Yesterday, I spoke at a public hearing on a permit application by Dominion Power, and it was highly disheartening. In fact, I almost walked out! Since most of the readership here is not local to this project, I'll offer as background that the proposed plant is to generate power using "clean" coal technologies - an oxymoron, of course! - and the environment in question is the Clinch River watershed. This particular permit application was for a variance that would allow the burial of 3880 linear feet of stream and almost half an acre of wetland to be buried under two million tons per year of toxic coal ash containing illegally high concentrations of about 25 toxins including carbon, mercury, arsenic, and lead.

I'll only mention the least technical of the six talking points with which I had armed myself: Two miles downstream from the proposed toxic dump live three times as many species of fresh-water mussel than can be found in all of Europe, several of which are endangered and all of which would be summarily exterminated if the stream is rerouted as proposed. But then, Walt Disney never bothered to animate mussels, so somehow they don't count! It should come as no surprise that the environmental study conducted by Dominion and accepted without question by the Department of Environmental Quality found that the area was of "low biological integrity" and supported no life.

The hearing was conducted by the Water Protection Board, but it had nothing to do with protecting the water. They made it very clear that they were only hearing arguments based on irregularities in Dominion's application and "mitigation" plan, yet they announced at the outset that they had already ruled that the mitigation plan was adequate and that Dominion was in compliance with all regulations, deadlines, etc. Now, I ask you, propeace community, with a law in place that prohibits such dumping within 100 feet of a stream, why would there be provisions for the granting of such a variance without a significant burden of proof on the power company to show a need for the existence of this plant in the first place?

The only reason I stayed, and I stated as much, is because the man who was holding the hearing spoke so sincerely about what a long way he had traveled to hear us and how he wasn't going to put a timer on us unless things got out of hand. I was the second citizen of sixteen who had signed up to speak; one more took the mike spontaneously at the end. The County Board of Supervisors Chair, a Town Council member from the town adjacent to the plant, and the representative from Dominion took the opening positions.

I talked about the Orwellian nature of the language I was hearing - talking about an industrial waste landfill when what they meant was a toxic waste dump, talking about mitigation when what they really meant was holding hostage headwaters and watershed previously ruined by the mining industry, saying that their mission is to protect water quality when what they really meant was that their mission is to play trade-off games to get a few old messes cleaned up in exchange for turning their back while new messes are created. I brought in the fact that the US is the only country that hasn't signed the Kyoto accord because the EPA can't meet that standard and the VA standard can't meet the EPA standard, yet Dominion needs a variance even from that lax standard in order to commit us to a technology that will be illegal before the first fifth of its depreciation has been taken!

There were other speakers who were even hotter. One woman compared the DEQ's parsing of different aspect of Dominion's assault on the environment with no attention to the big picture to modern Western medicine's attitude toward health care and the human body. I went up to the man who shamed them in the name of future generations and thanked him for speaking for my grandchildren because I didn't dare - I was afraid I would lose my temper! Several people made the biodiversity argument on behalf of the mussel species and the argument about the danger from the unmapped and unstable abandoned mine shafts and seams with great eloquence and scholarship.

Arguments in favor were "party line" about what a good neighbor Dominion is, about what a wonderful record they have (NOT!), about how compliant they have been with all requirements, etc. Oh! and get this: They cited "developers like WalMart" as some sort of paragon of environmental virtue! This drivel is all the DEQ needs to get their basic assumptions to bubble up. Eavesdropping on conversations prior to the hearing, I heard things like "my high school kids aren't going to quit driving to school" and "we need coal-fired power for the foreseeable future." I heard one of my favorite statistics quoted - that we have 5% of the world's population consuming 25% of the earth's resources - but the attitude was, "Oh, well, I guess the rest of the world can't live like us!"

The next hearing is on June 24th by the Air Pollution Control Board. This is an interesting situation for another reason: There are currently three vacancies on that Board that will be filled with new gubernatorial appointees prior to this hearing. Because of Governor Kaine's silence on this matter, the environmental activist community fears that a favorable attitude toward Dominion's construction plans will turn out to be an unspoken criterion for these appointments. I answered that Action Alert with a letter to the governor in which I pointed out that, since the mission of the Air Pollution Control Board must be to control air pollution (DUH!), it would therefore be a conflict of interest to appoint anyone to serve who has financial interests in companies that generate such pollution.

It's a sad situation here in these coal-minin' hills of southern Appalachia. Even if we are able to persuade the powers that be to do the "right" thing, there's a rich cultural tradition at stake, not to mention the livelihood of some under-educated people. Everyone loves mountain music and crafts and the rich storytelling style of these daughters and sons of the pioneer days. The problem is that they don't particularly want to change their lifestyle and take advantage of the dollars of the liberals to return to school and learn to run a computer.

How do we protect the autonomy and self-determination of these mountaineers and still take care of our planet? And how can we grassroots activists dispel the mythologies that keep the status quo in place?