rewritten UH to reclassify waste associated with strip mining
as benign film material. Federal judge rejected that UM, but
then that change was upheld in two thousand three by
UH fourth Circuit Court judge. And then Obama comes in
and people said, all right, dude, you're you're the environmental guy.
(28:51):
Get rid of this altogether. In the first one days
didn't happen. But Obama has introduced UM stricter guidelines now
and the e p A has onto curtail mountain top
mining hailed by certain environmentalists. But if you talk to
bow Webb, they'll say that ain't enough. Brother. He's like,
you gotta outlaw mountaintop removal mining, period, and anything less
(29:12):
than that is just playing into the hands a big
coal It's it's surprising that it has been allowed to
go on. I mean, the idea of blowing the top
of a mountain and then pushing it into the valley below,
covering up the stream, and then introducing coal slurry to
this local environment. UM in an age where we you know,
where there's such a thing as Earth Day and people
(29:32):
are like, I will never use a paper or a
plastic bag. I used my own that I bought and
brought from home. That this is going on, is UM.
It's it's startling. Yeah. Well, UM, last and you know,
I said that there were some efforts by the Obama
administration to curtail this UM last Thursday. This is just
(29:53):
over the wire today, UM. Two senators from Kentucky, Mitch
McConnell and Ran Paul, introduced the bill trying to restrict
that p A from clamping down on it, giving the
e p A a a sixty day deadline to veto Clean
Water Act permits issued by the Corps of Engineers, and
UM activists are saying, and this is tricky, so they
put in that sixty eight thing. Everyone knows nothing in
(30:14):
the government can happen in sixty days, so it's sort
of a a facade, red herring or red herring. Uh.
The bill would also prevent the e p A from
retroactively vetoing permits. So UM. That was Mitch mcconollin, Ran
Paul and Ran Paul from Kentucky. If you're from Kentucky.
You know all about your senators two thousand ten, said like,
(30:37):
you don't need me to tell you about this guy.
In two thousand ten, he said in an interview quote,
I think they should name it something better. The top
ends up flatter. But we're not talking about Mount Everest.
We're talking about these knobby little hills that are everywhere
out here. I don't think anyone's gonna be missing a
hill or two here and there. And that was ran Paul,
straight from the horse's mouth, and Chuck, I think that
(30:59):
you know as well as eye, people are going to
be like you guys are getting political. Stop being political.
And I just I'm trying to figure out how to
frame a response to that, because this is Paul, this
is UM super political. It's above politics. It's basically incredibly
well financed UM industrial interests and average people who have
(31:24):
no money. That kind of UM dying, dying and getting sick.
That's not political. That's not the right or the left.
That's right or wrong. Basically, well said sir, we're talking
about UM an e P. A study estimated four hundred
thousand acres have been wiped out, and like we said,
between seven hundred and a thousand miles of stream and
(31:45):
that was that those are the two thousand one number,
so it's a lot higher by then, Well, do you
want to talk to Ben slowly? I do. I'm looking
to see if I have anything else. Oh you know what,
we should plug a couple of things, Um, Jonathan Franzen's
new novel Freedom. It's a big subplot mountaintop removal mining. Yeah,
I heard the TV show Justified. Have you ever seen it?
(32:07):
It's awesome. Timothy Oliphant season two has a big subplot
on mountaintop removal mining and all these things, you know,
raise awareness on certain levels. The wild wonderful Whites of
West Virginia. What's that? It's a documentary you know, the
Dancing Outlaw. Oh yeah, yeah, so it's a follow up
that it's his family and they are crazy. It's actually
(32:27):
produced by Johnny Knoxville's production company. Really it's worth seeing.
So um. Ben will be in here in a second
to give us some more organizations. But if you want
to just look into this little more, there are three
places that can recommend you go. One is I Love
Mountains dot org. Great place to start. There's a group
called the Mountain Justice Summer. There they are well organized.
(32:49):
I think they're the oldest one. Yeah, that's Mountain Justice
Summer dot org. And then um Appalachian Voices app Voices
dot org. Go to any of those websites, look up
some pictures, do your own research, see if it matters
to you or summer's coming up. And if you want
to go join the protest, they have them all over Appalachia.
If you've ever wanted to see a person with dreadlocks
(33:12):
in working in conjunction with the hillbilly, this is the
place to go. It's a good point. So chuck um,
let's let's pause a second here while we bring Ben
sol Okay, so we're back. It seemed like a brief
(33:36):
second to you, but it was about ten minutes thoughts
at least something like that. And in the studio for
our first ever musical guests, we have Mr Ben so Ley.
Welcome Ben, Hello, fellas. Ben is a singer, a songwriter,
and a cellist. Check he is a Kentucky native right
and he is a coal a mountaintop removal coal mining activists.
(33:56):
And in two thousand ten, Ben, you put out an
album Them on Subpop label, produced by Mr Jim James
of My Morning Jacket. It's true with Daniel Martin Moore
called Deer Companion, and it was a you call a
concept album or just a theme album. M that's a
good question. Um. Some folks referred to as a protest album. O.
Some folks referred to it as a album of of
(34:19):
umn issues based album. And we just kind of looked
at it as a tribute album to a really beautiful
part of the country and bringing that part of the
country and that sound and kind of our heritages Kentucky
musicians into like the urban context and mixing all that stuff. Well,
since that was one of my questions anyway, just tell
us a little bit more about that project. I now
(34:40):
did of the proceeds went to I Love Mountains dot org. Yeah, well,
I mean all of the proceeds that we would have
gotten as artists. Yeah, and in the record world, you know,
there's you get a portion of it from record sales
album went to dot org. No. Actually it was like
I mean, to be specific, it was thirteen point something
(35:00):
per cent the portion that we would have gotten his artists.
So we just donated that to Act Voices, Um. And
mostly because they run an amazing website and called I
Love Mountains dot org. And the goal of the record
was not to like protest anything or you know, necessarily
pick aside. It was more to like raise awareness being
catalysts for conversation exactly. So UM, in that way, we
(35:26):
wanted to support the thing that was we felt like
was one of the best things for a national conversation,
which was the website where people can go and find
out how they're involved and what to do. How did
you get into UM Where did your desire to raise
awareness about MTR come from? UM? It's a good question.
I think I think it all started with UMH an
(35:48):
author that read a story. And this guy's name is
Silas House. It's a well known author there in the
Kentucky Central part of America region. He's amazing writer. And
he came and read on a show that I was
doing this beautiful entry about a lady who had posted
herself up on this mountain side and she was not
going to allow the machines to kind of rip up
(36:09):
the land which had been in her family for years
and years, and that you know, it was a you know,
I had a lot of emotion and energy and the
writing that kind of spawned the thought of it, and
then more and more research. I was like, Wow, how
can this actually be going on America? How can people
actually I have to live without Basically there's a lot
of their civil rights to have like clean water, to
(36:32):
be protected by their police, you know, all these things,
and so I wanted to help raise awareness for it.
