What is mountaintop removal mining?

moved here. Hey. You hear that music? Josh? Yeah, Yeah, that's Ben Sully, who will meet later. Right, that's right. I could listen to that stuff all day. Man, that chilling music. Macleagen awesome. Yeah, let's get into this one, all right, let's do it. This is the shortest intro how ever. Okay, okay, but it's it's it's telling. It's a good one. And you would think that I would have had it ready since it's the intro, you know. But I like to play things fast and loose, kind

of by the seat of my pants. And I also like to see how much time I can fill up all I look for things, right, like I've done you, But Chuck, I'm gonna give you a shocking statistic. There's gonna be a lot of those in this one. In the great state of West Virginia, which is next to Virginia just west of it, though, UM since nineteen seventy nine, the number of employed miners in that state, and mining is the number one industry in West Virginia. It's coal

mine country. The number of miners um in since nineteen seventy nine in that state has declined from sixty thousand to twenty two thousand, according to the state's Senator Robert Bird, but coal mining itself has dramatically increased over that time. So how do you explain that Well, as a matter of fact, the whole podcast that we're about to do explains it very clearly. A tie of mining process called mountaintop removal mining or strip mining. What's a type of

strip mining? Yeah, apparently one person called it strip mining on steroids. UM is very much responsible for the UM the ability for coal mining to just go through the roof in Appalachia while requiring fear and fear people. So while coal has has increased, unemployment has increased as well. And I guess let's just get right into it, because this one is chock full of stats and stories and this is an unusual podcast for us. And by the way, this one is officially yours, given this one to me.

This you did the you did the legwork for this one. Yeah, and we should add at the end of this podcast, we're gonna have a interview with uh in our first musical guest ever, with singer, songwriter and cello player Ben Soley, who was an activist for against mountaintop removal coal mining and uh it's on you know, the subpop label with his music, and he's gonna interview with us and play

a song and it's gonna be pretty cool to stick around. Yes, don't go anywhere in the middle of the podcast, all right, So let's get into it. So, um, chuck. Traditionally, when you think of mining, you think of basically a hole in the side of the mountain held up with timbers that UM men covered in coal dust are going into with pick axes and headlamps. Extremely dangerous, um job, but

a job that's traditionally um been able to support families. Yes, long has its roots in Appalachia, right, Um, this is a totally different kind of mining. Mountaintop removal mining is where traditional mining you bore into the mountain. With mountain top removal mining, you blow the top off of the mountain to expose the coal steam rather than digging in to get it. Yeah, coal steams run horizontally through a mountain. So what happens is and this is the how it

works portion. Yeah, and it's pretty amazing how they do this. And even Ben has told me it's pretty amazing, even though he thinks it's an awful practice, it's pretty amazing. On the last they clear cut the forest. They scrape away the top, soil, lumber, herbs, all that stuff, herbs, herbs, wildlife, and habitat. The wildlife habitat is destroyed. Vegetation is destroyed.

And in their defense they usually customarily they send a guy in with a machine gun who just fires into the air like a full day and then he comes down the mountain. Then they start clear cutting, so they do all this. Once they've done all that, they blow up the top of the mountain as much as eight hundred to a thousand feet I've seen. The mountain is just gone. That's why they call it removal. Yeah, and it's flattened out and it looks like a barren moonscape

instead of a forest in a mountain. Yeah, that's the that's the term that's used by just about anybody who has anything to do with either um uh it's supporting or opposing coal mining mountaintop coal mining. Moonscape is the word that everyone always uses. That's what I was trying to get out from that point. Um, they have these big shovels that come and dig into the soil. U

haul that stuff away into the valleys nearby. Yeah, because it's not like the stuff that s integrates this this um, this thing that's called overburdened by the mining industry, which is you know, rock, soil, dirt, trees. Yeah. Um, Like it doesn't just evaporate. You have to get rid of it. Yeah, you gotta put it somewhere. And then something called a drag line, which is one of the more impressive machines

