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Year in year out, some new study confirms that the world’s happiest people live in cold, wind-swept Denmark.

Geography of Bliss author Eric Weiner offers a compelling theory why: expectations. It isn’t  really that the Danes have low expectations; it’s just that they do not, as we Americans tend to do, attach their personal well-being to to things they want. As Weiner wrote last week on his Happy Days blog:

Danes seem to know instinctively that expectations kill happiness, leaving the rest of us unhappy un-Danes to sweat it out on the “hedonic treadmill.” That’s what researchers call the tendency to constantly ratchet up our expectations, a sort of emotional inflation that devalues today’s accomplishments and robs us of all but the most fleeting contentment….

The hedonic treadmill insinuates itself into our lives, in ways large and small. As a budding audiophile, I recently purchased a headphone amplifier — a tiny black box that attaches to my iPod. Wow, I thought, this sounds incredible. At least that’s what I thought for about one week. Then my ears grew accustomed to the enhanced fidelity and craved something better. Before long, I was back on line, credit card in hand. Intellectually, I knew that my next audio fix would be just as fleeting, but I couldn’t resist the seductive pull of the hedonic treadmill.

Denmark represents what some sociologists call a “post-consumer society.” Danes have nice things, but they value quality over quantity. Instead of time spent shopping alone, Danes engage in hygge (pronounced “hoogey”). It’s a kind of spontaneous get-together with friends. Add to that the fact that Danes are compulsive joiners. Ninety-two percent of the population belongs to a social club. Almost all of the recent research into Happiness Studies comes to the same conclusion: we are social animals, and nothing makes us happy as consistently as strong social bonds.

A University of Cambridge study also found that trust in government, the police and other people is a remarkable determinant of individual happiness. All of the Scandinavian countries seem to bear this out. Transparency International gives Finland a 9.9 out of 10 in terms of political transparency and lack of corruption. Sixty-four percent of Norwegians agree with the statement, “Most people can be trusted.” In Brazil, the number plunges to five percent. What’s more, researchers have dropped wallets all around the world. The result? If you have to lose your wallet, do it in a Nordic country; the chances are good you’ll get it back.

While travelling through Scandinavia last year, I noticed something else. Train conductors and house painters are not looked down upon, or looked past. Scandinavians don’t seem to accept the rigid class divide of the U.S., and they don’t tie so much of their identity or their happiness to their jobs. What the American philosopher William James called “that bitch-goddess status” does not seem to hold as much sway over the Scandinavians as it does with us.

What’s going on here? How did the land of the obstreperous Vikings turn into the land of milk and honey? About 1,100 years ago, King Olaf discovered Christianity and converted his pagan country to the teachings of peace and brotherhood. The Scandinavians never seemed to take too seriously all the piety of Christianity, but they did start handing out an annual award for peace called the Nobel Prize.

The late, great American writer Guy Davenport spent several summers in Copenhagen. Many of his brilliant, utopian fictions are set there. He observed in his “Danish Journal,”

The Danes are a highly moral people who are unembarrassed by the facts of life. They sunbathe naked in their parks. They have decriminalized every affection they can think of.

I think it was Davenport’s profound disillusionment with his own country that led him to revere Danish culture above all others. The Danes adopted the right parts of Christianity–that whole brotherhood of man thing–and rejected piety and prejudice. They replaced consumerism with conviviality. As one of Davenport’s characters writes in his own journal, the Danes made their two greatest goods, “freedom of spirit for the individual, and social justice for the community.”

I could be happy with that.

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So over the weekend, the Secretary of State gets an ear-full from India’s environmental and forests minister, Jairam Ramesh, that goes something like this: one American consumes as much as twenty-five people living in India, and you are going to lecture me on carbon dioxide? Please.

Then today the Times reports that India has agreed to let U.S. companies build and profit from two nuclear power plants in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, but the U.S. companies won’t get started until India agrees to shield them from $450 million of liability in the event of nuclear meltdown.