But I'm a musician. What do you do? Like how
much can a song really change anything? Is always one
of these big dilemmas, especially a song of protest. Have
you heard Europe's Final Countdown? That changed everything for me?
(36:53):
You know the song I Do for You? I'm Gonna
Buy You That MP three is a better thing. Oh
that's sweet. Uh So tell us a little bit more
about Deer Companion and your work with Daniel Martin Moore
and Jim James and Subpop and how that was packaged.
I know that was very unique. It is unique. And
Subpop is a really amazing record label for even taking
(37:14):
the time to like look at putting this thing out.
And I think a big, big part of that is
because they started as a label that was based in
a community, like they started, you know, putting out the
punk rock music of Seattle, and they grew big and
they put out music and everything. Now, but this is
the way of reaching into a different community and being
(37:35):
part of a conversation. And in a lot of ways,
folk music kind of has that punk like against the
you know, against the common thing, the establishment, against the establishment,
the man, the man, whatever, the industry, and so I
think this really resonated with them, so they took the
(37:55):
time and energy put it out. Working with Daniel Martin
Moore was, um, he's a tall, all handsome crooner sort
of fella. He is, and he also lives in Kentucky
And before we even met, he was very active in
raising when it's been mountintop removal with a song called
fly Rock Blues, and fly rock kind of describes the
(38:15):
materials that fly off into the air when they mountain that, Yeah,
it's amazing stuff. I mean sometimes boulders as big as
houses go flying hundreds of yards. I mean it's amazing,
powerful explosive force and land in places way outside the
digging zone. So um, that and song inspired me to
(38:36):
work with him on this project. And then Jim James
came on board, also Kentucky native. Also Kentucky native, I
mean he had done a lot of work with Kentucky
for the Commonwealth, an organization there in Kentucky, and he
just was a great voice for being able to take
these influences of Appalachia, take our own songwriting, and also
(38:57):
bring him in with kind of the relevant indie rock,
this kind of sound that is associated with him and
My Morning Jacket. And quickly on the packaging to um
that was was there a map that was included or
there's a there's a beautiful picture of Appalachia. And what's
unique about the picture and the reason that we chose
(39:17):
it is not it's not some you know, long shot
landscape of the rolling mountains, old Appalachian fog. It's it's
not this idealized thing. It's simply a valley. It's this beautiful,
pristine valley. And that's really what the whole contention behind
this is. It's not really the absence of the mountaintops
(39:37):
that causes so much destruction. It's the filling in the
destruction of the valleys. These are the places that collect
our water, the headwaters that come down not only to
these Appalachian communities but also some of our major cities
on the East coast, and those waters are being polluted,
and the idea that we all live downstream from those
UM is a really provocative and and an idea that
(39:59):
we're all in this together. This is one big community,
from the groundwater being polluted to the electricity that runs
these light bulbs. Like, we're all kind of participating in
this thing. And it's very easy when we're participating in it,
turning on a light switch or charging our phone. Two
miss the idea, not that a mountain is blowing up.
That's too abstract. That's two out there. The idea that
(40:21):
people have to live with UM, that people make this power.
But people have to deal with the cold trucks, you know,
tearing up the roads. People have to deal with the
dust in the air and the shaking ground. People have
to deal with the loss of land values. Like there
are people that are living UM very hard lives to
make sure that we have these things. And I think
(40:43):
from a positive standpoint, we need to appreciate that more.
Not just protest them, not point our fingers and look
at them and say look at those poor people. Let's
say thank you in a lot of ways. And that's
what we try to do with your companion, was to
say thank you celebrate Appalachia as a landscape as part
of our American heritage. You know, everything from the fiddler chopped,
(41:06):
you know, the man beside his cabin chopping wood, or
the fiddler playing, by the guys dancing, like these American
things that have been turned into musicals and shows. They
all stem from these those pioneers that settled in these
mountains and and I just think it's such a huge
part of our heritage Americans, and it's just disappearing as
these communities they just they struggled to survive underneath the
(41:28):
climate of things being exploded and land being devalued and
water being polluted. It's hard for them to survive. It's
hard for communities two to even keep their footing when
all that's happening. So we're losing part of our American heritage.
And that's how it ties in with me as a musician.
That's how I found it tied in with me as
a musician. Awesome. And I want to point out Ben
(41:50):
as a guy who walks the walk. He did a
an entire tour, was it last year? On your bicycle? Well, yeah,
we've done three tours by bicycle. Man. I don't know
how many people are there ever tried to carry the
cello and bicycle, But this guy does it from town
to town. Believe it or not, there's four or five
cellist out there in the world that are that are
carrying their cellos on bicycle. It's something about you know,
people say cellist are extreme people. I don't think that.
(42:14):
But I just really got into this idea of not
being sustainable or being green, slowing down right, the idea
that I wanted to be more involved in these communities.
I felt this this unsettling feeling that I was coming
through these places, putting on a show, asking people about
the music, and then moving on to the next driving
(42:34):
eight to ten hours the next day sometimes to get
to some distant community where a promoter is willing to
put on put out money to put on a show.
It felt like a little bit of a fleecing thing
and somewhat dishonest in a lot of ways. It wasn't real,
and people romanticized it, but it wasn't really real. So
the idea of getting on a bicycle, slowing down, not
being able to roll up our windows or just stay
(42:55):
on the interstate and zoom pass the place. We had
to really ride through each community and be a part
of their town for at least a little bit. Yeah,
you notice, I've been riding my bike lately just for exercise,
and it's amazing how much more you notice just by
walking or riding a bike than when you're zipping past
in the car. The smells, the condition of the road
is a big one. Um the habits and nature of
(43:18):
other drivers out there. You notice how amazing it is
that we have thousands and thousands of pounds of machinery
that we can just hurtle down the highway. I mean,
for for better or worse. You just kind of notice
what what an extreme action that is. It feels we're
so used to it. But the idea that we can
hop on a highway and just push this machine, very heavy,
(43:38):
big machine, float it down the highway. You know, it's
kind of like you know, Arthur C. Clark or something.
It's just right out there. You don't take things for granted.
My friend, all right, Well, before we get involved with
the music, sticking around and playing as a song, I
would love to we we plug. I love mountains dot Org.
Is that a good place for people to start. It's
(43:59):
a great place for people will start especially because you can.
They have a tool on there where you can plug
in your zip code and see what portion of your
power is coming from coalts and not only that, you
can see where that coal is coming from. Yeah, it's
a great website. I love mountains that are it's cool,
not cold, that's cold. So the song we're gonna hear
just called electrified, and it is from Mr. Soli's forthcoming album,
(44:23):
which should be dropping right now, and it's called Inclusions.
