Add to Bush's follies the rape of his own country

[IChing]

The despoilment of the Appalachians is typical of the President's bankrupt environmental policies

Henry Porter
Sunday March 12, 2006
The Observer

Eastern Kentucky is a long way from Britain. What do we care if another million acres of the Appalachian mountain range are lost to strip mining? If the habitat of the flying squirrel and the cerulean warbler is blown up and bulldozed? If one of the oldest temperate forests in the world with some 80 species of trees is destroyed by the greed of a few coal companies? Why should it matter to us?
I'll tell you why. First, because this story exposes the pathological destructiveness of the Republican political and religious elite. Not content with the ruin it has caused in Iraq, George W Bush's administration lays waste the great American wilderness in a way that tests your faith in the reason of man.

Second, this campaign against nature is being plotted, sanctioned and carried out by men - it is exclusively men - who are on their knees in little, white churches every Sunday praying to a god whom they believe created this earth. The same people who reject Darwin and promote the idea that life on earth is too complex and varied to have been created by evolution, a theory known as intelligent design, are the ones who show such contempt for God's creation.

And let's not forget the last crucial point. With the United States accounting for 30 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions, much of it from heavily polluting, coal-burning power stations, we may all to some extent consider ourselves downwind of what's going on in the coal industry of Kentucky and parts of West Virginia.>>>snip

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1728999,00.html