Sick is what I feel as the tiny Cessna lurches in the turbulence of a hot summer morning. The air inside our plane roasts with mugginess, and I know my face has turned the same shade of white as the wing outside my window. I wonder if Susan, our pilot, has any vomit bags tucked away. I don't see any and hope my stomach settles.
But even as I hold in my queasiness, I know I will be ailing long after this flight. Weeks and months later when the airsickness vanishes, I will still feel ill. For we are flying over West Virginia on a "tour" of coal mines that practice mountaintop removal, and the scale of the destruction, the magnitude of so many mountains being blasted to nothing, burns a small death in us all.
Our pilot, Susan Lapis, volunteers with SouthWings, an organization working to protect the Earth by giving people a bird's-eye view of the destruction we're creating -- "Conservation Through Aviation," the group's logo says. She's logged more than 1,200 hours flying news crews from all the major networks as well as the likes of Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Woody Harrelson.
At the outset, a smooth takeoff soothes my nerves, and I begin searching for landmarks. Immediately, though, we encounter one of the first major problems of burning coal -- the reddish haze of air pollution that forms a layer of what Susan calls "the yuck." For the first thousand feet of our climb all horizons are muddled in this ugly soup that causes so many health problems to so many people all over the country.
"We have the technology to clean this up," Susan says as she tells us about her own struggle with asthma. But the corporations say it costs too much, so instead the expense gets passed on to the millions of people -- you and me -- who inhale heavy metals with every breath.
As we fly north, we see other horrors: a timber clear-cut of a whole ridge, the exposed soil washing out in gullies (but at least the shapes of the mountains remain); 765 kilowatt power lines scarring straight lines across the land (but still, the mountains remain); a natural gas field with its network of roads cutting up the forest for hundreds of acres (but still, the mountains remain).
But then our plane's little shadow crosses over a plateau of barrenness, and the mountains do not remain. We're in the coalfields, so even through ozone pollution we can see huge swaths of gray and tan, exposed rock, surrounded by green of forest. And I begin to feel sick, really sick.
To get at an 18-inch seam of coal, first the miners slash all of the forest. No logging occurs, but instead the trees just burn, causing more air pollution. Then dozers cut roads and hydraulic drills punch holes that crews fill with explosives that detonate every afternoon. The dust clouds blast up thousands of feet into the air, Susan tells us, "looking like thunderstorms from the ground." Then onto this flattening stage enter shoveling cranes called draglines that scrape away the rich soil and all the other rock layers. Dump trucks haul away most of this debris to what is called "valley-fill," another term for burying miles and miles of pristine streams and woods. The exposed seam of coal is hauled and processed and then shipped to plants that electrify our homes. Flip a light switch and bring down a mountain, that simple.
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