So it's here. The trees far electrified, the streets are electrified,
(44:45):
your eats are electrified. My voice was electriffive. Your heart
is unsteady. They can make a feat in time. Your
mind is confused, it will be clarified, your own fashioned.
You will be modernized. Every Thing is electrified. If the
(45:09):
thing is electrified. If you lost in the jungle, used
the satellite, you're broke in the city, sneak on the
bus line, you lost your job because it was mechanized.
(45:30):
They said we have to compete when the markets gooblized.
Every thing is electrified. Every thing is electrified. Every thing
is electrified. Lie with my bare hand touched the base
(45:54):
of your spine. Feel you shuddering glow moved like a
swallow and I'm hypnotop. Every things electric file. Everything's aled
to file. Things electrify. Some folks are heroes, others maybe vilified.
(46:44):
Assess your lawsuit has learned to diversify. Find your higher
callings than evangelize, build your congregation. Now you're televised. Every
thing's electrified. Everything is a ACTU five. Yeah, and the
things electrified, the thing electure five. Man, that was awesome.
(47:38):
That was very cool, so cool. And those you know
you heard clapping. We have people all over the office
here that wanted to come in and here. Yeah, I
have something else. Uh. So you can see Ben Solely
on tour. He's on tour right now, and he is
all over the place. I'm looking Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St. Louis,
I mean, back through Kentucky, down through the South. Go
(47:59):
see Ben so Lee on tour through the end of June.
You can find that at his website. Yeah. You can
also learn all about mining and energy by typing either
one of those words in the search part. How stuff
works dot com, which is not sure your listener mail
this time. Instead, you shoot us an email if you
want to drop us a line. Yeah, and hey, if
you go see Benslely onto work, go up to him
(48:20):
and talk to him. He's a very nice guy and
tell him that your buddies with us. He's a very
good guy. Anyway. If you want to get in touch
with us, send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. VI is it how stuff works
(48:40):
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
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The how Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it
today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant,
(00:20):
and that makes this stuff you should know? Right, that's right.
How are you doing? I am well, sir, How are you?
I'm pretty good. It's lovely here in Atlanta. It is.
It's like seventy five degrees beautiful. It's like San Diego
moved here. Hey. You hear that music? Josh? Yeah, Yeah,
that's Ben Sully, who will meet later. Right, that's right.
(00:41):
I could listen to that stuff all day. Man, that
chilling music. Macleagen awesome. Yeah, let's get into this one,
all right, let's do it. This is the shortest intro
how ever. Okay, okay, but it's it's it's telling. It's
a good one. And you would think that I would
have had it ready since it's the intro, you know.
But I like to play things fast and loose, kind
(01:01):
of by the seat of my pants. And I also
like to see how much time I can fill up
all I look for things, right, like I've done you,
But Chuck, I'm gonna give you a shocking statistic. There's
gonna be a lot of those in this one. In
the great state of West Virginia, which is next to
Virginia just west of it, though, UM since nineteen seventy nine,
(01:25):
the number of employed miners in that state, and mining
is the number one industry in West Virginia. It's coal
mine country. The number of miners um in since nineteen
seventy nine in that state has declined from sixty thousand
to twenty two thousand, according to the state's Senator Robert Bird,
(01:46):
but coal mining itself has dramatically increased over that time.
So how do you explain that Well, as a matter
of fact, the whole podcast that we're about to do
explains it very clearly. A tie of mining process called
mountaintop removal mining or strip mining. What's a type of
(02:06):
strip mining? Yeah, apparently one person called it strip mining
on steroids. UM is very much responsible for the UM
the ability for coal mining to just go through the
roof in Appalachia while requiring fear and fear people. So
while coal has has increased, unemployment has increased as well.
(02:26):
And I guess let's just get right into it, because
this one is chock full of stats and stories and
this is an unusual podcast for us. And by the way,
this one is officially yours, given this one to me.
This you did the you did the legwork for this one. Yeah,
and we should add at the end of this podcast,
we're gonna have a interview with uh in our first
(02:47):
musical guest ever, with singer, songwriter and cello player Ben Soley,
who was an activist for against mountaintop removal coal mining
and uh it's on you know, the subpop label with
his music, and he's gonna interview with us and play
a song and it's gonna be pretty cool to stick around. Yes,
don't go anywhere in the middle of the podcast, all right,
(03:09):
So let's get into it. So, um, chuck. Traditionally, when
you think of mining, you think of basically a hole
in the side of the mountain held up with timbers
that UM men covered in coal dust are going into
with pick axes and headlamps. Extremely dangerous, um job, but
a job that's traditionally um been able to support families. Yes,
(03:33):
long has its roots in Appalachia, right, Um, this is
a totally different kind of mining. Mountaintop removal mining is
where traditional mining you bore into the mountain. With mountain
top removal mining, you blow the top off of the
mountain to expose the coal steam rather than digging in
to get it. Yeah, coal steams run horizontally through a mountain.
(03:55):
So what happens is and this is the how it
works portion. Yeah, and it's pretty amazing how they do this.
And even Ben has told me it's pretty amazing, even
though he thinks it's an awful practice, it's pretty amazing.
On the last they clear cut the forest. They scrape
away the top, soil, lumber, herbs, all that stuff, herbs, herbs, wildlife,
(04:18):
and habitat. The wildlife habitat is destroyed. Vegetation is destroyed.
And in their defense they usually customarily they send a
guy in with a machine gun who just fires into
the air like a full day and then he comes
down the mountain. Then they start clear cutting, so they
do all this. Once they've done all that, they blow
up the top of the mountain as much as eight
(04:40):
hundred to a thousand feet I've seen. The mountain is
just gone. That's why they call it removal. Yeah, and
it's flattened out and it looks like a barren moonscape
instead of a forest in a mountain. Yeah, that's the
that's the term that's used by just about anybody who
has anything to do with either um uh it's supporting
(05:02):
or opposing coal mining mountaintop coal mining. Moonscape is the
word that everyone always uses. That's what I was trying
to get out from that point. Um, they have these
big shovels that come and dig into the soil. U
haul that stuff away into the valleys nearby. Yeah, because
it's not like the stuff that s integrates this this um,
this thing that's called overburdened by the mining industry, which
(05:26):
is you know, rock, soil, dirt, trees. Yeah. Um, Like
it doesn't just evaporate. You have to get rid of it. Yeah,
you gotta put it somewhere. And then something called a
drag line, which is one of the more impressive machines
I've ever seen. Huge. How big are these things? They
said somewhere stories Yeah, um, and they way up to
eight million pounds and apparently they're they're um. Yeah, so
(05:49):
you saw that picture. It looks like an oil rig
on like tracks. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, So the drag
line comes in to expose the coil, digs into the rock. Um,
these machines scoop out the coal. The machines that scoop
are the coal. Their buckets can hold up to twenty
compact sized cars. Wow, that's large. Is there are massive
(06:10):
operations and the result of this is, uh, the narrow
valleys have been filled. It's called valley fill. And one.
