October 21, 2009
By Deborah Emin
Mountain top removal in order to take the coal easily from the gorgeous hills in Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia and Alabama and Pennsylvania means death and disease and destruction. The real 3-D world of Appalachia.
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Turn out your lights, New York City. Turn off your computers and think for a while about what it means to have easy and cheap electricity. It means that the coal-producing states are being raped in order for us to see.
I saw an eye opening film screening last night. It opened not just my eyes, but my heart. Here is a story of what happens when the greed of some is pitted against the poverty of the larger but powerless group.
Coal is never going to be clean or healthy for any of us. It is cheap when it comes to our electric bills but not when it comes to the wholesale destruction of an entire region of our country.
On November 14 the Discovery Channel is going to play the full movie of Coal Country. Watch it and you will see how easy it is to take advantage of the powerless and poor and make them even more powerless and poor.
Authors Bio:Deborah Emin is the founder of the publishing company, Sullivan Street Press (www.sullivanstreetpress.com). She is also the impressario of the Itinerant Book Show as well as the program director of the REZ Reading Series in Kew Gardens, NY. Her novel, Scags at 7, is back in print as well as available as an e-book from Sullivan Street Press. In addition to writing for OEN, Deborah has a blog on the Sullivan Street Press website where she writes about her experiences on the road, i.e., writing about anything that has to do with the Itinerant Book Show. She is currently at work on Scags at 18, due out fall 2010. And she travels back and forth to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she is writing a book about the aftermath of the 2008 flood there. To keep up to date with all she is involved in, please go to her website www.deborahemin.com