I've ever seen. Huge. How big are these things? They said somewhere stories Yeah, um, and they way up to eight million pounds and apparently they're they're um. Yeah, so you saw that picture. It looks like an oil rig on like tracks. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, So the drag line comes in to expose the coil, digs into the rock. Um, these machines scoop out the coal. The machines that scoop are the coal. Their buckets can hold up to twenty

compact sized cars. Wow, that's large. Is there are massive operations and the result of this is, uh, the narrow valleys have been filled. It's called valley fill. And one. We got a bunch of stats. Here's one. Coal companies have buried more than twelve miles of headwaters and streams, rivers and streams buried underneath the stuff gone forever. Yeah, with the overburn, remember the stuff that they blew the top of the mountain off of may have to get

rid of it. There's two ways to do it. When you truck it off of the mountain and dump trucks, which is done, but it's also extremely expensive and time consuming. Or you move bulldozers up there and you push the overburden into the valley below in the in typically in a valley there's going to be some sort of stream

water supply. Yeah. And um, if you have a per mint, if you apply for a valley filled permit, um, you you can you're usually granted one and you just push that stuff into the valley and then start getting to the coal. Right, And so that's um. There's a lot of problems with this and we're going to try and hit on all of them, the myriad issues. It's not what you think you can just stop right here's probably could. Another one of the issues is something when they wash

the coal. It's called the result of of the wash is what they end up was called coal slurry. Right, And you wash coal because UM coal comes with a lot of other organic and inorganic toxins metals compounds UM like nickel, cadmium, mercury that keep it from burning as well. Right, Yeah, and there's chemicals added to the wash as well which end up in the coal slurry ponds. Right. So you're you're you're washing it for market, but this water has

got to go somewhere, and it's extremely toxic. UM mercury alone would make it extremely toxic. All those other heavy metals just make it been worse. So you either inject them into old minds all abandoned minds is one one thing that we do with cole slurry, or you wash them into holding ponds, which are basically earthen damns built into the side of the mountain, which can be precarious,

as we'll find out. Yeah, and if you've seen cole slurry, I mean, just type it into Google images, it looks like, uh like soupy um black sludge is about the best comparison I can make. So these ponds um. One of these actually busted. The dam broken in nineteen seventy two in West Virginia a Buffalo Creek and a hundred and thirty two million gallons of this stuff rushed through the valley, killed a hundred and twenty five people injured, eleven hundred

and four thousand people were left homeless. And these by and large are very poor people, which is one of the keys here that we're gonna keep hitting on. Yeah, I think Wise County, West Virginia. The um the average income is like eighteen thousand for a family something like that. Yeah, graduation rate is about six and the poverty level is exactly what it was during the was it Eisenhower I think so Eisenhower administration when he went there and said

we have to end poverty in West Virginia. It's the same lb J. Yeah, Johnson, Sorry, UM. So once this whole operation is done, there may be more than one seam, and there's different ways to get into it. UM, Like you can dig in from the side high wall mining, or you can blow the top off the mountain where you can do both. But once the mountains exhausted, and

these are massive sites. There's one in Virginia, I believe that's like thirty five thousand acres, which that's one site that Yeah, that's just one mining operation, or you could also call it one former mountain. UM. When when the time was when you left, that was that you got your coal and you got out of there in the mining oper oration was abandoned. UM. Nowadays you were supposed to most most mountaintop removal permits UH come with UH an addendum that you have to do some sort of reclamation.

And the reclamation process typically is supposed to involve basically piling rock and stuff back up, UM, regrowing this area and UM trying to basically simulate a mountain again. Yeah, and then was when that was first introduced, the Surface

Mining Control and Reclamation Act established standards. UH. They said back then that the goal was just to get grass to grow, anything to grow, and reclamation is a good thing in theory, but one of the knocks that activists like to point out is that what happens on paper isn't always what happens in reality. And there's been studies that show that the soil is still not the same decades later. It's just not the same. You can't make it what it was right. Um. There is one sterling

example of what can be done. It's called the Powell River Project. So the Powell River Project is um in Virginia, I believe, and it's acres. It's a former um mining site. UM that was. It's just a leveled mountaintop and some care was given to it and now it is basically a wildlife preserve. UM. It has strawberries and blueberries growing on it and sugar maples and cattle is grazing on the turf. UM. The wildlife that's come back are screech

and bard owl's, coyote, bear, turkey. UM. They're basically this this mountain is getting back to nature, right. Yeah. Primarily financed by the coal industry. Must say to say that, UM, And I think the deal is if everything went down like it's going down at Powell River, there would be fewer is shoes. But that's not the case. Unfortunately, that's

