If it's the end of the week...

...that means it's time for the latest Front Porch podcast by way of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.  This time around we have a special guest and the topic is about how hard it can be for WV to attract and retain young adults, with digressions into the water crisis, the environment, etc.

Really?

It's hard to believe that barely 14 months after the Freedom Industries chemical spill trashed the water of 300,000 West Virginians the state legislature would vote to roll back last year's unanimously supported bill.

(And, yes, I would hate to diagram that sentence.)

Will we learn?

This op-ed of mine about the need for the state legislature to protect WV's water appeared in the Friday Charleston Gazette:

I was traveling out of state last January when I got an email from a friend at the Council of Churches about a chemical spill in Charleston.

At first, I didn’t think much of it or have any idea of how huge that event would turn out to be.

After all, things like that happen fairly regularly in West Virginia. A sludge leak here, a shelter in place there, a tank, a truck, a train … we kind of get used to it.

Shame on us for that.

I remember a line from Dostoevsky that goes something like “Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel.”

If there was any silver lining in last year’s Freedom Industries spill, it was in the fact that this time the effects of a disaster weren’t confined to rural people up a holler in southern West Virginia. The spill inconvenienced some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the state. Legislators of both parties had to look at signs in the Capitol warning that water was to be used only for flushing toilets.

Adversity, like wealth, is something distributed very unequally, although it tends to be concentrated on the other end of the spectrum.

That experience of shared adversity, all too rare, gave a sense of urgency last year as legislators labored throughout the session to come up with a workable bill that had pretty much universal support.

Now, it looks like the lessons of that shared adversity are in danger of being forgotten. Several bills have been proposed that would weaken protections on our drinking water.

One argument in favor of that is that the Freedom Industries spill was an outlier far beyond the norm. That’s true as far as it goes. But then the recent oil train wreck, Upper Big Branch, Buffalo Creek, Farmington, and Hawks Nest disasters were outliers too.

Come to think of it, West Virginia itself is a bit of an outlier. In the language of statistics, I think you could make the case that we’re a standard deviation or two away from the arithmetic mean.

For that matter, things like severe winter storms and structure fires are outliers of a sort. Fortunately, they don’t happen very often, but we still need snowplows and fire departments.

We hear a lot these days about improving West Virginia’s economy so that it’s easier for families to stay here and thrive. But I know of several young families that have moved out of state or are planning to because of the spill. I know plenty more who have said one more thing like that and they’re out of here. The people I’m thinking about are young, educated, smart and productive, i.e. exactly the kind of people we need more of.

We also hear a lot about making West Virginia more business friendly. However, it would be very hard to calculate the harm done to hundreds of local businesses by the chemical spill. Thousands of workers, particularly those in the service sector, lost work and wages. And these are people who don’t put their money in an overseas hedge fund: they spent all they get right here. Along with that, thousands of school children missed classroom instruction and many of these missed the only nutritious meals they were likely to get those days.

West Virginia’s tourism industry, which generated well over $4 billion in 2010, took a hit as well. Further, incidents like that, not to mention the latest mishap, make the state less attractive to new business investments, particularly those that don’t involve trashing the place.

While any piece of legislation or policy can be improved, any changes to state water laws should not come at the expense of public safety or water quality.

There are many thoughtful people who believe that water will be to the coming century as precious as oil was in the past. And water is something our state is blessed with. It would be nice to think that we’ve learned something from last year’s mess and over 100 years of the exploitation of our natural resources and people.

The jury is still out on that.

A year later

This past Friday (Jan. 9) marked the one year anniversary of the Freedom Industries chemical spill that poisoned the water of 300,000 West Virginians. There's been a lot of coverage of events and ideas about the spill, but if you have a few minutes, listen to WV Public Radio's segment on the topic on Inside Appalachia.

TO HELL WITH...If any good things can be said to have come out of the chemical mess, this essay by WV Wesleyan's Eric Waggoner has to be one of them.

GEARING UP FOR 50 DAYS OF? Here's an op-ed by yours truly on the prospects for fighting child poverty in the coming legislative session.

Two WV bright spots (really)

I've been very impressed by US Attorney Booth Goodwin. He made headlines last month with the indictment of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. This week, it was for the indictment of six owners and managers of Freedom Industries, the company that poisoned the water of 300,000 West Virginians last January. It's nice to see corporate crimes treated as real crimes.

Another WV bright spot is Charleston Gazette reporter and Coal Tattoo blogger Ken Ward, who really shines the light where it needs to go. If you click here, you can hear what he had to say  on NPR today about the chemical spill, the Blankenship indictment and more.

Last year, the WV legislature passed some pretty strong water protection legislation. Word is that incoming Republican leaders want to weaken that legislation in the 2015 session. That should be an interesting fight.

Maybe they should start by poisoning their own water.

Another plus or two

This could be an accident, or I could be getting things totally wrong, but it looks like my beloved state of West Virginia may actually be on the verge of protecting its drinking water. If I'm wrong, which may well be the case, please don't wake me up.

Another small plus is the possibility of bus transportation between Charleston and Morgantown.  It may not be much, but I'll take what I can get.

Is this what "open for business" means?