Such hypocricies remind one how hard it is, as Americans, to talk about the climate crisis,when we are largely responsible for it. It can drive you to ask the question Michael Pollan posed in The New York Times Magazine, “Why bother?” Pollan asked it in terms of China’s population, not India’s, but it is the same question: Why grow a garden, and buy local, and stop eating beef when

I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelganger in Shanghai or Chongping who has just bought his first care (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for my troubles.

Derrick Jensen, in his column in the current issue of Orion magazine, offers this answer: nothing. Or next to nothing. Both Pollan and Jensen have problems with the consumer-oriented “solutions” offered at the end of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth.Even if we did all that Gore asks, U.S. carbon emissions would only drop 22 percent, not the 80 percent that is needed to stave off real global problems. Jensen, who makes a kind of art out of the inflammatory, puts it this way:

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery…. Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions?”

The point is well-taken. If individual consumption accounts for only 25 percent of all U.S. energy consumption, then something else has to give. Namely, industry, commerce, agribusiness and the military. Personal changes, however virtuous, are not enough: we have to change the system.

I like Derrick Jensen. I like that the way he tells the choir, within the context of an environmental magazine, that they suck. Or that they need to change their tune, or at least sing with a little more passion.

 And he’s right that we need to think of citizenship as a much more active duty, a way of redefining democracy against the forces of industrial-capitalism. But personal change has to be a part of that. For one, if you buy less, and buy local, you are changing the market culture–shifting it away from petroleum-based fertilizers and transportation. You are also changing yourself at the most fundamental level–the level of conscience and character. No real environmental movement can sustain itself without that kind of change on the part of the individual.

What’s more, changes on the individual level are acts, however small, of self-reliance, of taking control of one’s life back from Big Coal, Big Oil and Big Agra.

Not only that, as Pollan writes in “Why Bother?”

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand.

But beyond all that, if you are someone who is calling for the end of, say, mountaintop removal strip mining, and you are doing nothing to reduce your own consumption of coal, why should anyone listen to you? You’re a goddamn hypocrite.  You have no moral high ground.

China and India have to see that not only the Obama family, with its White House vegetable garden, are advocating personal change, but that many, many more Americans are ready and willing to make fundamental changes to reduce the size of this country’s carbon footprint.

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This week, while President Obama and the G-8 were trying to get serious out the climate crisis, I was sitting on a very hot beach that could soon be under water, reading John Hay’s neglected classic, In Defense of Nature.

The book comes out of Hay’s rich experiences wandering the northeastern coasts of North America. I took In Defense of Nature with me because this is its 40th anniversary, because Hay was a great writer, and because he was writing–40 years ago–with the same urgency we must now bring to the issue of “defending nature.” I put the idea in scare quotes because it has become increasingly problematic. It still suggests some kind of dualism wherein nature is a helpless, silent thing out there that needs us to save it from ourselves. And while that is partly true, it must also be said that we need saving from ourselves, and we must stop thinking about ourselves as standing above and apart from the natural world.

Now our most urgent business is to recognize that we exist within larger ecosystems that sustain us, or do not, depending on how we understand our relation to them, and that the ultimate ecosystem is the planet, whose atmosphere we are altering. (A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows a familiar and disturbing disconnect between the scientific community and the American public on global warming; but climate change call be boiled down to this–the molecular structure of carbon-dioxide traps heat, and that can be proven in any high school chemistry class.)

Hay asked the fundamental question four decades ago: “Why this scarring business of playing God? Is this not our last chance to play at being man?” To see the scarring business of extracting coal, the leading cause of climate change, check out this video:

Nobody plays God like the strip miners, believe me, and it is vastly encouraging to see that one of the country’s most respected climate scientists, James Hansen, is now making a direct link between the climate crisis and mountaintop removal strip mining. And Hansen is right now, as sadly Hay was in 1969, that we are running out of time. It is a frustratingly American phenomenon that, as Hay wrote, “Crisis and disaster may be our only educators.” But that’s where we find ourselves now–at our last chance of being men and women, members of a larger land community.