just a sterling example of what could be done. Well, this is what happens when you spend like decades and lots of money on this one particular site for the most case. I think you told me that they just like throw some grass seed down over the old site. And that's that, right, And UM, I guess well we should probably start now talking about the environmental impact. There's basically two ways, um, you can you can classify the

impacts that this has three ways. One economic which looks like it should be good, right, but if you look at the rates of unemployment in the continuous poverty in Appalachia, UM, you'll actually see that it's not so great. The economic impact, Um,

the environmental impact, and then the human impact. So let's talk about environment We're talking about cold slurry, right, you have to put that cold slurry somewhere the earthen damn like you said, UM, at Buffalo Creek in nine collapsed, spilled a hundred and thirty two million gallons and killed a hundred people, right, that's right, and two thousand in Kentucky there was another damn break two hundred and fifty million gallons of sludge flowed into the Tug Fork of

the Big Sandy River and affected streams and rivers up to a hundred miles away. More than a million fish and other wildlife died. One of the biggest environmental disasters in this country's history, and a lot of people probably never heard of it. Yeah, it's apparently the areas of exposure was twenty times that of the ex m Valdi's disaster. Yeah, and I believe it was either this one or the

other one. Um. One of the coal company heads called it because heavy rains is what eventually calls the damn to break on top of the slurry. Called it an act of God. Yeah, and I believe that's how it was left so sort of washing our hands of it. It was because the heavy rains, and you know, that's what happened. So you also mentioned Valley phil Um where streams have been affected just by being buried, which means

no more stream stat for you. There sixty seven hundred Valley Phill permits in the United States, six thousand, seven hundred times this has happened. Actually, I think it's more than I think it's um. Like in the seventy two hundreds because it was between eighty five and two thousand one. And we found another one. Chuck, that's um, there's been about five hundred or so from two thousand one to two thousand and eight. Yeah, things have really ramped up

here in the last decade. Stars so UM the back to the streams as well. Apparently there was this um this uh study in Science where UM twelve environmental science sciencests got in Science magazine. Yes, you know, in Science in January last this past you know, January twelve environmental sciences got together and did a survey of the literature of on the environmental impact of mountaintop removal mining and UM, the valleys you said, I think something like twelve hundred

miles of valley valley streams and headwaters have been affected. Um. These these guys sampled water and seventy three of seventy eight streams. Um or, they did a study on this and found that UM, seventy three of the seventy eight streams they sampled had deformed fish carrying toxic levels of selenium, which is a heavy metal, which is not good. UM. And if your fish is deformed, that's not good. In general. Yeah, the Simpsons, uh episode of Flanky how Many Eyes was three?

Almost sit four, we would have heard it about that. Um. Drinking water is another problem because the cold slurry. These earthen dams are temporary solution to begin with, um, but they can leak and that cold slurry can enter drinking water. Yeah. And you know, just to recap real quick though on the reclamation that I did find that study from earlier.

The study said that fifteen years after a mountaintop was leveled at this one site, trees had still not regrown because they just can't make the soil like it used to be. And the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and that's for the land. When it comes to the streams, the Army Corps of Engineers said under oath in their testimony um that there is not a successful stream creation project in junction with this. Yeah, or they don't know

of one. Yeah. Like basically, all right, we can try and reform the mountains to a rough assemblance of what it once was, but you can't just make new streams and we haven't found out a way to do that. It's kind of like um, taking a sword and severing someone's head and it just kind of balancing it back on the neck again. It's there, but it's not really working any longer. Right, Yeah, So that's some of the environment and where you're also talking about, Uh, it's in

the drinking water. It is um, which kind of is it's straddles um the environmental and the human impacts. Um. There are people in this literature that we've been um researching for this podcast whose families have lived in these areas for like two hundred and thirty years or so, right, Like these are straight up Appalachian folk, right, hillbilies they call them, And um, the Hillbillies have been there for a while and before I guess it was probably a

very quiet place. But as we've mentioned, with mountaintop removal, mining, explosives are a major part of it. So when you blow the top off of a mountain, first of all, it takes a lot of explosives, but it's very loud. Um. Apparently, in two thousand three, sixty seven percent of all explosives produced in the US were consumed by the coal industry, and in West Virginia alone, that figure led to an estimated three million pounds of explosives being used a day.