Once again let me state my considered opinion that West Virginia should change its motto from "Mountaineers are always free" to "You can't make this **** up." Here's another example of why: recently some solid waste from a Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale drilling site was turned away from a landfill in that state because an issue regarding radioactivity.

Not to worry. The material soon found a home in a WV landfill.

You know, I could be wrong, but this could be a setback for recent efforts to rebrand the state after the Freedom Industries chemical spill. Really guys, we're not that toxic.

Thought for the day

I thought I was pretty familiar with the writings of Frederick Douglass, but I came across another good one today that was new to me. The context was a press conference I attended whereat some heavy hitters, including legislators and a US attorney, called on WV Gov. Early Ray Tomblin to fully restore cuts to domestic violence and early childhood programs.

The governor partially restored funding to some programs yesterday, but this was one-time money taken from other revenues targeted for children. Those at the press conference wanted a full restoration of around $1 million in funding to be divided between several programs. One speaker pointed out that $1 million amounts to "a rounding error" compared with the size of the whole state budget. Specific sources of funding were identified as well.

But I digress...the quote was cited by Booth Goodwin, US Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia., who talked about how much cheaper it is to help kids get a good start in life than to deal with them once things have gone wrong.

Here's what Douglass said: "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." I think that would apply to women as well.

I WISH I'D WRITTEN THIS item on the water crisis, coal, climate, WV politics and all that mess.

SPEAKING OF WV, workers die on the job here at twice the national rate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A slow theological slog

Swiss theologian Karl Barth, 1886-1968.

Finishing a large, difficult book is a kind of marathon, although generally it is one mercifully broken up over an extended period of time rather than a few hours. Last night I finally finished reading the signature work of Karl Barth, one of the 20th century's premier theologians.

The book in question was The Epistle to the Romans, first published around 1918. It was 537 dense pages of text, many of which went right over my head. I borrowed it from a friend and sometime reader of this blog back around Thanksgiving. It went into my morning pile of books that I try to turn a couple of pages of over coffee most mornings.

Barth is probably best known for his work in organizing Christian opposition to the Nazi movement in Europe,and especially its efforts to Nazify Christianity, by establishing the Confessing Church. Some if its members, such as Martin Niemoller, wound up in concentration camps. Others, like Dietrich Bonheoffer, were executed by the regime.

If I had to sum up Barth's theology, I couldn't, but maybe one could start like this: the main thing you need to know about God is that you ain't. Barth rejected liberal and rationalist theology and instead emphasized that God is absolutely unknowable by humans--except as He (Barth was pre-feminist but would probably be cool with it today) freely chose to reveal himself in the Gospel proclamation.

I think I like Barth because I do believe in the absolute distinction between God and humanity. I even believe in that on the days I doubt God. Nothing seems loopier or more self-evidently false than the assertion that humans are somehow divine. The Quakers may be right that there is "that of God" in every person. But if so, I'd say that "that" is what Bob Dylan called a "broken mirror of innocence," i.e. something that might reflect light but not originate it.

Somedays I'm orthodox in spite of myself.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES. This story about real estate highlights our growing issues of inequality.

THANKS, GUYS. NOT. Here's a look at the fun loving guys who gave us West Virginia's 2014 chemical spill.

HOW BOUT WE FEED SOME KIDS? Here's my latest op-ed on school meals, the Feed to Achieve Act and Community Eligibility.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Good news and a less than flattering portrait

The thing to keep in mind in WV is that things aren't all bad all the time. In fact, some really good things are happening. The last post mentioned the minimum wage increase bill that was signed by Gov. Tomblin yesterday.

Here's another example:  thanks to a stellar enrollment effort by the WV Department of Health and Human Services, around 105,000 low income working West Virginians have signed up for the expanded Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act. An additional 20,000 signed up for private coverage via the marketplace/exchange. When you consider that a good number of other folks found out they were eligible for other programs as a result of all the outreach, I think it's safe to say that the number of uninsured West Virginians has dropped by about 60 percent this year alone.

THAT WAS THE GOOD NEWS. Here, via The  New Yorker, is the unflattering portrait. I think the writer nailed it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Annals of bad tactics

Lots of people in West Virginia are understandably enraged over the Freedom Industries chemical spill and the way it's been handled by everyone from the water company and the governor's office. And this surely has not been Governor Tomblin's finest hour.

Still, when a friend told me that a small group was planning on marching on his office and demanding his resignation, my initial reaction, which still holds, was that this approaches the level of the Platonic Form of Bad Tactics.

One, what do you reckon would really happen? Would the governor say "OK, you're right. I'm outta here"?

Two, nothing is more pathetic than a show of force where there isn't any.

Three, issuing demands is generally useless unless one has the power to enforce them, in which case it isn't necessary.

Four, as my beloved Niccolo Machiavelli observed nearly 500 years ago, insulting or threatening someone doesn't actually do them any harm but it puts them on guard against you and makes it harder if not impossible to deal productively with the person in the future.

He said it much better:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."

I think people who want to influence public policy would do well to memorize that verse. While it's not necessarily true that people who are insulted or threatened will hate or try to injure us, it's a sure bet they will be less likely to cooperate at some future point. And in places like WV, people tend to stick around for a good while and they have long memories. It's hard to unburn a bridge.