We are the clever animal; there’s no doubt. We did, after all, invent language–words with which to construct a beautiful book like In Defense of Nature, and words with which to deny things like torture and climate change. George Orwell pointed out in his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that political thinking suffers when language suffers. When language becomes too abstract, it becomes a “defense of the indefensible,” a rhetoric calculated to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” I don’t think any evidence need be marshaled here to show how right Orwell was.

But language can also move in the other direction, toward the concrete. This, said John Hay, would mean a move in the direction of conservation and responsibility. “To conserve and have it stick,” he wrote, “needs more education in particularity and in close attention to the precious elements of life than we have yet had.” We need more public education in the particular, such as Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard movement, whereby children grow, learn about and eat food from their own particular schoolyard.

The attention we pay to the natural world need not come at the beach or in the Adirondacks. In fact, it must be nurtured in cities. The particular stories we tell ourselves must include many more like Elizabeth Royte’s profile in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine of urban farmer Will Allen, whose Growing Power farm in downtown Milwaukee feeds 10,000 city dwellers. There, truly, resides a partial solution to the problems of climate change (the food is grown and consumed without petroleum fertilizers or transportation), health care (no diabetes here), and education (Allen is a 6-foot-7 ex-pro basketball player; children listen to him).

Allen and Alice Waters are showing us how to turn away from our scarring attitude toward the natural world, back toward one that will make us more fully human and more wholly accountable. It is at once a great step forward and a necessary return to what John Hay called first principles.

“Perhaps,” he wrote, “if it takes ruin to right us, we are closer than ever to first principles.”

Miners take a shuttle car that transports them to work in the mine (NIOSH)

Yesterday, President Barack Obama named Joseph Main,  a retired longtime safety and health administrator for the United Mine Workers of America, to head the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).

I don’t know much about the man, but I know this: the coal industry is unhappy. “It’s going to be frustrating having somebody with an agenda that is pro-union,” said Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. “We’re not looking forward to it.” Excellent. I like him already.

As has been well-documented, George W. Bush had a habit–he made it a habit–to appoint as industry regulators men and women who had worked in, and benefited from, the very industries they were named to regulate. What happened next usually wasn’t pretty.

When Bush made David Lauriski, a general manager for Energy West Mining, the head of MSHA, Lauriski immediately set about to systematically weaken safety laws for underground miners–men and women who already had one of the most dangerous jobs in America. In the 1990s, MSHA proposed installing more “self-rescuers” (cashes of oxygen) in deep mines, but Lauriski said it was cost-prohibitive. Next thing you knew, poorly inspected mines were collapsing, and miners were dying because they didn’t have enough oxygen. Lauriski’s response? “The [coal] industry has always been good to me,” he told the Oklahoma City Journal Record. “I just hope that I’ve given back as mush as I’ve received.” He did, and that gift was paid for in blood money.

In 2000, a coal impoundment pond broke in Inez, Kentucky and 300 million gallons of toxic sludge flooded the communities below. When Jack Spadaro, the director of the Mine Safety and Health Academy, tried to hold Massey Energy criminally responsible for lying about the strength of the impoundment pond, Lauriski responded by changing the locks on Spararo’s office. The one watchdog for the people of Inez gets locked out of his office by the director of the country’s mine safety! The mind reels.

Robert Salyer made a great documentary about the whole affair called Sludge. It was produced by the heroic grassroots arts organization, Appalshop, out of Whitesburg, Kentucky. Take a look at Sludge now. Among other things, it’s a lesson in how tenuous democracy becomes when its custodians lack the moral compass to correct the greed and abuse of industry.