A day to blow up mountains. People live on these mountains still, the same mountains that they're blowing up, so you've got the noise. Have a very dangerous condition called fly rock, yeah, which is exactly what it sounds like. When you blow a mountain top up. Rock flies everywhere, and if somebody's living there, it um can go into their house and kill them. Yeah, And that was the case in uh two thousand four at two thirty in

the morning, bulldoz are operating without a permit. At two again to thirty in the morning, because bulldozer was working on mine site without a permit, it dislodged a thousand pound boulder, rolled two hundred feet down and crushed three year old Jeremy Davidson in his bed, who was sleeping at the time. Yet and the company was fined fifteen tho dollars for that, yeah, for gross negligence. Yeah. So I don't even have a comment on that. We'll just

leave that to the listeners. Um. The have some more deaths here if you want to be dark for another moment. In West Virginia, fourteen people drowned in the last three years because of floods and mud slides, in Kentucky, fifty people have been killed and five injured over the last

five years by cold trucks that were illegally overloaded. And on the flooding thing, I think they said that in this one spot in West Virginia that there were three what they call a thousand year flood or a hundred year flood in ten days, three year floods in ten days in this one region. That's not supposed to happen. UM. And you know you're talking about death's that's just directly

from drownings, UM injury, that kind of thing. If you take all of the public health hazards into account, UM as a public Health reports UM Journal study did UH this year I think last year, I'm sorry, UM. Anywhere between sevent hundred and thirty six and hundred and eighty nine people die in Appalachia each year as a result of the coal mining industry there, right, So there is a lot of death, but there's also a lot of

potential death too. We talked about Buffalo Creek where the slurry uh damn, a slurry pond damn broke and killed a hundred and twenty people. That was a hundred and thirty million gallons of coal slurry, right killed the people. There is a place UM called marsh Fork, march Fork Elementary School. I saw a documentary on the school. So march Fork has UM I believe two hundred something students going there every day. And just above the elementary school there is a coal slurry pond above it on the

mountain side that holds three billion gallons of coal sludge. Yeah, and there's a whole operation. There's a silo three hundred feet from the school. Right, So rather than the hundred and thirty two million gallons, we're talking about three billion gallons poised behind an earthen dam right above an elementary school. So there's a lot of potential for a disaster as well. Right. Yeah, that's a Massy Energy that's one of the bigger coal

companies in the United States. And you might remember Massey's name by UM the up for Big Branch mine explosion that happened about a year ago from two days ago. It was April five, UM that that explosion killed twenty nine miners and leaving three others trapped. UM. So Massy is, like you said, big in a traditional mining uh surface mining and regulation. Actually one of their former executives was named a Deputy Energy Secretary for fossil fuels a couple

of years back. That's right, President Bush named appointed uh what was his name? His name was Stanley sue Bileski. He was appointed in UM two seven December two thousand seven to the Department of Energy. Yeah, okay, Uh. Back to March Fork Elementary School. That that actually one of the documentaries I saw yesterday was on that school specifically, and uh, West Virginia activists Bo Webb, he's one of the leading activists on this cause. Found of the parents

are saying that they're chill. Dren are coming home from school with a variety of illnesses like nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, shortness of breath, wheezing, asthma, um long term effects, kidney damage. There's been a lot of kidney damage in that area, liver damage, spleen failure, bone damage, and cancer of the digestive digestive track. And um Bo has uh Actually it

wasn't Bo, but one of the other activists there. They were trying to raise money in this documentary to build a new school not near you know, not threeet away from a coal mining corporation. And they were trying to raise it by donating pennies, and they in the documentary they marched and had a rally at the governor's office in West Virginia and it was hardcore. Man, it was

hard to watch. Like literally, the governor gave him a minute and he's glad handing and talking to people, and you know, they bring out this little girl from the school and he's like, well, what are you interested in? And you sure are cute and what do you want to be when you grow up? And basically the kids just like, I don't want to live under a coal mine and I don't want to be sick anymore. And they called this guy out, the governor out big time.

And it was really one of those uncomfortable scenes to watch when politics gets when it's clear that this guy has no answer and the big coal has their lobbyists that are you know, on the on the side of you know, big coal mining, and it was it was just very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch, but you should watch it nonetheless. And that was that was marsh Creek Elementaries in West Virginia, right, yeah, okay, so um, yeah,

it's in Rock Creek. I see um chuck. One of the reasons why the governor would have been embarrassed or um felt awkward is because there is a ton of money at stake here. That one UM Public Health Reports Journal study. Yeah that that said you know, between um people die each year from coal mining. Um. It was an economics paper really, and it said that, um, the coal industry generates about eight billion dollars in economic contribution to Appalachia every year, right, yeah, which is a lot.