We got a bunch of stats. Here's one. Coal companies
have buried more than twelve miles of headwaters and streams,
rivers and streams buried underneath the stuff gone forever. Yeah,
(06:33):
with the overburn, remember the stuff that they blew the
top of the mountain off of may have to get
rid of it. There's two ways to do it. When
you truck it off of the mountain and dump trucks,
which is done, but it's also extremely expensive and time consuming.
Or you move bulldozers up there and you push the
overburden into the valley below in the in typically in
a valley there's going to be some sort of stream
(06:54):
water supply. Yeah. And um, if you have a per mint,
if you apply for a valley filled permit, um, you
you can you're usually granted one and you just push
that stuff into the valley and then start getting to
the coal. Right, And so that's um. There's a lot
of problems with this and we're going to try and
hit on all of them, the myriad issues. It's not
(07:17):
what you think you can just stop right here's probably could.
Another one of the issues is something when they wash
the coal. It's called the result of of the wash
is what they end up was called coal slurry. Right,
And you wash coal because UM coal comes with a
lot of other organic and inorganic toxins metals compounds UM
(07:38):
like nickel, cadmium, mercury that keep it from burning as well. Right, Yeah,
and there's chemicals added to the wash as well which
end up in the coal slurry ponds. Right. So you're
you're you're washing it for market, but this water has
got to go somewhere, and it's extremely toxic. UM mercury
alone would make it extremely toxic. All those other heavy
(07:59):
metals just make it been worse. So you either inject
them into old minds all abandoned minds is one one
thing that we do with cole slurry, or you wash
them into holding ponds, which are basically earthen damns built
into the side of the mountain, which can be precarious,
as we'll find out. Yeah, and if you've seen cole slurry,
(08:19):
I mean, just type it into Google images, it looks like,
uh like soupy um black sludge is about the best
comparison I can make. So these ponds um. One of
these actually busted. The dam broken in nineteen seventy two
in West Virginia a Buffalo Creek and a hundred and
(08:40):
thirty two million gallons of this stuff rushed through the valley,
killed a hundred and twenty five people injured, eleven hundred
and four thousand people were left homeless. And these by
and large are very poor people, which is one of
the keys here that we're gonna keep hitting on. Yeah,
I think Wise County, West Virginia. The um the average
(09:01):
income is like eighteen thousand for a family something like that. Yeah,
graduation rate is about six and the poverty level is
exactly what it was during the was it Eisenhower I
think so Eisenhower administration when he went there and said
we have to end poverty in West Virginia. It's the
same lb J. Yeah, Johnson, Sorry, UM. So once this
(09:24):
whole operation is done, there may be more than one seam,
and there's different ways to get into it. UM, Like
you can dig in from the side high wall mining,
or you can blow the top off the mountain where
you can do both. But once the mountains exhausted, and
these are massive sites. There's one in Virginia, I believe
that's like thirty five thousand acres, which that's one site
(09:46):
that Yeah, that's just one mining operation, or you could
also call it one former mountain. UM. When when the
time was when you left, that was that you got
your coal and you got out of there in the
mining oper oration was abandoned. UM. Nowadays you were supposed
to most most mountaintop removal permits UH come with UH
(10:09):
an addendum that you have to do some sort of reclamation.
And the reclamation process typically is supposed to involve basically
piling rock and stuff back up, UM, regrowing this area
and UM trying to basically simulate a mountain again. Yeah,
and then was when that was first introduced, the Surface
(10:31):
Mining Control and Reclamation Act established standards. UH. They said
back then that the goal was just to get grass
to grow, anything to grow, and reclamation is a good
thing in theory, but one of the knocks that activists
like to point out is that what happens on paper
isn't always what happens in reality. And there's been studies
(10:53):
that show that the soil is still not the same
decades later. It's just not the same. You can't make
it what it was right. Um. There is one sterling
example of what can be done. It's called the Powell
River Project. So the Powell River Project is um in Virginia,
I believe, and it's acres. It's a former um mining site.
(11:18):
UM that was. It's just a leveled mountaintop and some
care was given to it and now it is basically
a wildlife preserve. UM. It has strawberries and blueberries growing
on it and sugar maples and cattle is grazing on
the turf. UM. The wildlife that's come back are screech
(11:41):
and bard owl's, coyote, bear, turkey. UM. They're basically this
this mountain is getting back to nature, right. Yeah. Primarily
financed by the coal industry. Must say to say that, UM,
And I think the deal is if everything went down
like it's going down at Powell River, there would be
fewer is shoes. But that's not the case. Unfortunately, that's
(12:03):
just a sterling example of what could be done. Well,
this is what happens when you spend like decades and
lots of money on this one particular site for the
most case. I think you told me that they just
like throw some grass seed down over the old site.
And that's that, right, And UM, I guess well we
should probably start now talking about the environmental impact. There's
(12:26):
basically two ways, um, you can you can classify the
impacts that this has three ways. One economic which looks
like it should be good, right, but if you look
at the rates of unemployment in the continuous poverty in Appalachia, UM,
you'll actually see that it's not so great. The economic impact, Um,
(12:49):
the environmental impact, and then the human impact. So let's
talk about environment We're talking about cold slurry, right, you
have to put that cold slurry somewhere the earthen damn
like you said, UM, at Buffalo Creek in nine collapsed,
spilled a hundred and thirty two million gallons and killed
a hundred people, right, that's right, and two thousand in
(13:11):
Kentucky there was another damn break two hundred and fifty
million gallons of sludge flowed into the Tug Fork of
the Big Sandy River and affected streams and rivers up
to a hundred miles away. More than a million fish
and other wildlife died. One of the biggest environmental disasters
in this country's history, and a lot of people probably
(13:33):
never heard of it. Yeah, it's apparently the areas of
exposure was twenty times that of the ex m Valdi's disaster. Yeah,
and I believe it was either this one or the
other one. Um. One of the coal company heads called
it because heavy rains is what eventually calls the damn
to break on top of the slurry. Called it an
(13:54):
act of God. Yeah, and I believe that's how it
was left so sort of washing our hands of it.
It was because the heavy rains, and you know, that's
what happened. So you also mentioned Valley phil Um where
streams have been affected just by being buried, which means
no more stream stat for you. There sixty seven hundred
Valley Phill permits in the United States, six thousand, seven
(14:19):
hundred times this has happened. Actually, I think it's more
than I think it's um. Like in the seventy two
hundreds because it was between eighty five and two thousand one.
