Wendell Berry: When it comes to toxins in coalfield water, 'EPA needs to wipe its eyes and do its duty'

"The two-party arrangement in Kentucky really has not much to do with Republicans and Democrats. The two parties that actually matter are the Party of Coal and the Party of All Else," writer-farmer Wendell Berry contends in the Lexington Herald-Leader. (Herald-Leader photo by Tom Eblen) "The Party of All Else, whose language is unintelligible to the Kentucky Division of Water, now has made its appeal to the Environmental Protection Agency. To prevent its own contamination by selenium and other toxic effluents of Kentucky politics, the EPA needs to wipe its eyes and do its duty."

In April, "The Kentucky Cabinet for Energy and Environment may have confused lawmakers into passing a proposed regulation about the amount of selenium that can be discharged into streams by mining operations. And in passing the proposal, legislators ignored a possible conflict of interest from various organizations who worked within the system to push the bill," Ronnie Ellis reported for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., which owns five daily and six weekly newspapers in Kentucky, all but one in or near the state's eastern coalfield.

Berry writes, "The Party of Coal arrives at its own version of an ecological solution. By political means that require no explaining, it causes the Kentucky Division of Water to propose an increase of the allowable limit on selenium in streams to 12 times the present limit. The justifications for this are famous for their subtlety: Mountaintop removal and valley fills answer Kentucky's need for more level land. The industry's sediment control ponds, which cannot leak and cannot overflow, have in effect repealed the law of gravity. If, unbelievably, some toxic pollution should escape into streams — well, bluegill and catfish don't matter except to people who fish and people who eat fish. A public issue, such as the poisoning of streams, is none of the public's business, if authentic public discussion and participation can be shortcut or prevented. And so water pollution by coal mining becomes a case so familiar in Kentucky as to seem conventional: public servants versus the public."

"The Party of All Else, on the contrary, includes people who understand that ecological damage is extremely difficult to limit; if aquatic life is damaged or destroyed in headwater streams, then the aquatic life downstream is inescapably and adversely affected," Berry writes. They understand, therefore, that humans cannot be exempted from threats to the lives of their fellow creatures. To all this, the Party of Coal responds with it own motto: We Don't Care." (Read more)

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/08/2810248/wendell-berry-epas-duty-to-limit.html#storylink=cpy