It's like, you know, you can't that's a lot of money spent on that area. The problem is this same paper, using the same model, figured out that um, it costs about forty two billion dollars in healthcare costs and the cost of life. So that's a big picture. Yeah. Yeah, so you're actually losing. And you can just look at you know, the poverty in Appalachia and see, oh, well, these people who are literally next to these mines are not benefiting from this at all. Right, and the uh

there's another stat. Activists will point out that only about four or five percent of our of our nation's coal energy comes from mountaintop removal mining. So it's not like, oh, you know, like of the coal that we use comes from this practice, so we really really need it. Uh. They will tell you that conservation alone, we could save an average of our energy to man's which far outweighs you know, by what four or five times the five

percent that we're using. Right, I've seen up the ten percent um comes from strip mining or from mountaintop removable mining. But that's being used pretty grievingly because we um, the United States gets about fifty of its electricity. I think in two thousand nine, I got forty percent of it's electricity from coal. So usually it's around Yeah, and we're exporting coal too. It's coal is an important part of

our energy plan. I can't ignore that. So where does that leave us, Chuck, Well, there's a couple of things, uh, Josh. One reason that I wanted to do this show, and that you've got on board and we're way behind it too, is because oh no, I'm I'm just doing this. Is because this is a problem that affects poor rural people, for the most part, people in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, uh, Tennessee now, and and that they don't have the same

voice that other folks do. UM. One of the leading, but I think it was bow Webb again said if this this wouldn't happen in New England. Um that biggest environmental disaster west of the or east of the Mississippi River happened in The New York Times didn't report about it for like four months. So it's and I guess a lot of the listeners out there probably looked at the title what is Mountaintop removable coal mining and said, yeah,

what is that? I've never heard of it. But we've all heard of the Valdez, we heard about the you know, all these disasters obviously need attention. I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay attention to things like oil spills, but it gets a lot more at tension when it's on the Gulf of Florida with Destin and seaside right there than it does in the rural mountains of West Virginia. So somebody needs to be talking about this, and a

lot of people are. And another problem is the coal lobby and the fact that companies can donate money to uh political campaigns and getting a pockets of politicians and favors are paid back. And it's the same old story with you know, big industry like this. It's just sad to see it happening. Well, it is. It's a big it's a there's a big debate going on right now about just how much the e p A should have

teeth in regards to mountaintop removal mining, right. Yeah, And the e p as new chief is pretty progressive and pretty hardcore and not a friend of big business, and she is making some waves. Um. Coal miners are against these actions. You're talking about Lisa Jackson. Yeah, and she's a bulldog. That read that Rolling Stone interview on her, and she's she said her job is just to look out for the environment, that that's the only thing she wants to do. And you know, if you're in her way,

she's gonna try and knock you down. Well, we'll see. But that's still not enough um for a lot of people. I think they're the general consensus among activists and probably people who live in school buses on the side of a mountain nearby a mountaintop removal UM operation is that it should be banned outright, Yeah, That that process is not mining those particular sites, but that that um type of mining, that method of mining should just be completely outlawed. Yeah.

I mean most of these permits were issued during the Clinton and Bush administrations UH second Bush obviously, and there were certain key provisions to the Clean Water Act that were rewritten UH to reclassify waste associated with strip mining as benign film material. Federal judge rejected that UM, but then that change was upheld in two thousand three by UH fourth Circuit Court judge. And then Obama comes in and people said, all right, dude, you're you're the environmental guy.

Get rid of this altogether. In the first one days didn't happen. But Obama has introduced UM stricter guidelines now and the e p A has onto curtail mountain top mining hailed by certain environmentalists. But if you talk to bow Webb, they'll say that ain't enough. Brother. He's like, you gotta outlaw mountaintop removal mining, period, and anything less than that is just playing into the hands a big coal It's it's surprising that it has been allowed to

go on. I mean, the idea of blowing the top of a mountain and then pushing it into the valley below, covering up the stream, and then introducing coal slurry to this local environment. UM in an age where we you know, where there's such a thing as Earth Day and people are like, I will never use a paper or a plastic bag. I used my own that I bought and brought from home. That this is going on, is UM.