And we found another one. Chuck, that's um, there's been
about five hundred or so from two thousand one to
two thousand and eight. Yeah, things have really ramped up
here in the last decade. Stars so UM the back
(14:40):
to the streams as well. Apparently there was this um
this uh study in Science where UM twelve environmental science
sciencests got in Science magazine. Yes, you know, in Science
in January last this past you know, January twelve environmental
sciences got together and did a survey of the literature
(15:01):
of on the environmental impact of mountaintop removal mining and UM,
the valleys you said, I think something like twelve hundred
miles of valley valley streams and headwaters have been affected. Um.
These these guys sampled water and seventy three of seventy
eight streams. Um or, they did a study on this
(15:23):
and found that UM, seventy three of the seventy eight
streams they sampled had deformed fish carrying toxic levels of selenium,
which is a heavy metal, which is not good. UM.
And if your fish is deformed, that's not good. In general. Yeah,
the Simpsons, uh episode of Flanky how Many Eyes was three?
(15:45):
Almost sit four, we would have heard it about that. Um.
Drinking water is another problem because the cold slurry. These
earthen dams are temporary solution to begin with, um, but
they can leak and that cold slurry can enter drinking water. Yeah.
And you know, just to recap real quick though on
the reclamation that I did find that study from earlier.
(16:08):
The study said that fifteen years after a mountaintop was
leveled at this one site, trees had still not regrown
because they just can't make the soil like it used
to be. And the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers
and that's for the land. When it comes to the streams,
the Army Corps of Engineers said under oath in their
testimony um that there is not a successful stream creation
(16:28):
project in junction with this. Yeah, or they don't know
of one. Yeah. Like basically, all right, we can try
and reform the mountains to a rough assemblance of what
it once was, but you can't just make new streams
and we haven't found out a way to do that.
It's kind of like um, taking a sword and severing
someone's head and it just kind of balancing it back
on the neck again. It's there, but it's not really
(16:49):
working any longer. Right, Yeah, So that's some of the
environment and where you're also talking about, Uh, it's in
the drinking water. It is um, which kind of is
it's straddles um the environmental and the human impacts. Um.
There are people in this literature that we've been um
researching for this podcast whose families have lived in these
(17:10):
areas for like two hundred and thirty years or so, right,
Like these are straight up Appalachian folk, right, hillbilies they
call them, And um, the Hillbillies have been there for
a while and before I guess it was probably a
very quiet place. But as we've mentioned, with mountaintop removal, mining,
explosives are a major part of it. So when you
(17:32):
blow the top off of a mountain, first of all,
it takes a lot of explosives, but it's very loud. Um. Apparently,
in two thousand three, sixty seven percent of all explosives
produced in the US were consumed by the coal industry,
and in West Virginia alone, that figure led to an
estimated three million pounds of explosives being used a day.
A day to blow up mountains. People live on these
(17:55):
mountains still, the same mountains that they're blowing up, so
you've got the noise. Have a very dangerous condition called
fly rock, yeah, which is exactly what it sounds like.
When you blow a mountain top up. Rock flies everywhere,
and if somebody's living there, it um can go into
their house and kill them. Yeah, And that was the
case in uh two thousand four at two thirty in
(18:17):
the morning, bulldoz are operating without a permit. At two
again to thirty in the morning, because bulldozer was working
on mine site without a permit, it dislodged a thousand
pound boulder, rolled two hundred feet down and crushed three
year old Jeremy Davidson in his bed, who was sleeping
at the time. Yet and the company was fined fifteen
tho dollars for that, yeah, for gross negligence. Yeah. So
(18:40):
I don't even have a comment on that. We'll just
leave that to the listeners. Um. The have some more
deaths here if you want to be dark for another moment.
In West Virginia, fourteen people drowned in the last three
years because of floods and mud slides, in Kentucky, fifty
people have been killed and five injured over the last
five years by cold trucks that were illegally overloaded. And
(19:04):
on the flooding thing, I think they said that in
this one spot in West Virginia that there were three
what they call a thousand year flood or a hundred
year flood in ten days, three year floods in ten
days in this one region. That's not supposed to happen. UM.
And you know you're talking about death's that's just directly
(19:24):
from drownings, UM injury, that kind of thing. If you
take all of the public health hazards into account, UM
as a public Health reports UM Journal study did UH
this year I think last year, I'm sorry, UM. Anywhere
between sevent hundred and thirty six and hundred and eighty
(19:46):
nine people die in Appalachia each year as a result
of the coal mining industry there, right, So there is
a lot of death, but there's also a lot of
potential death too. We talked about Buffalo Creek where the
slurry uh damn, a slurry pond damn broke and killed
a hundred and twenty people. That was a hundred and
thirty million gallons of coal slurry, right killed the people.
(20:10):
There is a place UM called marsh Fork, march Fork
Elementary School. I saw a documentary on the school. So
march Fork has UM I believe two hundred something students
going there every day. And just above the elementary school
there is a coal slurry pond above it on the
(20:31):
mountain side that holds three billion gallons of coal sludge. Yeah,
and there's a whole operation. There's a silo three hundred
feet from the school. Right, So rather than the hundred
and thirty two million gallons, we're talking about three billion
gallons poised behind an earthen dam right above an elementary school.
So there's a lot of potential for a disaster as well. Right. Yeah,
(20:53):
that's a Massy Energy that's one of the bigger coal
companies in the United States. And you might remember Massey's
name by UM the up for Big Branch mine explosion
that happened about a year ago from two days ago.
It was April five, UM that that explosion killed twenty
nine miners and leaving three others trapped. UM. So Massy is,
(21:15):
like you said, big in a traditional mining uh surface
mining and regulation. Actually one of their former executives was
named a Deputy Energy Secretary for fossil fuels a couple
of years back. That's right, President Bush named appointed uh
what was his name? His name was Stanley sue Bileski.
(21:37):
He was appointed in UM two seven December two thousand
seven to the Department of Energy. Yeah, okay, Uh. Back
to March Fork Elementary School. That that actually one of
the documentaries I saw yesterday was on that school specifically,
and uh, West Virginia activists Bo Webb, he's one of
the leading activists on this cause. Found of the parents
(21:59):
are saying that they're chill. Dren are coming home from
school with a variety of illnesses like nausea, diarrhea, vomiting,
shortness of breath, wheezing, asthma, um long term effects, kidney damage.
There's been a lot of kidney damage in that area,
liver damage, spleen failure, bone damage, and cancer of the
digestive digestive track. And um Bo has uh Actually it
(22:25):
wasn't Bo, but one of the other activists there. They
were trying to raise money in this documentary to build
a new school not near you know, not threeet away
from a coal mining corporation. And they were trying to
raise it by donating pennies, and they in the documentary
they marched and had a rally at the governor's office
in West Virginia and it was hardcore. Man, it was
hard to watch. Like literally, the governor gave him a
(22:48):
minute and he's glad handing and talking to people, and
you know, they bring out this little girl from the
school and he's like, well, what are you interested in?
