the other side

Dear group,

The other day, I had a rather spirited discussion with a friend named Ben who I knew was a geologist and miner in West VA. He's a local born and raised in far southwest Virginia. What I didn't know was that he did the kind of surface mining that this project researches. To my horror, he was describing a closing for next Tuesday with Conoco-Phillips for two mountain areas that he owns on the Kentucky-West VA border. He plans to sell those two areas for surface mining. He argued that jobs for the local people will be provided for the next 15 years and that this company had a good safety record and that employees were union. He also believed that the power was needed for Virginia, D.C. and other areas on the East coast so he thought he was doing a great service. I made the sorts of arguments you might expect but they fell on deaf ears.

He might be a good speaker for us if we could keep the conversation polite and courteous. This just highlighted for me the complexity of this problem.

Ginny Weisz