As I was visiting my 70-year-old father on Father’s Day last week, we fell into a discussion of how I developed my love of reading. When I was growing up, we had few books in our house that were not bibles. One summer, when I was nine or ten, I discovered that the public library’s Bookmobile made a weekly stop at the strip mall about a mile from my house. The Bookmobile was a blue and white bus, dark and cavernous on the inside. The shelves were set at at 45% angle so none of the books would fly off in transit. For me, it was a kind of portal into a new world of storytelling.

On my weekly pilgrimage to the Bookmobile, I discovered authors like John D. Fitzgerald, whose semi-autobiographical books about growing up reflected so many of my own boyhood fears and ambitions. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I was reading about real people, not biblical characters in some far-out place and time. I spend a lot of my time now writing about this country’s environmental problems. But I think the Bookmobile still lurks in the background, both a literal and metaphorical vehicle for the power of story to communicate the complex realism of this country.
That’s what I was telling my father last Sunday.

“Why didn’t I ever know any of that?” he said, looking at me and then my mother. “Why didn’t I know about the Bookmobile?

“Well,” I said, “you know, you were at work.”

“Someone could have told me when I got home,” he replied. “That’s something I would have liked to have known about.”

My father was a mechanical engineer. I guess it never occurred to me that he would have cared about such things. So I didn’t tell him. Now I see that there might have been hundreds of things we could have talked about, other ways we might have communicated outside the realm of sports.

A few days after our conversation, I picked up The Best American Poetry of 2008, edited by Charles Wright. I came across this fine poem by Bob Hicok, and the silence that has so much defined my space between my and my father came back to me with a new intensity and resonance:

“O my pa-pa”

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste
for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
They’re not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

Source: Poetry (May 2007).

I love Hicok’s idea of a poetry workshop for the fathers of poets, wherein they get back at their ungrateful sons for writing poems beginning, “My father never …,” but never poems that said, “My father waved at me from the top of a hill at dusk ….” And I like his idea that our fathers’ absence–the times we were at the Bookmobile, developing our conflicted inner lives–was actually a kind of presence. Who, after all, bought me the tennis shoes with which I walked down to the Bookmobile?

I guess what I’m saying is that, for those of us who traffic in the autobiographical, we should learn to tread lightly at times, be not so quick to judge. Especially our fathers, who may have seemed “silent as a carp,” but in reality, might have been struggling fiercely to overcome “the distance men need in their love.”

And to the persistent question, “What is poetry for?” I offer up Bob Hicok’s poem as one answer.