And you sure are cute and what do you want
to be when you grow up? And basically the kids
just like, I don't want to live under a coal
mine and I don't want to be sick anymore. And
they called this guy out, the governor out big time.
And it was really one of those uncomfortable scenes to
(23:09):
watch when politics gets when it's clear that this guy
has no answer and the big coal has their lobbyists
that are you know, on the on the side of
you know, big coal mining, and it was it was
just very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch, but you should
watch it nonetheless. And that was that was marsh Creek
(23:31):
Elementaries in West Virginia, right, yeah, okay, so um, yeah,
it's in Rock Creek. I see um chuck. One of
the reasons why the governor would have been embarrassed or
um felt awkward is because there is a ton of
money at stake here. That one UM Public Health Reports
Journal study. Yeah that that said you know, between um
(23:54):
people die each year from coal mining. Um. It was
an economics paper really, and it said that, um, the
coal industry generates about eight billion dollars in economic contribution
to Appalachia every year, right, yeah, which is a lot.
It's like, you know, you can't that's a lot of
(24:14):
money spent on that area. The problem is this same paper,
using the same model, figured out that um, it costs
about forty two billion dollars in healthcare costs and the
cost of life. So that's a big picture. Yeah. Yeah,
so you're actually losing. And you can just look at
you know, the poverty in Appalachia and see, oh, well,
(24:34):
these people who are literally next to these mines are
not benefiting from this at all. Right, and the uh
there's another stat. Activists will point out that only about
four or five percent of our of our nation's coal
energy comes from mountaintop removal mining. So it's not like, oh,
you know, like of the coal that we use comes
from this practice, so we really really need it. Uh.
(24:55):
They will tell you that conservation alone, we could save
an average of our energy to man's which far outweighs
you know, by what four or five times the five
percent that we're using. Right, I've seen up the ten
percent um comes from strip mining or from mountaintop removable mining.
But that's being used pretty grievingly because we um, the
(25:17):
United States gets about fifty of its electricity. I think
in two thousand nine, I got forty percent of it's
electricity from coal. So usually it's around Yeah, and we're
exporting coal too. It's coal is an important part of
our energy plan. I can't ignore that. So where does
that leave us, Chuck, Well, there's a couple of things, uh, Josh.
(25:38):
One reason that I wanted to do this show, and
that you've got on board and we're way behind it too,
is because oh no, I'm I'm just doing this. Is
because this is a problem that affects poor rural people,
for the most part, people in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, uh,
Tennessee now, and and that they don't have the same
(26:01):
voice that other folks do. UM. One of the leading,
but I think it was bow Webb again said if
this this wouldn't happen in New England. Um that biggest
environmental disaster west of the or east of the Mississippi
River happened in The New York Times didn't report about
it for like four months. So it's and I guess
a lot of the listeners out there probably looked at
(26:22):
the title what is Mountaintop removable coal mining and said, yeah,
what is that? I've never heard of it. But we've
all heard of the Valdez, we heard about the you know,
all these disasters obviously need attention. I'm not saying that
we shouldn't pay attention to things like oil spills, but
it gets a lot more at tension when it's on
the Gulf of Florida with Destin and seaside right there
(26:42):
than it does in the rural mountains of West Virginia.
So somebody needs to be talking about this, and a
lot of people are. And another problem is the coal
lobby and the fact that companies can donate money to
uh political campaigns and getting a pockets of politicians and
(27:02):
favors are paid back. And it's the same old story
with you know, big industry like this. It's just sad
to see it happening. Well, it is. It's a big
it's a there's a big debate going on right now
about just how much the e p A should have
teeth in regards to mountaintop removal mining, right. Yeah, And
the e p as new chief is pretty progressive and
(27:24):
pretty hardcore and not a friend of big business, and
she is making some waves. Um. Coal miners are against
these actions. You're talking about Lisa Jackson. Yeah, and she's
a bulldog. That read that Rolling Stone interview on her,
and she's she said her job is just to look
(27:45):
out for the environment, that that's the only thing she
wants to do. And you know, if you're in her way,
she's gonna try and knock you down. Well, we'll see.
But that's still not enough um for a lot of people.
I think they're the general consensus among activists and probably
people who live in school buses on the side of
a mountain nearby a mountaintop removal UM operation is that
(28:07):
it should be banned outright, Yeah, That that process is
not mining those particular sites, but that that um type
of mining, that method of mining should just be completely outlawed. Yeah.
I mean most of these permits were issued during the
Clinton and Bush administrations UH second Bush obviously, and there
were certain key provisions to the Clean Water Act that
(28:28):
were rewritten UH to reclassify waste associated with strip mining
as benign film material. Federal judge rejected that UM, but
then that change was upheld in two thousand three by
UH fourth Circuit Court judge. And then Obama comes in
and people said, all right, dude, you're you're the environmental guy.
(28:51):
Get rid of this altogether. In the first one days
didn't happen. But Obama has introduced UM stricter guidelines now
and the e p A has onto curtail mountain top
mining hailed by certain environmentalists. But if you talk to
bow Webb, they'll say that ain't enough. Brother. He's like,
you gotta outlaw mountaintop removal mining, period, and anything less
(29:12):
than that is just playing into the hands a big
coal It's it's surprising that it has been allowed to
go on. I mean, the idea of blowing the top
of a mountain and then pushing it into the valley below,
covering up the stream, and then introducing coal slurry to
this local environment. UM in an age where we you know,
where there's such a thing as Earth Day and people
(29:32):
are like, I will never use a paper or a
plastic bag. I used my own that I bought and
brought from home. That this is going on, is UM.
It's it's startling. Yeah. Well, UM, last and you know,
I said that there were some efforts by the Obama
administration to curtail this UM last Thursday. This is just
(29:53):
over the wire today, UM. Two senators from Kentucky, Mitch
McConnell and Ran Paul, introduced the bill trying to restrict
that p A from clamping down on it, giving the
e p A a a sixty day deadline to veto Clean
Water Act permits issued by the Corps of Engineers, and
UM activists are saying, and this is tricky, so they
put in that sixty eight thing. Everyone knows nothing in
(30:14):
the government can happen in sixty days, so it's sort
of a a facade, red herring or red herring. Uh.
The bill would also prevent the e p A from
retroactively vetoing permits. So UM. That was Mitch mcconollin, Ran
Paul and Ran Paul from Kentucky. If you're from Kentucky.
You know all about your senators two thousand ten, said like,
(30:37):
you don't need me to tell you about this guy.
In two thousand ten, he said in an interview quote,
I think they should name it something better. The top
ends up flatter. But we're not talking about Mount Everest.
