by Matt Kasper
At a House hearing last week, witnesses were intending to focus on coal mining. Instead, a photo of a five year old child is getting all the attention.
Testifying in front of the House Natural Resources Commitee on the impact of coal mining, activist Maria Gunnoe intended to show a picture of a five year old child bathing in polluted water from mountaintop mining. But House Republicans censored the image, calling it child pornography.
The photo was taken by photojournalist Katie Falkenberg, who wrote this caption about the image:
Erica and Rully must bathe their daughter, age 5, in contaminated water that is the color of tea. Their water has been tested and contains high levels of arsenic…. The coal company that mines the land around their home has never admitted to causing this problem, but they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking. Contaminated and colored water has occurred in other coalfield communities as well where mountaintop mining is practiced.
Members of the committee were not able to see the informative image, because Republican committee staff barred Gunnoe from displaying the picture during her testimony.
Gunnoe complied with the request, but after the hearing was escorted into an empty room by Capitol Police and was questioned for 45 minutes about the photo at the request of an unnamed GOP senior committee staffer to Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO). Gunnoe is a renowned activist against mountaintop coal mining, who has testified before the committee three other times.
Intimidation tactics against coal activists are nothing new, especially against Gunnoe. She has faced threats and intimidation directed at her and her family for her environmental justice work:
In return for her passionate activism, mine managers have singled out Gunnoe as an enemy of mine workers and their jobs. She has received threats on her life and her children are frequently harassed at school. Her daughter’s dog was shot dead, wanted posters featuring her photo have appeared in local stores, and she has had to take serious measures to protect her family and property.
It is not difficult to see why the Goldman Environmental Prize winner is seen as a threat. As Gunnoe pointed out in her testimony about the Spruce coal mines in West Virginia, mountaintop removal is an extraordinarily destructive process that the coal companies don’t want the public to know about:
- Selenium discharges downstream from Spruce No 1 are already much higher than EPA standards according to recent water testing. The Spruce 1 permit will allow more selenium to be released into this stream. This is the making for life threatening levels of selenium.
- The community of Blair has NO municipal drinking water available to them. The only water in these communities is the well water which in some cases has already been polluted. The community of Blair needs water infrastructure to supply their homes with healthy water before any area permits are even discussed.
- From what we see on the ground the coal companies have already moved forward in preparing the permit area as if they had an approved permit.
- The Spruce permit is in the Coal River watershed. Mountaintop removal is why American Rivers placed the Coal River on our America’s Most Endangered Rivers list this year – because the river is at a decision point – not because it’s the most polluted. We can save these precious headwater streams that also serve as drinking water to our communities but we must act now before it is too late.
A 21-peer reviewed study confirmed that people living near the mountaintop removal cites are 50 percent more likely to die of cancer and 42 percent more likely to be born with birth defects compared with other communities in the Appalachia region. Local communities near such projects have a 70 percent increased risk for developing kidney disease, and there are 313 excess deaths every year from coal-mining pollution.
Sadly, these are not the issues being discussed after the hearing. Instead, we’re talking about why a powerful photograph was censored by a House Committee.
Capitol Police have not found Gunnoe guilty of any wrongdoing.
Matt Kasper is a Special Assistant for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Related Post:
- Coal mining costs Appalachians five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
The message this sends to all American moms and dads…
Do not take pictures of your children having a bath or you may be suspected of pornography. If you send a photo like that to the grandparents you could be in serious violation of federal laws. The Republican vision of Amerika.
Of course, the real porn is the effect of mountaintop removal, which the Republicans didn’t want anyone to see for fear it would be banned.
If I could wax poetic for a moment, I want to admit that, for me, mountains represent and resemble a woman’s breast, underneath every majestic peak you can find Earth’s heart beating. Lopping off the nipple and flesh of a mountain in order to mine a few more dirty kilowatt-hours is about as pornographic as I can imagine. A breast, a mountain, denuded, bare, flattening our Mother and clogging her streams, ruining complete ecosystems. This is where I see the heinous crime. If a Member of Congress looks at an child bathing in this muck and believes it is her innocent body that is pornographic and not the dirty water lapping at her sensitive skin, then I’d say that man needs to look deep into his soul and reexamine his priorities and values.
Anne. The film (of a book) ‘The Carpet Baggers’ sprang to mind reading your post, you will probably guess why.
Once again those who consider themselves civilized display the opposite trait and their judgements here reveals more about their own moral poverty than that of those creating the image.
Lamborn is clearly a tool and should expose those logically stunted and morally bankrupt individuals who prompted him to take this underhand and ethically bankrupt path.
The Repugnants declaring a picture of an innocent, victimised, child, victimised by their greed, as ‘pornographic’ is simply the most transparent psychological projection. These are very sick puppies, indeed.
Coming from (at least) 4 generations of coalminers, I know that the coalminer will not give up his job, and the coal company will not surrender their source of wealth, even though they know coal is ruining the air we breathe. He denies reality because he needs a job, and that is the problem we all face, our entire employment structure is based on wealth acquisition through fossil fuel burning. We live in an energy-driven economy, not a money driven economy. Without energy input we don’t have an economy so we will go on burning it to create ‘wealth’, causing climate change while simultaneously denying it.
Teapartiers, Republicans, call them what you will, are just a manifestation of denialism; the philosophy is the same everywhere: deny deny deny, it’s far more comfortable.
As a species we have capitalized the land and what it produces, overworked it to grow our population to unsustainability and continue to demand more and more to maintain our established ‘way of life’ which we insist must run on into infinity.
While this is clearly impossible, admitting it would be to see that the king really has no clothes, and our commercial edifice would crash around us. So the denial of truth is inevitable, and part of that denial is not just climate change, but overpopulation and energy depletion.
These form the triumvirate of our chaos, but they are collectively denied. Whether you’re a miner or investment banker the immediate wellbeing of all of us depends on ‘business as usual’ in world commerce; politicians and economists alike insist that we must have growth, despite knowing that it can’t go on.
“From what we see on the ground the coal companies have already moved forward in preparing the permit area as if they had an approved permit.”
This is an old tactic: While the permit is under review (or challenge in court), the company goes ahead with operations. Often, before the court can rule, the stream is already buried and the judgement is moot. See e.g. Coal River by Michael Shnayerson.
The story is in the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Denver Post, and on Denver’s ABC affiliate. Judging by the comments at those articles, Rep. Lamborn has few defenders among his constituents.
The congressman’s own voting record is informative. So is the Wikipedia entry on him: Look for “Jonathan Bartha.”
Yes. As I wrote, he is a tool. ‘On a scriptural level’, Sheesh! He should have his own set of Billboards. And using ‘tar baby’ in context of communicating with POTUS is way out there. I wonder if he has come across the term ‘self righteous’?