This week, I’ve been teaching a class at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, sponsored by Orion magazine, in a beautiful Vermont town called Craftsbury Commons. The town looks exactly like it does in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Trouble With Harry,” which he shot here in 1954. There is no traffic, no cell phone service, no distractions. Sitting on the porch one night, I watched a man lead two oxen down the main street of town.
Ten aspiring writers and I sit in a room all morning and we write, talk, critique, encourage. In Richard Russo’ brilliant academic satire, Straight Man, his main is also a writing teacher. At one point in the novel, he has to break off a contentious conversation with his mother because his once-a-week writing workshop is about to start. His suspicious mother replies, “Is that the one where you sit in front of the class for three hours and don’t say anything?”
I admit I do a lot of sitting and listening as well. After twenty years in the classroom—I mean the twenty years I’ve spent in the front of it—I’ve come to the conclusion that there are about six of seven lessons a writing teacher can impart to his or her students. The rest is mainly, as my friend Wyatt Mason says, cheering. I’ll do my share of cheering this week. I’ll also try to offer some suggestions on structure, pacing, character development. Hopefully I’ll send my students away with the conviction—my conviction—that in a world of so much manufactured speech, the nonfiction writer must act as the protector and the purveyor of authentic, original language. It is our pleasure and our responsibility.
This is my second year at Wildbranch. In the summer of ’07, I had just finished a book about mountaintop removal strip mining, called Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. So I suggested to Jennifer Sahn, the editor of Orion magazine, that I lead a workshop called “Writing about Imperiled Landscapes.” The members of my workshop had, for the most part, come from various New England states. Slowly, I realized that some of them seemed puzzled by my writing prompts. And finally I began to understood why: not everyone thinks of the places where they live as imperiled. As a Kentuckian, I have grown accustomed to thinking that way. I have grown used to knowing that the forests I loved most could be clear-cut, the gorges could be flooded, the mountains could be annihilated with explosives, and the streams below those mountains could be buried or turned toxic—and it is all perfectly legal. But some Americans, Vermonters, for instance, simply expect their Green Mountains to stay put, their rivers to remain protected by law. They expect their food and milk to come from local sources. They don’t like “visual pollution,” so they outlawed billboards.
It’s all very civilized.
While I was up at Wildbranch, a few people asked if I thought I would like living in Vermont. Probably. But I doubt I’ll ever find out for sure. I’ve grown used to living around imperiled landscapes. I find that it sharpens one’s focus, something a writer needs. It also creates a sense of urgency. A writer doesn’t always need that, but sometimes it helps. It clarifies purpose.
One of my fellow-instructors at Wildbranch was Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagra and the novel Flight. Ginger kept posing this question to her writing group: “What is the story here?” It’s an excellent question, perhaps the only question. My fellow Kentuckian, Barbara Kingsolver, wrote recently, “Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us.”
We are a culture awash in stories, of course. But getting at the real story—that seems to be becoming harder and harder. There’s too much static, too much distraction. The real grows ever more elusive, and all the more important.

I am reading a remarkable book right now, just published by the Penguin Press, called Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I say “remarkable” because I am about to remark upon it. But also because its author Matthew B. Crawford skillfully hints at a notion that has long troubled me: a four-year college education is not what it’s cracked up to be.
Every Fall semester at the university where I teach writing, I gaze out at the fields of blank faces sitting before me. Sometimes I ask: Do you really want to be here? Two-thirds of the class usually answers, “No.” Those students are here because their parents made them come, or because they felt peer pressure to attend college. They would like to make “a lot of money,” but beyond that, they have no clue why they are sitting in Freshman Writing.
Still, my university keeps upping its enrollment, and the state advisory board for higher education has mapped out a plan to double the number of college graduates in Kentucky by the year 2020. I understand these goals, of course. We are a very poor, very under-educated state. We rank at the bottom of the list on just about everything. So the conventional thinking says: increase education, hand out more diplomas, raise the standard of living.
But in Shop class as Soulcraft, Crawford asks us to reconsider our definitions of education and the personal fulfillment that it promises. Crawford earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. In a bleak academic job market, he went to work for a policy organization in D.C. Gradually, he began to find the work soul-crushing and increasingly unethical. He was forced to make arguments he didn’t really buy, and at the end of the day, what had he really accomplished? He found himself sitting in his K Street office, thinking about a friend, Fred, who repaired motorcycles. The work was honest, useful, and at end of the day, Fred’s happy customer cranked up his rebuilt Kawasaki Ninja and sailed off.
Crawford quit his D.C. job and opened his own motorcycle repair shop. In doing so, he taught himself the value of working with one’s hands and he began to contemplate why we, as Americans, so often denigrate such work. After all, it wasn’t your plumber who bundled derivatives and send your 401k crashing. It wasn’t your mechanic who talked you into a sub-prime loan. Nor will their jobs get outsourced to India. So why don’t we value this work? Why don’t we seek it out?
The problem, says Crawford, is, well, dirt. These men and women get dirty. “Because the work is dirty,” he writes, “people assume it is also stupid.” And yet the very work “culture” has its roots in the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation of the soil. Of dirt. It is a dark indication of how far, as Americans, we have drifted from Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, self-reliant nation.
What’s more Crawford argues that he is tasked with far tougher cognitive problems when trying to figure out the inner machinations of a vintage European motorcycle then when working on K Street.
Beyond that, the work is ethical. He must take responsibility for it; he must look his customers in the eye. That responsibility situates him within a community rather than an anonymous network of immoral financial transactions.
I also appreciate Crawford’s resurrection of the word “craft.” As we have lost respect for the working class, we have also lost our respect for the well-made, the hand-crafted. In 1925, the German poet Rilke was already complaining bitterly:
“To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a family steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life ….”
All of these mass-produced dummies of life have led us to a culture based on what Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown calls a “fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy.” Those fossil fuels gave us vinyl siding and aisles of plastic, and the automobiles gave us the means to go procure it all. Our age of accumulation found little room, and little time, for craftsmanship.
One reason might be that craftsmanship is the blending of beauty and use, two things we have relegated to separate corners of our culture. One exists in a museum, the other in the discount furniture store. We think of art, by definition, as useless, and too often, we accept useful things that have absolutely no aesthetic qualities. But this is a troubling and unsatisfying dichotomy. It marginalizes art and the aesthetic, and it too easily accepts the uninspired and the mass-produced in our everyday lives.
But a true appreciation of craft might return us to a more satisfying economy where quality matters more than quantity because the human spirit trades more in beauty than in dollars. Indeed, this is an imperative. The global climate crisis and the reality of peak oil will not allow us to continue believing in the economist’s dream of endless economic growth. What we need is a dynamic, steady-state economy where real work—the kind Crawford describes—is valued again.
American 18-year-olds who want to be carpenters or mechanics or chefs should not be shuttled into four-year degree programs. The quality of all education would improve if we allowed the young to pursue their own version of knowledge, their own idea of rewarding work.