We're talking about these knobby little hills that are everywhere
out here. I don't think anyone's gonna be missing a
hill or two here and there. And that was ran Paul,
straight from the horse's mouth, and Chuck, I think that
(30:59):
you know as well as eye, people are going to
be like you guys are getting political. Stop being political.
And I just I'm trying to figure out how to
frame a response to that, because this is Paul, this
is UM super political. It's above politics. It's basically incredibly
well financed UM industrial interests and average people who have
(31:24):
no money. That kind of UM dying, dying and getting sick.
That's not political. That's not the right or the left.
That's right or wrong. Basically, well said sir, we're talking
about UM an e P. A study estimated four hundred
thousand acres have been wiped out, and like we said,
between seven hundred and a thousand miles of stream and
(31:45):
that was that those are the two thousand one number,
so it's a lot higher by then, Well, do you
want to talk to Ben slowly? I do. I'm looking
to see if I have anything else. Oh you know what,
we should plug a couple of things, Um, Jonathan Franzen's
new novel Freedom. It's a big subplot mountaintop removal mining. Yeah,
I heard the TV show Justified. Have you ever seen it?
(32:07):
It's awesome. Timothy Oliphant season two has a big subplot
on mountaintop removal mining and all these things, you know,
raise awareness on certain levels. The wild wonderful Whites of
West Virginia. What's that? It's a documentary you know, the
Dancing Outlaw. Oh yeah, yeah, so it's a follow up
that it's his family and they are crazy. It's actually
(32:27):
produced by Johnny Knoxville's production company. Really it's worth seeing.
So um. Ben will be in here in a second
to give us some more organizations. But if you want
to just look into this little more, there are three
places that can recommend you go. One is I Love
Mountains dot org. Great place to start. There's a group
called the Mountain Justice Summer. There they are well organized.
(32:49):
I think they're the oldest one. Yeah, that's Mountain Justice
Summer dot org. And then um Appalachian Voices app Voices
dot org. Go to any of those websites, look up
some pictures, do your own research, see if it matters
to you or summer's coming up. And if you want
to go join the protest, they have them all over Appalachia.
If you've ever wanted to see a person with dreadlocks
(33:12):
in working in conjunction with the hillbilly, this is the
place to go. It's a good point. So chuck um,
let's let's pause a second here while we bring Ben
sol Okay, so we're back. It seemed like a brief
(33:36):
second to you, but it was about ten minutes thoughts
at least something like that. And in the studio for
our first ever musical guests, we have Mr Ben so Ley.
Welcome Ben, Hello, fellas. Ben is a singer, a songwriter,
and a cellist. Check he is a Kentucky native right
and he is a coal a mountaintop removal coal mining activists.
(33:56):
And in two thousand ten, Ben, you put out an
album Them on Subpop label, produced by Mr Jim James
of My Morning Jacket. It's true with Daniel Martin Moore
called Deer Companion, and it was a you call a
concept album or just a theme album. M that's a
good question. Um. Some folks referred to as a protest album. O.
Some folks referred to it as a album of of
(34:19):
umn issues based album. And we just kind of looked
at it as a tribute album to a really beautiful
part of the country and bringing that part of the
country and that sound and kind of our heritages Kentucky
musicians into like the urban context and mixing all that stuff. Well,
since that was one of my questions anyway, just tell
us a little bit more about that project. I now
(34:40):
did of the proceeds went to I Love Mountains dot org. Yeah, well,
I mean all of the proceeds that we would have
gotten as artists. Yeah, and in the record world, you know,
there's you get a portion of it from record sales
album went to dot org. No. Actually it was like
I mean, to be specific, it was thirteen point something
(35:00):
per cent the portion that we would have gotten his artists.
So we just donated that to Act Voices, Um. And
mostly because they run an amazing website and called I
Love Mountains dot org. And the goal of the record
was not to like protest anything or you know, necessarily
pick aside. It was more to like raise awareness being
catalysts for conversation exactly. So UM, in that way, we
(35:26):
wanted to support the thing that was we felt like
was one of the best things for a national conversation,
which was the website where people can go and find
out how they're involved and what to do. How did
you get into UM Where did your desire to raise
awareness about MTR come from? UM? It's a good question.
I think I think it all started with UMH an
(35:48):
author that read a story. And this guy's name is
Silas House. It's a well known author there in the
Kentucky Central part of America region. He's amazing writer. And
he came and read on a show that I was
doing this beautiful entry about a lady who had posted
herself up on this mountain side and she was not
going to allow the machines to kind of rip up
(36:09):
the land which had been in her family for years
and years, and that you know, it was a you know,
I had a lot of emotion and energy and the
writing that kind of spawned the thought of it, and
then more and more research. I was like, Wow, how
can this actually be going on America? How can people
actually I have to live without Basically there's a lot
of their civil rights to have like clean water, to
(36:32):
be protected by their police, you know, all these things,
and so I wanted to help raise awareness for it.
But I'm a musician. What do you do? Like how
much can a song really change anything? Is always one
of these big dilemmas, especially a song of protest. Have
you heard Europe's Final Countdown? That changed everything for me?
(36:53):
You know the song I Do for You? I'm Gonna
Buy You That MP three is a better thing. Oh
that's sweet. Uh So tell us a little bit more
about Deer Companion and your work with Daniel Martin Moore
and Jim James and Subpop and how that was packaged.
I know that was very unique. It is unique. And
Subpop is a really amazing record label for even taking
(37:14):
the time to like look at putting this thing out.
And I think a big, big part of that is
because they started as a label that was based in
a community, like they started, you know, putting out the
punk rock music of Seattle, and they grew big and
they put out music and everything. Now, but this is
the way of reaching into a different community and being
(37:35):
part of a conversation. And in a lot of ways,
folk music kind of has that punk like against the
you know, against the common thing, the establishment, against the establishment,
the man, the man, whatever, the industry, and so I
think this really resonated with them, so they took the
(37:55):
time and energy put it out. Working with Daniel Martin
Moore was, um, he's a tall, all handsome crooner sort
of fella. He is, and he also lives in Kentucky
And before we even met, he was very active in
raising when it's been mountintop removal with a song called
fly Rock Blues, and fly rock kind of describes the
(38:15):
materials that fly off into the air when they mountain that, Yeah,
it's amazing stuff. I mean sometimes boulders as big as
houses go flying hundreds of yards. I mean it's amazing,
powerful explosive force and land in places way outside the
digging zone. So um, that and song inspired me to
(38:36):
work with him on this project. And then Jim James
came on board, also Kentucky native. Also Kentucky native, I
mean he had done a lot of work with Kentucky
for the Commonwealth, an organization there in Kentucky, and he
just was a great voice for being able to take
these influences of Appalachia, take our own songwriting, and also
(38:57):
bring him in with kind of the relevant indie rock,
this kind of sound that is associated with him and
My Morning Jacket. And quickly on the packaging to um
that was was there a map that was included or
there's a there's a beautiful picture of Appalachia. And what's
unique about the picture and the reason that we chose
(39:17):
it is not it's not some you know, long shot
landscape of the rolling mountains, old Appalachian fog. It's it's
not this idealized thing. It's simply a valley. It's this beautiful,
pristine valley. And that's really what the whole contention behind
this is. It's not really the absence of the mountaintops
(39:37):
that causes so much destruction. It's the filling in the
destruction of the valleys. These are the places that collect
our water, the headwaters that come down not only to
these Appalachian communities but also some of our major cities
on the East coast, and those waters are being polluted,
and the idea that we all live downstream from those
UM is a really provocative and and an idea that
(39:59):
we're all in this together. This is one big community,
from the groundwater being polluted to the electricity that runs
these light bulbs. Like, we're all kind of participating in
this thing. And it's very easy when we're participating in it,
turning on a light switch or charging our phone. Two
miss the idea, not that a mountain is blowing up.