It's it's startling. Yeah. Well, UM, last and you know, I said that there were some efforts by the Obama administration to curtail this UM last Thursday. This is just over the wire today, UM. Two senators from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell and Ran Paul, introduced the bill trying to restrict that p A from clamping down on it, giving the e p A a a sixty day deadline to veto Clean Water Act permits issued by the Corps of Engineers, and UM activists are saying, and this is tricky, so they

put in that sixty eight thing. Everyone knows nothing in the government can happen in sixty days, so it's sort of a a facade, red herring or red herring. Uh. The bill would also prevent the e p A from retroactively vetoing permits. So UM. That was Mitch mcconollin, Ran Paul and Ran Paul from Kentucky. If you're from Kentucky. You know all about your senators two thousand ten, said like, you don't need me to tell you about this guy. In two thousand ten, he said in an interview quote,

I think they should name it something better. The top ends up flatter. But we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these knobby little hills that are everywhere out here. I don't think anyone's gonna be missing a hill or two here and there. And that was ran Paul, straight from the horse's mouth, and Chuck, I think that you know as well as eye, people are going to be like you guys are getting political. Stop being political.

And I just I'm trying to figure out how to frame a response to that, because this is Paul, this is UM super political. It's above politics. It's basically incredibly well financed UM industrial interests and average people who have no money. That kind of UM dying, dying and getting sick. That's not political. That's not the right or the left.

That's right or wrong. Basically, well said sir, we're talking about UM an e P. A study estimated four hundred thousand acres have been wiped out, and like we said, between seven hundred and a thousand miles of stream and that was that those are the two thousand one number, so it's a lot higher by then, Well, do you want to talk to Ben slowly? I do. I'm looking to see if I have anything else. Oh you know what, we should plug a couple of things, Um, Jonathan Franzen's

new novel Freedom. It's a big subplot mountaintop removal mining. Yeah, I heard the TV show Justified. Have you ever seen it? It's awesome. Timothy Oliphant season two has a big subplot on mountaintop removal mining and all these things, you know, raise awareness on certain levels. The wild wonderful Whites of West Virginia. What's that? It's a documentary you know, the Dancing Outlaw. Oh yeah, yeah, so it's a follow up that it's his family and they are crazy. It's actually

produced by Johnny Knoxville's production company. Really it's worth seeing. So um. Ben will be in here in a second to give us some more organizations. But if you want to just look into this little more, there are three places that can recommend you go. One is I Love Mountains dot org. Great place to start. There's a group called the Mountain Justice Summer. There they are well organized. I think they're the oldest one. Yeah, that's Mountain Justice

Summer dot org. And then um Appalachian Voices app Voices dot org. Go to any of those websites, look up some pictures, do your own research, see if it matters to you or summer's coming up. And if you want to go join the protest, they have them all over Appalachia. If you've ever wanted to see a person with dreadlocks in working in conjunction with the hillbilly, this is the place to go. It's a good point. So chuck um, let's let's pause a second here while we bring Ben

sol Okay, so we're back. It seemed like a brief second to you, but it was about ten minutes thoughts at least something like that. And in the studio for our first ever musical guests, we have Mr Ben so Ley. Welcome Ben, Hello, fellas. Ben is a singer, a songwriter, and a cellist. Check he is a Kentucky native right and he is a coal a mountaintop removal coal mining activists. And in two thousand ten, Ben, you put out an album Them on Subpop label, produced by Mr Jim James

of My Morning Jacket. It's true with Daniel Martin Moore called Deer Companion, and it was a you call a concept album or just a theme album. M that's a good question. Um. Some folks referred to as a protest album. O. Some folks referred to it as a album of of umn issues based album. And we just kind of looked at it as a tribute album to a really beautiful part of the country and bringing that part of the country and that sound and kind of our heritages Kentucky

musicians into like the urban context and mixing all that stuff. Well, since that was one of my questions anyway, just tell us a little bit more about that project. I now did of the proceeds went to I Love Mountains dot org. Yeah, well, I mean all of the proceeds that we would have gotten as artists. Yeah, and in the record world, you know, there's you get a portion of it from record sales

album went to dot org. No. Actually it was like I mean, to be specific, it was thirteen point something per cent the portion that we would have gotten his artists. So we just donated that to Act Voices, Um. And mostly because they run an amazing website and called I Love Mountains dot org. And the goal of the record was not to like protest anything or you know, necessarily pick aside. It was more to like raise awareness being

catalysts for conversation exactly. So UM, in that way, we wanted to support the thing that was we felt like was one of the best things for a national conversation, which was the website where people can go and find out how they're involved and what to do. How did you get into UM Where did your desire to raise awareness about MTR come from? UM? It's a good question. I think I think it all started with UMH an author that read a story. And this guy's name is