Last summer, I stood under the gilded dome of West Virginia’s state capitol in Charleston and watched a rally to prevent the strip mining of Coal River Mountain. These local residents wanted to bring a wind farm to the peaks of their mountains, thereby preserving the Appalachian landscape and creating a new economy based on renewable energy.
At one point, a band called the Long Haul took to the stage to play some bluegrass. And somebody said that was about right: fighting strip mining in the Appalachia is indeed a long haul.
That point came home again last week when the Obama Administration released new plans for mountaintop removal oversight. They include:
* stopping a streamlined process that allowed coal operators to get fast-tracked mining permits
* returning to a 1982 rule that prevents the dumping of mine waste within 100 feet of a stream
* offering more federal oversight of how the states enforce the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA)
Almost immediately, environmental groups responded that it wasn’t enough. Joan Mulhern, senior legislative attorney for Earthjustice, said, “Until the White House announces that it will stop the blowing up of mountains and burying of streams, we cannot support their policies, regardless of what process is used to review the mines on a case-by-case basis.”
Mulhern is right that the ultimate goal of the long haul is to stop mountaintop removal. However, I am concerned that we in the environmental movement may again err in making the good the enemy of the perfect.
It is as if, under George W. Bush we expected nothing good to happen, and now, because of the Mosaic dreams of deliverance that projected onto Obama, we will not accept anything other than the perfect.
It still remains to be seen what effect the new actions will have. If the Obama Administration is serious about making states enforce all of SMCRA, and if it is serious about preventing the dumping of mine debris within 100 feet of streams, then the new decisions could be huge. In Kentucky, where I live, the federal laws simply go unenforced, and they have since Ronald Regan took office in 1980.
For example, SMCRA specifies that all post-mined land must be returned to its “approximate original countour” (AOC). I have never–never–seen this happen. Coal operators gets away with a loophole in SMCRA that allows them an “AOC variance” if they convert the mined land to a “higher or better use.” This phrase is so vague, unfortunately, that it has come to mean virtually anything, so that a strip mine sprayed with hydroseed becomes a “pasture” or “wildlife habitat.” The only problem with this thinking is that the wildlife of Appalachia prefer their native habitat: forested mountains.
But to truly prevent the dumping of mine waste around streams would mean to halt mountaintop removal almost entirely. And if the Obama administration reversed the Bush decision to change the word “waste” to “fill” within the Clean Water Act, that would go even further to prevent such dumping. Then everything that isn’t coal would have to be returned to the mine site or trucked away. Coal operators would mind this far too cost prohibitive and would then be forced to return to underground mining–a method that employs far more miners than mountaintop removal.
Again the issue here is enforcement. If the Office of Surface Mining would bring in a director from outside the agency, real enforcement and real change could happen. What has happened in the coal industry is no different than what has happened in the banking industry. It simply went unregulated. But we cannot expect an economy based on hyperindividualism and greed to regulate itself by some invisible free hand. That has got to be the most naive tenet within the whole logic of market capitalism. The abuse of the land, like the abuse of credit, demands oversight.
It’s a long haul. But we risk alienating potential allies if we reject every imperfect proposal along the way as as affront to our idealism. We risk returning to the cynical despair of the last eight years. And no one wants that.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty died two years ago today. Rorty was, I think, our country’s most important philosopher since William James. And Rorty considered himself a neo-pragmatist of the Jamesian tradition. That is to say, Rorty rejected the notion that philosophy is a search for Truth. “We pragmatists cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake,” he wrote in Philosophy and Social Hope. The problem with truth, or more precisely, the problem with competing claims to truth, is that when you start flinging them around, someone usually ends up getting killed.

