Thirty years after the first Earth Day, the state of our environ- ment does not look good. A two-year study from the United Nations Environment Programme warns of widespread ecosystem decline. We are in a period of mass extinctions, unparalleled since the demise of the dinosaurs. While, since the first Earth Day, awareness that Earth’s ecosystems are in fact our life support systems has increased, still, we continue business as usual.

Business as usual means that ever-larger corporations seek ever-higher short-term profit, no matter the costs to society and unborn generations. These corporations have bought their way into our political system, so that we no longer have one person one vote, but instead one dollar, one vote.

In West Virginia, the evidence that corporations control our government is most horribly visible in the massacre of our mountains by the coal industry. Our last three heads of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) have been coal industry executives, who profess that no environmental harm comes from blasting hundreds of feet off mountain after forested mountain, and burying mile after mile of headwater streams. The DEP spends loads of taxpayer money defending the way it has issued mountaintop removal permits, even though the permits clearly violate sections of the Clean Water Act and federal surface mine law.

Collusion between govern ment and industry is evident on all political levels. The nation’s top mining regulator, that was Kathy Karpan of the Office of Surface Mining, is promoted instead of fired when she seeks employment as the nation’s top mining lobbyist. The agencies that are supposed to regulate mining are instead promoting whatever the industry wants. Our Senators and Representatives and the Clinton/Gore Administration rush to weaken decades-old environmental laws so that coal companies will be now LEGALLY able to continue mountaintop removal --dewatering, deforesting, despoiling and destroying the life support system of Southern West Virginia.

Those who gain from mountaintop massacre -- the CEOs of out-of-state corporations and their well-greased politicians -- insist that this assault on our future must continue. They would have us believe their self-serving myth that the way things are is the way things have to be. What else can we have in the coalfields, but the coal industry they ask? This question plays upon people’s fear of change and utterly discounts the power, ingenuity and creativity of community- minded people who work together.

We cannot allow King Coal and his politicians to continue mountaintop massacre with its increasingly unbearable toll (see list) on our state, enriching the few at great cost and peril to us all, including unborn generations. We cannot leave the future this legacy from blind, insatiable greed. The brutalized landscape that mountaintop removal leaves is like a scream from the Earth, telling us we must change, we must stop this assault.

Indeed, we are in the midst of change. The Earth will make the changes for us if we blindly rush on, allowing our co-opted politicians and corrupted agencies to perpetuate the corporate mantra of "profits before people." Thirty years after the first Earth Day, we still have time to save our life support systems, but we will have to can reclaim democracy from corporate control and we will have to strengthen our belief in human ingenuity and our ability to shape a positive future.

Vivian Stockman is a leading, long-time activist in protecting the environment of West Virginia and elsewhere. She is with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.