Massey Energy Falsified Safety Records (Video) "Single most destructive coal mining company in history"

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Don Blankenship was CEO of Massey Energy during falsified safety records and corruption

Massey Energy Corruption The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is reporting numerous violations, including falsifying records, by Massey Energy Company (acquired by Alpha Natural Resources on June 1, 2011). The MSHA is investigating the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that occurred in April 2010 in which 29 miners were killed. Massey Energy has a dismal record of uncountable environmental and safety violations (60,000+ from 2000 through 2006 per Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). RFK Jr. succinctly states, "Corporations do not want democracy, they want profits".

The Last Mountain The corruption and destruction by Massey Energy is chronicled in the film The Last Mountain, which was reviewed in the prior post, The Last Mountain: A fight for our future (Video) *Mountain Top Removal: reducing mountains to rubble*. The Last Mountain is the story of a community that fights back to protect Coal River Mountain and stop Massey Energy. Massey Energy has become "the single most destructive coal mining company in history".

Investigators: Mine Owners Cooked Books on Safety Federal investigators on Wednesday said Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia coal mine where more than 29 workers were killed last year, kept two sets of safety records: one for the people working in the mine, another to mislead federal inspectors who came to check on the operation. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

The Last Mountain

Coal River Mountain Watch

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The Last Mountain: A fight for our future (Video) *Mountain Top Removal: reducing mountains to rubble*

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Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining

Mountain Top Removal North American ecosystems are already being destroyed continent-wide, but mountain top removal (MTR) coal mining is catastrophic and the ultimate environmental Apocalypse. As Michael Rose in the Huffington Post stated, "Every day the sound made by the detonation of four million pounds of explosives echoes through the West Virginia mountains as a small army of companies wages a war on the ridges laying bare the coal formed over 200 million years ago. Like all wars, even environmental ones, there's collateral damage." Taking the tops off mountains is a violent business and all is laid waste. No semblance of the original ecosystem remains once it is blasted to pieces: no rocks, no water, no trees, no plants, no insects, no wildlife. The damage is mind-boggling, it is estimated to-date that mountain top removal coal mining has destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains, 1 million acres of forest, and buried 2,000 miles of streams. There are hundreds of leaking, spilling, and poisonous coal sludge impoundments, of which Massey Energy alone has created 300+. There is also the air pollution from the explosions and mining and those carcinogenic particles ultimately settle for miles around at homes, communities, forests, streams, lakes. Mountain top removal coal mining results in unimaginable debris and toxic waste.

Reducing Mountains to Rubble In the trailer below, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. describes the magnitude of explosives used in mountain top removal coal mining as, "the explosive power of a Hiroshima bomb once a week". Massey Energy Company (acquired by Alpha Natural Resources on June 1, 2011) has become "the single most destructive coal mining company in history". Massey Energy has a dismal record of uncountable environmental and safety violations (60,000+ from 2000 through 2006 per Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). RFK Jr. succinctly states, "Corporations do not want democracy, they want profits". The Last Mountain is the story of a community that fights back to protect Coal River Mountain and stop Massey Energy.

The Last Mountain - Official Trailer The fight for the last great mountain in America's Appalachian heartland pits the mining giant that wants to explode it to extract the coal within, against the community fighting to preserve the mountain and build a wind farm on its ridges instead. The Last Mountain highlights a battle for the future of energy that affects us all.

The Last Mountain

Coal River Mountain Watch

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State of the World's Oceans (Video) "If the ocean goes down, it's game over"

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Earth "Blue Marble" Image

"Ecosystem collapse is occurring" - Dr. Alex Rogers

State of the Ocean The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) has issued a preliminary report which is shocking and disturbing. IPSO stated:
● A high-level international workshop convened by IPSO met at the University of Oxford earlier this year. It was the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind and was designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and overfishing.
● The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.
● Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health.

Report Highlights
● Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia.
● The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Some are as predicted, but many are faster than anticipated, and many are still accelerating.
● The magnitude of the cumulative impacts on the ocean is greater than previously understood.
● Timelines for action are shrinking.
● Resilience of the ocean to climate change impacts is severely compromised by the other stressors from human activities, including fisheries, pollution, and habitat destruction.
● Ecosystem collapse is occurring as a result of both current and emerging stressors.
● The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing.

Report Conclusion The participants concluded that not only are we already experiencing severe declines in many species to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an unparalleled rate of regional extinctions of habitat types (eg mangroves and seagrass meadows), but we now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years (Barnosky et al., 2009).

Is It Really Possible A Mass Extinction Could Happen? In the video below, Dr. Alex Rogers provides an overview of the State of the Ocean report. "I think if we continue on the current trajectory, we are looking at a mass extinction of marine species", says Dr. Rogers. He further states that it looks like coral reef systems "will go down" by the end of the century and this would constitute a "mass extinction event". Up to 9 million species are associated with just coral reefs. However, the problems with the world's oceans are much larger than the coral reefs. Rising ocean temperatures are affecting all marine species. Ocean acidification via agricultural fertilizers and sewage is another stressor and is also causing detrimental and large algae blooms. Consequently there is a spreading of dead zones in the world's oceans.

