Environmental

Bill Walker is a freelance writer who is concerned about human monetary greed and how it is destroying our planets environment!

Now that the environmental impact study has begun for the Cherry Point coal export terminal (see sidebar on page 11), and with an upcoming election in the fall of this year closing in, I feel that this would be a great time for environmentally concerned citizens to take a quick video education of their own. Listed below are short reviews of eight videos that can be found and checked out at any Whatcom County library location free of charge. I would imagine that most of our other local county library systems have them as well or would be willing to order them if they don’t. Many of these videos pertain to coal and our deteriorating environment and one depicts how corporate greed nearly drove our economy into a deep depression. They are all very informative and worth the time invested in viewing if you haven’t seen them already.

If you were only going to see one of these films then this is the one that I would recommend the most as it covers a wide range of related topics when it comes to coal extraction and processing. This story tells the very real and unbelievable story about how many coal companies have now resorted to removing coal by literally blowing the tops off of mountains in the Appalachians of West Virginia and Kentucky.

This film also gives a startling wake up call to environmentalists on how lobbyists can easily manipulate congress to change environmental law to meet any need that companies like Massy Coal may find as an impediment to their destructive business models.

And finally this film uses information gleaned from several studies that show how health concerns from polluted wells are beginning to overwhelm the local healthcare system in Appalachia as brain tumors and other cancers from suspected heavy metal poisoning have risen in just a decade or two to almost epidemic proportions which coincides almost precisely with these new mining practices.

I look at this film as a companion film to “The Last Mountain” as many of the same activist’s stories are portrayed. However this film delves a little bit deeper into how these people’s homes and lives have been completely ruined by mountain top removal mining operations and how flooding has become common place in areas that really didn’t flood much, if at all, before.

Two things are different about this video, from the one above. In this film you get to hear oil company executives brag about how they are restoring these mountain tops back to a pristine natural state. As the director is showing you what their interpretation of a natural state really looks like when it’s finished, you can decide just how natural you think it looks.

The second thing, and more important issue for our local interest, is this film shows how the coal is eventually stored, shipped, and then processed from the mine all the way through to its eventual burning at a power company. It will give you an idea of what it would be like having a coal port as your neighbor here in Whatcom County.

“Dimming the Sun” shows the difference between two very different kinds of pollutants. The first is Carbon Dioxide which is considered a green house gas that is suspected in many studies as being the root cause of the global warming phenomenon. However, there was a problem with these computer models; the Earth wasn’t warming the way these models had predicted that it should until a second pollutant was added, quite literally, into the mix. Soot and ash from the burning of coal primarily, was blocking out some of the sun’s solar effects thus causing a cooling of the surface and atmosphere when carbon dioxide should have been heating the atmosphere around the Earth.

In a strange twist it took the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to alert scientists to this possibility during the short time period that jets were not allowed to fly in U. S. air space. And it’s very interesting to consider what may happen if we clean up one side of this problem and not the other. Which climate type would you rather live in, tropical or ice age?

Many people have seen this film but perhaps it’s been long enough since it came out for parents to get this video for their kids to watch. Al Gore, the former Vice President, gives his impassioned plea for America and the world to drastically reduce its burning of carbon-based energy resources. This film tells the story of what may be in our future if we let carbon dioxide continue to build up in the atmosphere. And this film was made before scientists started to realize what other atmospheric pollutants like soot and ash in the before mentioned film, Dimming the Sun, might be doing to climate change.

First of all let me say that I am one of those people who believe that using natural gas as a bridge away from coal and oil to a sustainable clean energy economy is the way to go. This film discusses the problems with getting to our abundant reserves of natural gas through the use of hydraulic fracking techniques. I realize that this is not a perfect solution to America’s energy needs but we have to rely on at least one of our natural energy resources until we can make a complete switch to clean energy, or at least, cleaner energy, and this is one way to achieve this.

This is a good film to watch and then decide on your own what you think about natural gas and its down sides.

Though this film is partially about the chemical pesticide industry and the effects of over use of these products by both an unsuspecting general public as well as our own agricultural industry the film primarily deals with Rachel’s life and work in the United States Government which led up to her writing of the book, “Silent Spring.”

This is a great film in how it depicts the early efforts of the chemical industry and how they learned methods to manipulate our government, which oil, coal, and natural gas companies now use, to maximize their profits with little if any concern about what it was doing to the health of the average American citizen.

I would love to see the looks on people’s faces when first viewing one scene in particular that actually shows a pesticide company fogging a group of kids eating lunch outside while telling them and their parents that this is a completely safe and effective way of controlling insects. That kind of thinking made me wonder if that might have had something to do with my own development of multiple sclerosis all these years later as we now know that these kinds of pesticides were created primarily to disrupt the nervous systems of insects? I’m pretty certain that both Dow Chemical and Monsanto would consider me a pest if they knew of my complete distaste for their lack of a more moral and sustainable business practice.

Both films directed by Bertram Verhaa

I wonder how many people who voted against the labeling of GMO’s in our recently past election would have changed their vote had they seen this film about the dangers of Genetically Modified Organisms? It’s very interesting to hear Monsanto claim that their just isn’t any good science (there is) that GMO’s are dangerous when the reason that there aren’t very many studies is because Monsanto and other corporations like them have effectively barred many scientific companies from studying them. If you want to see how they do this, including lobbying our own food and drug administration to achieve this, give this film a look.

And the companion film, “Monster Salmon” on the same video, should be a wake up call, for any and all people world wide, should these genetically modified fish ever find their way into the wild ocean population, which eventually, if not already, will happen!

You say you don’t quite understand how the banks and Wall Street were able to create and pull off the biggest ponzi scheme in American history and get away with it? The film, “Inside Job,” which is an excellent Film that won an Academy Award for best documentary and was also featured on PBS’s “Frontline,” "creates a very clear picture of how both Republicans and Democrats including Bill Clinton allowed the deregulation of the financial markets to create something called derivatives that nearly plunged the United States into a depression.

And if you think that we’re out of the woods and have nothing to worry about now, think again. The Federal Reserve created/printed and continues to do so, seventeen trillion dollars and still rising to stabilize world markets. And guess who gets to pay all of that money back Mr. and Mrs. American taxpayer?

These are just a few of the documentary environmental and political films that are available threw the library system here in our area, and I’m sure there are others. I encourage you to spend a few of these otherwise cold and rainy nights educating yourself about our environment and how things are accomplished in often closed door meetings of our government and big mega corporations at your expense.

And at some point I want you to ask yourself, do these people really have my best interests at heart, or is this just greed running wild?

You decide!