To PETA

I posted the following comment to a message on the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) blog. My comment wasn't approved by the administrator, so I'm putting it up here. Here's the context: PETA selected Senator Robert C. Byrd from West Virginia as their Person of the Year. In the comments section announcing the award, many folk complained about this decision for various reasons, from the fact that Byrd is not a vegetarian, to the fact that he is a hunter, to the fact that he has supported surface mining--which kills animals and destroys habitat--for 50 years. He was given the award, according to the PETA site, because he spoke out against the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal and he supported and introduced bills promoting humane treatment and slaughter of livestock. Good things, all, but--as other folks in the comments suggest--my vote would have been Dennis Kucinich, the vegan presidential candidate, a guy with a real backbone and a real ethic that encompasses the killing of animals as well as people.

You can read the PETA message here.

And here is my unpublished response:

To find out if you are contributing to Mountaintop Removal Mining in Appalachia, visit ILoveMoutains.org. At this link, you can type in your zip code to see if the electricity you are using comes from MTR: http://www.ilovemountains.org/mc/index.php

The feature at this link uses Google Maps and will show you where the power plants are located that create your electricity, and, if those plants are coal-fired, from what mining sites that coal is taken. If you keep zooming in over the location of the mines, you can see the barren, gray moonscapes created by the mines.

For those committed to the ethical treatment of animals (both wildlife and the human animal), energy consumption should be a part of that ethics. Mining destroys animals and their habitat and then the pollution from creating the energy further destroys animals and habitat through acid rain and global warming.

In even another way, heere in the coal fields of Kentucky, the mistreatment of animals and MTR mining go hand-in-hand. I now live in "The Elk Capital of Kentucky," the place where elk have been "re-introduced" to Appalachia for tourism purposes. The coal barons claim that "reclaimed" MTR sites provide the perfect habitats for these non-native elk, and the local politicians and leaders--desperate for ways to create tourism jobs in one of the poorest counties in the United States--agree. This year, the lottery to hunt the elk that didn't exist here a few years ago began, and car roofs and tailgates were draped with elk corpses.

All aspects of MTR mining are awful both on the front-end and the back-end, including the treatment of animals. Just like coal is dirty when it's mined (front-end) and dirty when it's burned for electricity (back-end), the treatment of animals is dirty at both ends. First, the mining itself destroys habitat and directly kills animals, then afterward, it allows for more "hunting grounds" for animals that don't belong here in the first place.

Remember: there is no such thing as "clean coal." This catch phrase is simply a marketing campaign of the American Coal Association, and, unfortunately Washington--including most of the presidential hopefuls--have adopted it. If all CO2s could be sequestered, coal would still be dirty (beyond dirty!), because MTR mining--and wildlife habitat destruction--would actually increase.