Burning America's Addiction to Coal

By documentary filmmaker David Novack. Check out Novack's latest film Burning the Furture: Coal in America.

Several years ago, I interviewed a scientist, John, who was conducting a study of Mountain Elk in Kentucky.  The Elk had recently been reintroduced to the wild, and he was tracking their success.  

But as we spoke, it became clear that this biologist, who was born and raised in the coal mining areas of SE Kentucky, had an ulterior motive. He was studying the Elk, in part, to gain access to former mountaintop removal mining sites - to test the soil, water and flora.

What he found didn't surprise him, the area was fundamentally arid and devoid of nutrients.  Foreign species that could survive the hostile environmental grew, but nothing like what had been there, and serving little ecological purpose.

John informed me that this was the result of hundreds of thousands of acres of the Appalachian mountain being blasted away, leveled, to surface mine coal.  The environmental impact was devastating, and the human impact even worse.

I had no idea that coal was mined this way, or on anything like the sale he described.  To me, coal seemed like a Victorian-era dinosaur.  

So I dug in deeper.  

It turned out that over 50% of the electricity produced in the United States is derived from burning coal, and more coal is mined today
than in the history of the country.  This was a shocking statistic to me.

How could I not have known that?

Six months later, John phoned in something of a panic.  A recent federal judicial decision against mountaintop removal mining, made on Clean Water Act grounds, had just been overturned.  This was major news and barely got a mention in the NY Times and Washington Post.  

I was the only person in media who John knew and he implored me to come to KY and see for myself.  And I did.

When John took me up in a single-engine plane to see mountaintop
removal mining from the air, my jaw dropped to the floor and my life was changed.  How can anyone pretend that this is okay?  Vast swathes of the most biologically diverse temperate forest in the world are clear cut, blasted with explosives, and pushed over into the verdant valleys below.

Presently, 800,000 acres, with 1.4 Million as the likely number by the end of the decade, have been permanently transformed.  The losses of soil and vegetation, the release of heavy metals into the air and water, and the terrorism of constant blasting have enormous human impacts.

Americans consume 10 times more electricity than the average person on the planet.  We waste at least 1/3 of the energy we produce in poor efficiency.

Once I was aware of the havoc that mountaintop removal mining wrecks on people and the environment, all to support a fundamentally gluttonous way of life, I had to take action.  So I made Burning the Future: Coal in America to educate the American public on the source of our electricity and the hidden costs

These costs are borne by the good people of Appalachia through
poor health, tremendous suffering, and the devastation and devaluation of their land, and costs borne by one of the most vital natural resources we have - the Appalachian mountains, whose water table sustains millions and millions of Americans with clean....well, once clean, water.

Watch Burning the Future: Coal in America and see your connection.

Then dig deeper in the "Coal Impact Guide" on the DVD and learn how the health and well-being of every American you know is impacted directly by coal extraction and coal burning at power plants.  

And visit the "We Can Do This" part of the Coal Impact Guide, where you will find easy instructions for sharing the message and taking action.