How Does This Damage Affect Human Life? Dr. Rogers continues that the poor management of fisheries reduces the harvest for humans. "We are actually extracting far too much fish, we are damaging the environment they live in, and we are removing keystone species (top predators) We are causing profound changes in the way many of these ecosystems are operating". These damaged ecosystems then become "far less able to cope with shocks and they become less stable". In addition, the effects of climate change have been impacting the oceans since the late 1970s (e.g. coral bleaching). "We are already there", he states, and this requires "global action". Overfishing is a critical problem.

What's The Advice, Stop Eating Fish? Dr. Rogers says, "I would hate to advise anyone to stop eating fish. It is a fantastic source of protein, IF it is harvested in a sustainable way. Many of the fish we see for sale are not harvested in a sustainable way and I certainly couldn't recommend eating." Sustainable doesn't mean only regarding that specie's population, but also how it is caught (the bycatch is very large and/or the catching method damages the marine environment.

What Cause For Optimism, Is A Sea Change Possible? Dr. Rogers thinks a "sea change" is possible. He thinks "people are starting to realize what is going on in the ocean is not just unsustainable, not just leading to serious degradation, but is actually morally corrupt". "I think that people recognize that to go in, take the resources from a system, and destroy that system effectively or destroy the resource, is not an acceptable way to behave in the modern world, where we are potentially facing a very high human population and we really need as much food as we can get".

State of the Ocean: An Overview  Dr. Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of IPSO and Professor of Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, gives the overview of the main problems affecting the ocean — and some suggested solutions. For more information visit http://www.stateoftheocean.org/

IPSO

IPSO's consortium of marine scientists and experts believes that we have a narrow window of opportunity in which to prevent the decline and collapse of the Earth's Ocean system. By doing so, we will give ourselves and future generations the best chance of survival.

Given the devastating effects of climate change on the Ocean, it is imperative that we minimize these and all other human-induced stressors as soon as possible. Our recommendations for doing so are outlined below.

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Meet Sapo the Baby Pygmy Hippo (Video) *Inspires hope for endangered species*

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Sapo the baby pygmy hippo, with his mother Flora, at the ZSL Whipsnade Zoo

Meet Sapo the Baby Pygmy Hippo

Sapo! Sapo, the 3-month old baby pygmy hippo at the ZSL Whipsnade Zoo in England, recently made his public debut and took his first swim. Sapo and his mother Flora are part of the European Endangered Species Program to maintain populations and assure survival at zoos. Fortunately, pygmy hippos breed well in captivity. Sapo is a Pygmy Hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) and is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as Endangered. Sapo inspires hope and will act as an ambassador for endangered species worldwide.

Pygmy Hippopotamus There are an estimated 3,000 pygmy hippos remaining. The species is native to West Africa (Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia). Both habitat destruction and hunting have reduced the population to endangered levels. Habitat fragmentation has isolated the mammals into remnant populations, some of which are very small. The species is a rare, nocturnal forest animal. While smaller than the well-known larger hippopotamus in Sub-Saharan Africa, they are a large mammal reaching 32 inches at the shoulder, 70 inches in length, and weighing 600 pounds. They live 30 to 55 years in captivity. By comparison, the larger Hippopotamus amphibius is second only to elephants in weight of land mammals (up to 9,500 pounds), 5 feet tall at the shoulder, and 17 feet long.

Meet Sapo, the Baby Pygmy Hippo June 8 - Tiny baby pygmy hippo makes a big splash as he takes his first dip at an English zoo, inspiring hope for the endangered species. Elly Park reports.

European Endangered Species Program

It does not matter
In which lake you discover a spill of pollution,
In the forest of which country a fire breaks out,
Or on which continent a hurricane originates:
You are guardian of the entired earth"
(Joeri Artjoechin)

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Whale Shark Endangered Off Kenyan Coast (Video) *Demand for liver threatens population of gentle giants*

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Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus) is the largest living fish species

Whale Shark Endangered Off Kenyan Coast

Gentle Giant The Whale Shark is listed a Vulnerable on the Red List by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN notes commercial fishing is the primary cause of population depletion via "unregulated and unsustainable fisheries to supply international trade demands for shark fins, liver oil (used to waterproof wooden boats), skins, and meat" (per WWF). This largest fish species can reach a length of 18 meters (59 feet), weigh 20+ tons, and may live 100 to 150 years. The Whale Shark is far-ranging, traveling thousands of kilometers, and is found worldwide in tropical and temperate waters (see map below). This gentle giant feeds on zooplankton and is known as a "filter feeder" which sieves food plus feeds on small crustaceans and schooling fishes. As part of this filter feeding, a Whale Shark may process 6,000 liters of water an hour through its gills.

Endangered Off Kenyan Coast Although commercial fishing has depleted populations worldwide, a recent drop in Whale Shark sightings in East Africa is of concern. In response, the East African Whale Shark Trust is tagging Whale Sharks for monitoring. The species is not protected under Kenyan law. Demand for the Whale Sharks' liver for waterproofing wooden boats is taking a toll on the species in Kenya. The East African Whale Shark Trust has begun an education effort in schools by organizing wildlife clubs to promote safeguarding the Whale Shark.

Whale Shark in Danger Off the East African Coast May 19 - The whale shark is the largest living fish species and is usually found in tropical and warm oceans. This gentle giant is not dangerous to humans but demand for its internal organs is putting it in grave danger. Esther Karanja reports.

Whale Shark Worldwide Distribution

Map courtesy of IUCN

East African Whale Shark Trust

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