The second section of the book serves as another way for Reece to expose the real attitudes and thoughts by the locals who live around Lost Mountain. Before getting to this chapter, I wondered if the local towns people really did understand the repercussions of how the coal mining would affect the health of their community. Was it a a few individuals, or a good amount of the public? It became clear to me that it was a pretty widely understood situation when a teacher, John Krupa was quoted as saying "It's just a matter of time before we kill ourselves off". He then went on to say say that he doesn't tell his younger students that, but its clear they understand it as they get older. Perhaps the only luck for these young students to get away from this environmental hazard is to go to college. It must be incredibly difficult to go to school each day, go to the park, go for a walk, or even going out to get the newspaper, knowing your ingesting so many toxins. I'm not sure that is something I could do.
Luckily its not all bad news bears at Lost Mountain. Reece describes a small development called the Ecovillage. Here waste is converted to water and is a fairly sustainable source. It's rather brilliant in that the Ecovillage uses 75% less energy than your average residential neighborhood. Hopefully as time goes on, engineers and others working on site can further develop ways to turn this tragedy into something good. I'd say toilet water is a pretty good start.
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I completely agree with you about this ecovillage that Reece talks about. If the coal companies and engineers working on this ecovillage could use this technology in other areas of the Appalachian region then we may not have as many troubles as there are now. I found how Krupa said "it's just a matter of time before we kill ourselves off" interesting as well, in the fact that it could very well be true. Hopefully this ecovillage can inspire more people to clean up the waste and people won't have to keep breathing in this toxic air.
ReplyDeleteIts good to see that they are starting this ecovillage, but even if this village cleans up the area, there will only be another mountain destroyed and more regulations ignored at the next village. We need to get the company's to follow regulations or else we will pass a tipping point where there is so much polluted area, that cleaning up would not help
ReplyDeleteI too was glad to see some of the positive alternative energy sources that have been utilized successfully. I am personally very interested in any new source of alternative energy or waste conversion. Although we will always have to rely on coal to some degree, we will need to explore alternative options for energy production as seen in the ecovillage.
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