It might seem that we’ve got ‘em on the run. There are lots of signs here and there that people all over are finally waking up to some of the aspects of the devastation wrought by our species on the Earth Mother.

On my recent three-day visit to the strip mine fields of West Virginia, it appeared that the coal company people have lost their usual arrogant way of dealing with the citizenry. To me it appeared that they were bending over backwards to please those of us who don’t think that mountain top removal is the best thing to happen since ice cream. They did a valiant job in trying to convert those of us who would accept their logic for the principle of ugliness and destruction in the service of energy.

The Blackwater Summer campaign to rally support for saving the Blackwater Canyon seems to be going very well. The citizenry are responding favorably according to Julian Martin, Mae Ellen Wildt and others. The new grassroots group, "Coal River Mountain Watch" along with the West Virginia Organizing Project are making headway in the coalfields to alert the citizens there of the outrageousness of the destruction of the West Virginia mountains.

On the national level every day I hear about the sense of outrage that voters are experiencing in regards to the "sneak ‘em in at night" anti-environmental riders that Congress is attaching to other bills. Lots of newspaper editorials are attacking the politicians responsible for this for once. The American people seem to be waking up.

To make my point, I need to talk for a moment about science. Ecosystems are incredibly complex. It is very hard to use traditional methods to establish what old rigid science would consider "proof." In science there is no absolute proof for anything. We can only make statement about probabilities of this truly being the reality, or of predicting this occurrence or that. There is always the "ethic" if you will for science to err on the side of uncertainty. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, well, maybe it isn’t a duck after all, but a decoy rigged up with a sound mechanism. Science is always leery of the chance occurrence that something that appears true may not be. So we may not be having global warming, or, if we are getting it, it might not be such a bad thing. Scientists like to make probability statements like there is only a 6 percent chance that the finding is not reality at all but merely a random occurrence. Ofttimes they will accept anything under this percent as "truth."

Some persons trained in science will sell out to the polluters since they fear that their basic mediocrity won’t advance their careers much in academia or in independent laboratories. It is mostly these "scientists" who are used profusely by polluting industries (let’s not forget their lackeys, the politicians also!).

In an overly simplistic example – if good science came up with a statement to the effect that there was about a 6% chance for Florida to be completely inundated in the next fifty years because of uncontrolled CO2 emissions, would you want to invest in Florida real estate for your grandchildren? Yet the scientific lackeys will misuse the old scientific conventions to say that there is no scientific proof, so what is all the stuff about the "sky is falling?".

Good science has already determined that the odds are much more than 6% that unchecked CO2 emissions will lead to global warming which, in turn, will be catastrophic to human societies world-wide on many variables, climate change being only one of them.

Since polluters are very willing to use bad science or scientists who will "lie with statistics," it is not time to become complacent. The polluters, although very much the minority, control most of the wealth. When greed is entrenched as it appears to be in many of the polluting megacorporations, then it will take a whole lot of clout from all of us to drag them kicking and screaming into the realms of common sense and decency. And their political hacks can muster up a lot of free media attention to accompany their demagoguery. Together they can easily up the ante on their ongoing campaigns of disinformation, propaganda and outright lies.

There is evidence that some of the largest energy corporations and utilities are beginning to see the light. British Petroleum is one example. Unfortunately, the coal companies and utilities like AEP will be the last to see the light, and they are the ones we have to deal with in West Virginia.

It is not time to become complacent. It is time for us to up the ante in our efforts. _