Instead, Rorty understood philosophy to be an instrument for change, a way of solving social problems. Language, he argued, is simply not a precise enough instrument to find the Truth, to represent the Ultimate Reality that all will agree upon. But it is a fine tool for talking, debating, reaching consensus. And it is an excellent tool for making art.

Western philosophy begins, of course, in Plato’s Allegorical Cave. Plato said that we must escape the cave to realize the eternal truths that lie in the light outside. To this philosophical tradition, Rorty said: “No. We like the cave just fine. Why don’t we paint some animals on the walls and start telling ourselves the stories of our great hunts?” In other words, he replaced the search for truth with the search for happiness. He wasn’t alone in this: Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Stoics and the Epicureans had done so as well. But Rorty did it in a uniquely American way.

His thinking and his writing was breezy and light. He made the dismantling of the Platonic tradition look like fun. Once, at a reception, I overheard Rorty talking to someone about John Rawls book, A Theory of Justice. Rorty said, “I don’t want to define justice. I want to tell stories.” Why? I think because the story, not the theory, is the true builder of Rorty’s highest ideal—solidarity. Back in the cave, our hunter-gathering ancestors sat around fires and told stories of the hunt. Those stories bound them together as a tribe, a culture. For 99% of our evolutionary past, this is what we did. Only very recently did we discover agriculture, move to cities, and become philosophers.

In the end, Rorty abandoned philosophy altogether and took up the cause of literature. He left the philosophy department at the University of Virginia to teach comp lit at Stanford. In one of his last books, Achieving Our Country, he argued that America could be a much more inspiring place if we … read more Walt Whitman. It was the poet, not the philosopher, who imagined a more just, convivial country in his poem, Leaves of Grass. He imagined a country of great equality and great diversity. He envisioned, in Rorty’s words, “larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” Rorty chided the American Left for being overly mocking and ironic. Be cheerful reformers, he urged. Be Whitmanesque.

Rorty believed that philosophy, when rightly practiced, should serve two goals: self-creation of the individual, followed by the creation of a just and equitable culture. To that end, Rorty offered what seems to be a startlingly useful directive: reduce cruelty, expand sympathy.

Imagine how many useless arguments, how many stupid “culture wars” we could avoid in this country if we simply adopted that definition of morality. Imagine how different our social landscape might look.

Rorty agreed with Whitman that “democracy” is a “good word, whose history has yet to be enacted.” But through his writings, Richard Rorty offered an piquant and inspiring discourse on the promise of democracy.