Silas House. It's a well known author there in the Kentucky Central part of America region. He's amazing writer. And he came and read on a show that I was doing this beautiful entry about a lady who had posted herself up on this mountain side and she was not going to allow the machines to kind of rip up the land which had been in her family for years and years, and that you know, it was a you know, I had a lot of emotion and energy and the writing that kind of spawned the thought of it, and

then more and more research. I was like, Wow, how can this actually be going on America? How can people actually I have to live without Basically there's a lot of their civil rights to have like clean water, to be protected by their police, you know, all these things, and so I wanted to help raise awareness for it. But I'm a musician. What do you do? Like how much can a song really change anything? Is always one of these big dilemmas, especially a song of protest. Have

you heard Europe's Final Countdown? That changed everything for me? You know the song I Do for You? I'm Gonna Buy You That MP three is a better thing. Oh that's sweet. Uh So tell us a little bit more about Deer Companion and your work with Daniel Martin Moore and Jim James and Subpop and how that was packaged. I know that was very unique. It is unique. And Subpop is a really amazing record label for even taking the time to like look at putting this thing out.

And I think a big, big part of that is because they started as a label that was based in a community, like they started, you know, putting out the punk rock music of Seattle, and they grew big and they put out music and everything. Now, but this is the way of reaching into a different community and being

part of a conversation. And in a lot of ways, folk music kind of has that punk like against the you know, against the common thing, the establishment, against the establishment, the man, the man, whatever, the industry, and so I think this really resonated with them, so they took the time and energy put it out. Working with Daniel Martin Moore was, um, he's a tall, all handsome crooner sort

of fella. He is, and he also lives in Kentucky And before we even met, he was very active in raising when it's been mountintop removal with a song called fly Rock Blues, and fly rock kind of describes the materials that fly off into the air when they mountain that, Yeah, it's amazing stuff. I mean sometimes boulders as big as houses go flying hundreds of yards. I mean it's amazing, powerful explosive force and land in places way outside the digging zone. So um, that and song inspired me to

work with him on this project. And then Jim James came on board, also Kentucky native. Also Kentucky native, I mean he had done a lot of work with Kentucky for the Commonwealth, an organization there in Kentucky, and he just was a great voice for being able to take these influences of Appalachia, take our own songwriting, and also bring him in with kind of the relevant indie rock, this kind of sound that is associated with him and

My Morning Jacket. And quickly on the packaging to um that was was there a map that was included or there's a there's a beautiful picture of Appalachia. And what's unique about the picture and the reason that we chose it is not it's not some you know, long shot landscape of the rolling mountains, old Appalachian fog. It's it's not this idealized thing. It's simply a valley. It's this beautiful, pristine valley. And that's really what the whole contention behind

this is. It's not really the absence of the mountaintops that causes so much destruction. It's the filling in the destruction of the valleys. These are the places that collect our water, the headwaters that come down not only to these Appalachian communities but also some of our major cities on the East coast, and those waters are being polluted, and the idea that we all live downstream from those UM is a really provocative and and an idea that

we're all in this together. This is one big community, from the groundwater being polluted to the electricity that runs these light bulbs. Like, we're all kind of participating in this thing. And it's very easy when we're participating in it, turning on a light switch or charging our phone. Two miss the idea, not that a mountain is blowing up. That's too abstract. That's two out there. The idea that people have to live with UM, that people make this power.