That's too abstract. That's two out there. The idea that
(40:21):
people have to live with UM, that people make this power.
But people have to deal with the cold trucks, you know,
tearing up the roads. People have to deal with the
dust in the air and the shaking ground. People have
to deal with the loss of land values. Like there
are people that are living UM very hard lives to
make sure that we have these things. And I think
(40:43):
from a positive standpoint, we need to appreciate that more.
Not just protest them, not point our fingers and look
at them and say look at those poor people. Let's
say thank you in a lot of ways. And that's
what we try to do with your companion, was to
say thank you celebrate Appalachia as a landscape as part
of our American heritage. You know, everything from the fiddler chopped,
(41:06):
you know, the man beside his cabin chopping wood, or
the fiddler playing, by the guys dancing, like these American
things that have been turned into musicals and shows. They
all stem from these those pioneers that settled in these
mountains and and I just think it's such a huge
part of our heritage Americans, and it's just disappearing as
these communities they just they struggled to survive underneath the
(41:28):
climate of things being exploded and land being devalued and
water being polluted. It's hard for them to survive. It's
hard for communities two to even keep their footing when
all that's happening. So we're losing part of our American heritage.
And that's how it ties in with me as a musician.
That's how I found it tied in with me as
a musician. Awesome. And I want to point out Ben
(41:50):
as a guy who walks the walk. He did a
an entire tour, was it last year? On your bicycle? Well, yeah,
we've done three tours by bicycle. Man. I don't know
how many people are there ever tried to carry the
cello and bicycle, But this guy does it from town
to town. Believe it or not, there's four or five
cellist out there in the world that are that are
carrying their cellos on bicycle. It's something about you know,
people say cellist are extreme people. I don't think that.
(42:14):
But I just really got into this idea of not
being sustainable or being green, slowing down right, the idea
that I wanted to be more involved in these communities.
I felt this this unsettling feeling that I was coming
through these places, putting on a show, asking people about
the music, and then moving on to the next driving
(42:34):
eight to ten hours the next day sometimes to get
to some distant community where a promoter is willing to
put on put out money to put on a show.
It felt like a little bit of a fleecing thing
and somewhat dishonest in a lot of ways. It wasn't real,
and people romanticized it, but it wasn't really real. So
the idea of getting on a bicycle, slowing down, not
being able to roll up our windows or just stay
(42:55):
on the interstate and zoom pass the place. We had
to really ride through each community and be a part
of their town for at least a little bit. Yeah,
you notice, I've been riding my bike lately just for exercise,
and it's amazing how much more you notice just by
walking or riding a bike than when you're zipping past
in the car. The smells, the condition of the road
is a big one. Um the habits and nature of
(43:18):
other drivers out there. You notice how amazing it is
that we have thousands and thousands of pounds of machinery
that we can just hurtle down the highway. I mean,
for for better or worse. You just kind of notice
what what an extreme action that is. It feels we're
so used to it. But the idea that we can
hop on a highway and just push this machine, very heavy,
(43:38):
big machine, float it down the highway. You know, it's
kind of like you know, Arthur C. Clark or something.
It's just right out there. You don't take things for granted.
My friend, all right, Well, before we get involved with
the music, sticking around and playing as a song, I
would love to we we plug. I love mountains dot Org.
Is that a good place for people to start. It's
(43:59):
a great place for people will start especially because you can.
They have a tool on there where you can plug
in your zip code and see what portion of your
power is coming from coalts and not only that, you
can see where that coal is coming from. Yeah, it's
a great website. I love mountains that are it's cool,
not cold, that's cold. So the song we're gonna hear
just called electrified, and it is from Mr. Soli's forthcoming album,
(44:23):
which should be dropping right now, and it's called Inclusions.
So it's here. The trees far electrified, the streets are electrified,
(44:45):
your eats are electrified. My voice was electriffive. Your heart
is unsteady. They can make a feat in time. Your
mind is confused, it will be clarified, your own fashioned.
You will be modernized. Every Thing is electrified. If the
(45:09):
thing is electrified. If you lost in the jungle, used
the satellite, you're broke in the city, sneak on the
bus line, you lost your job because it was mechanized.
(45:30):
They said we have to compete when the markets gooblized.
Every thing is electrified. Every thing is electrified. Every thing
is electrified. Lie with my bare hand touched the base
(45:54):
of your spine. Feel you shuddering glow moved like a
swallow and I'm hypnotop. Every things electric file. Everything's aled
to file. Things electrify. Some folks are heroes, others maybe vilified.
(46:44):
Assess your lawsuit has learned to diversify. Find your higher
callings than evangelize, build your congregation. Now you're televised. Every
thing's electrified. Everything is a ACTU five. Yeah, and the
things electrified, the thing electure five. Man, that was awesome.
(47:38):
That was very cool, so cool. And those you know
you heard clapping. We have people all over the office
here that wanted to come in and here. Yeah, I
have something else. Uh. So you can see Ben Solely
on tour. He's on tour right now, and he is
all over the place. I'm looking Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St. Louis,
I mean, back through Kentucky, down through the South. Go
(47:59):
see Ben so Lee on tour through the end of June.
You can find that at his website. Yeah. You can
also learn all about mining and energy by typing either
one of those words in the search part. How stuff
works dot com, which is not sure your listener mail
this time. Instead, you shoot us an email if you
want to drop us a line. Yeah, and hey, if
you go see Benslely onto work, go up to him
(48:20):
and talk to him. He's a very nice guy and
tell him that your buddies with us. He's a very
good guy. Anyway. If you want to get in touch
with us, send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. VI is it how stuff works
(48:40):
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.
The how Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it
today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two
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