Below is a letter to Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar. It was written by Tom FitzGerald, an environmental lawyer here in Kentucky who has done more to stop the radical strip mining of central Appalachia than probably anyone. Fitz is a man of unimpeachable integrity. He is rightly concerned that the Obama Administration may skip over two extremely qualified candidates to head the Office of Surface Mining.

OSM is an often overlooked part of Interior, but its influence is enormous. Under Steven Griles (a coal lobbyist who did time in the big house for lying about his associations with Jack Abramoff), OSM changed one work of the Clean Water Act–”waste” to “fill”–thereby making legal the dumping of mine waste into thousands of miles of Appalachian streams. For the last ten years, it has been extremely lax–negligent really–about enforcing the Surface Mine Reclamation and Control Act (SMCRA).

Suffice to say, OSM is currently an agency “captured” by the coal industry. Just as President Obama appointed an outsider, Leon Paneta, to oversee a corrupt CIA, he must now appoint someone from the outside to change the environment at OSM so that it will become an agency that actually enforces the law.

Coalfield resident Mickey McCoy once told me, “The watch dogs of the people have become the guard dogs of the industry.” That will change if either Joe Childers or Pat McGinley are put in charge.

I, therefore, urge readers to sign Tom FitzGerald’s letter and send it to Mr. Salazar.

May _________, 2009

Hon. Ken Salazar, Secretary
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20240

Re: Appointment of Director
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement

Dear Secretary Salazar:

We are writing to you concerning the appointment of a new Director for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), which as you are aware is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

The citizens of the coalfields of the eastern and western United States have waited through successive administrations since 1981 to see the promises that Congress made in 1977 fulfilled. In a number of key areas, the failure of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to assure full and fair implementation of the law has betrayed the promise Congress made to those who live in coalfield communities– that they would be protected from harm, that mining would be a temporary use of land, that reclamation would contemporaneously follow excavation of coal, and that the amount of time between disturbance of the earth and completion of reclamation would be minimized. Though Congress intended that the choice of technology would follow, rather than dictate, environmental protection, the coal industry has over the decades systematically replaced the workforce with larger machines more indiscriminate to the terrain, and key concepts in the law have been weakened by regulatory interpretations in order to accommodate this shift.

The tools needed to restore this agency to its potential, and to minimize the heavy footprint of coal on the land, water, people and communities of the coal-producing regions and to fulfill Congress’ promise to the citizens of the coalfields, await the hands of a new Director – one who will come to work each day with those goals, and will help a troubled agency recover a potential that existed for a brief period of time between 1978 and 1981.

Along with that leadership, we need to restore a level of funding that will allow the agency to fully implement its oversight functions, and a regulatory oversight policy that combines on-the-ground assessment of state regulatory programs with analysis of the implementation of state program components by the state agencies, in order to identify weaknesses in program implementation in a more timely and efficient manner.

We are aware that two candidates have been interviewed who each bring strengths and a score or more years of familiarity with both the coal industry, mining issues, and the 1977 law. Joe Childers, recently appointed to Chair the Kentucky Mine Safety Review Commission, and Professor Pat McGinley, Judge Charles Haden Professor of Law at West Virginia University.
Either of these candidates would be an excellent choice to head the agency, and we believe that the overwhelming majority of the environmental, conservation, and social and economic justice organizations will support your selection of either as Director. While one group or another may have a preference based on working relationships, both candidates are widely respected and your selection of either would have the support of the grassroots organizations who have toiled for decades against long odds to see the 1977 law implemented.

What would be tragic would be to miss the opportunity to install one of these two well-respected and knowledgeable candidates as Director.

We look forward to working with Joe or Pat as the next Director of OSMRE, and to helping the agency to restore to the administration of the 1977 law the central principles that drove its passage – a belief that mining should be a temporary use of land, and that the rights of people living downhill and downstream should be fully protected.

Cordially