But people have to deal with the cold trucks, you know, tearing up the roads. People have to deal with the dust in the air and the shaking ground. People have to deal with the loss of land values. Like there are people that are living UM very hard lives to make sure that we have these things. And I think from a positive standpoint, we need to appreciate that more. Not just protest them, not point our fingers and look at them and say look at those poor people. Let's

say thank you in a lot of ways. And that's what we try to do with your companion, was to say thank you celebrate Appalachia as a landscape as part of our American heritage. You know, everything from the fiddler chopped, you know, the man beside his cabin chopping wood, or the fiddler playing, by the guys dancing, like these American

things that have been turned into musicals and shows. They all stem from these those pioneers that settled in these mountains and and I just think it's such a huge part of our heritage Americans, and it's just disappearing as these communities they just they struggled to survive underneath the climate of things being exploded and land being devalued and water being polluted. It's hard for them to survive. It's hard for communities two to even keep their footing when

all that's happening. So we're losing part of our American heritage. And that's how it ties in with me as a musician. That's how I found it tied in with me as a musician. Awesome. And I want to point out Ben as a guy who walks the walk. He did a an entire tour, was it last year? On your bicycle? Well, yeah, we've done three tours by bicycle. Man. I don't know how many people are there ever tried to carry the cello and bicycle, But this guy does it from town

to town. Believe it or not, there's four or five cellist out there in the world that are that are carrying their cellos on bicycle. It's something about you know, people say cellist are extreme people. I don't think that. But I just really got into this idea of not being sustainable or being green, slowing down right, the idea that I wanted to be more involved in these communities.

I felt this this unsettling feeling that I was coming through these places, putting on a show, asking people about the music, and then moving on to the next driving eight to ten hours the next day sometimes to get to some distant community where a promoter is willing to put on put out money to put on a show. It felt like a little bit of a fleecing thing and somewhat dishonest in a lot of ways. It wasn't real,

and people romanticized it, but it wasn't really real. So the idea of getting on a bicycle, slowing down, not being able to roll up our windows or just stay on the interstate and zoom pass the place. We had to really ride through each community and be a part of their town for at least a little bit. Yeah, you notice, I've been riding my bike lately just for exercise, and it's amazing how much more you notice just by walking or riding a bike than when you're zipping past

in the car. The smells, the condition of the road is a big one. Um the habits and nature of other drivers out there. You notice how amazing it is that we have thousands and thousands of pounds of machinery that we can just hurtle down the highway. I mean, for for better or worse. You just kind of notice what what an extreme action that is. It feels we're so used to it. But the idea that we can hop on a highway and just push this machine, very heavy,

big machine, float it down the highway. You know, it's kind of like you know, Arthur C. Clark or something. It's just right out there. You don't take things for granted. My friend, all right, Well, before we get involved with the music, sticking around and playing as a song, I would love to we we plug. I love mountains dot Org. Is that a good place for people to start. It's a great place for people will start especially because you can.

They have a tool on there where you can plug in your zip code and see what portion of your power is coming from coalts and not only that, you can see where that coal is coming from. Yeah, it's a great website. I love mountains that are it's cool, not cold, that's cold. So the song we're gonna hear just called electrified, and it is from Mr. Soli's forthcoming album, which should be dropping right now, and it's called Inclusions.

So it's here. The trees far electrified, the streets are electrified, your eats are electrified. My voice was electriffive. Your heart is unsteady. They can make a feat in time. Your mind is confused, it will be clarified, your own fashioned. You will be modernized. Every Thing is electrified. If the thing is electrified. If you lost in the jungle, used the satellite, you're broke in the city, sneak on the bus line, you lost your job because it was mechanized.

They said we have to compete when the markets gooblized. Every thing is electrified. Every thing is electrified. Every thing is electrified. Lie with my bare hand touched the base of your spine. Feel you shuddering glow moved like a swallow and I'm hypnotop. Every things electric file. Everything's aled to file. Things electrify. Some folks are heroes, others maybe vilified. Assess your lawsuit has learned to diversify. Find your higher

callings than evangelize, build your congregation. Now you're televised. Every thing's electrified. Everything is a ACTU five. Yeah, and the things electrified, the thing electure five. Man, that was awesome. That was very cool, so cool. And those you know you heard clapping. We have people all over the office here that wanted to come in and here. Yeah, I have something else. Uh. So you can see Ben Solely on tour. He's on tour right now, and he is

all over the place. I'm looking Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St. Louis, I mean, back through Kentucky, down through the South. Go see Ben so Lee on tour through the end of June. You can find that at his website. Yeah. You can also learn all about mining and energy by typing either one of those words in the search part. How stuff works dot com, which is not sure your listener mail this time. Instead, you shoot us an email if you

want to drop us a line. Yeah, and hey, if you go see Benslely onto work, go up to him and talk to him. He's a very nice guy and tell him that your buddies with us. He's a very good guy. Anyway. If you want to get in touch with us, send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. VI is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.

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