Coles Hill is a beautiful place. The original 18th century homeplace is still standing, surrounded by rolling pastures. But those pastures are dotted not only with a few cows and rolls of hay, but also with hideous little green signs that declare “I Dig Uranium,” or (most offensively) “Stop Whining and Start Mining.”
The Coles family has owned this place for over 200 years. The current owner is Walter Coles, who is 77 years old and a retired foreign service officer.
Why would he want to see such a beautiful place ripped open and turned into a uranium mine? Why would he want to have millions of pounds of potentially deadly radioactive waste buried beneath his farm? Why would he subject his neighbors to the risk of radioactive contamination? Why would he ruin the agricultural future of our community?
Many folks would say there is an easy answer to those questions: the uranium under his farm is valued at over $7 billion. But it seems obvious to me that he doesn’t need the money. And surely there are some things which ought not be for sale–at any price.
Whether Mr. Coles will accomplish his goal of turning his farm into a uranium mill remains to be seen. For now, the decisison will be made in Richmond, and we are not constitutents of those who will decide our fate. Many of them have been fattened with the political contributions of the shadowy Canadian enterprise which is funding this project. They’ve enjoyed all-expense paid trips to Paris, courtesy of those who would rape our land. Them, I understand.
But Mr. Coles; him I cannot understand.
Love Wins
I’m actually having a strong physical reaction to this. It’s making me feel sick. I cannot fathom this kind of callous regard for the land, and for the health and well-being of the people. There are known health hazards. How far will this country roam from mindful right action to self-destruction?
Plenty of folks around here seem to be buying into the argument that this can be done safely. But tellingly, the legislation limits uranium extraction to our community. No other place in the state is willing to permit it in their communities. Even if Mr. Coles is convinced that there is no risk (and even the pro-mining studies cannot rule out risk), the stigma that will attach to our community is undeniable. Yes, we need jobs here, but our chamber of commerce has concluded that this will cost us more jobs that it might temporarily bring. A solid majority of our community is opposed to it as are all of our elected representatives and civic organizations. Of course the farming community is strongly opposed as it will destroy any possibility of our offering healthy, natural food. Who would want to eat food grown or raised near an active uranium mine and mill?
But what baffles me the most is the willingness to commodify something that the owner of it should hold dear. I can’t imagine treating land that way. It is too precious to me.
Once I got over my urge to whomp Mr. Coles upside the head with a 2×4 (that being the way my Grandpa advised getting the attention of a recalcitant mule), I spent some time thinking about your question: why would Mr. Coles do this?
You mention his career as a foreign service officer, and I wonder if that plays into it. People with little connection to the land are willing to treat it as a commodity. I’ve known people who speak of their assets thusly: bank account, IRAs, 401K, stocks, land, bonds. Where the land is reduced to nothing more than an asset, keeping, selling, or radically altering its use is no more complicated or emotionally fraught than rearranging the stock portfolio.
To put it another way, it’s hard to commodify something you already see only as a commodity.
That’s Cherie’s theory too. Y’all must be right of course. You put it very well. Where land is merely an “asset” then there is no more attachment to it than the currency he’ll exchange it for.
This causes lots of Wendell Berry quotes to swim around in my head, but I reckon Gerald O’Hara will do fine:
“Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, that Tara, that land doesn’t mean anything to you? Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.”
My dad’s family worked Iowa coal mines until my injured grandpa forbid his sons to go into them. My folks’ best friends lived in Western Kentucky, where Shelby worked coal and farmed. I spent a good bit of time there as a child – there’s even a record of my first visit as a baby. I’ve been thinking about both families a lot this morning, and how appropriate this song still is, albeit in a different context.
Wonderful. The photo and the song. Thanks.
So I will offer a Wendell Berry quote after all:
We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap. It has ridden questionable triumphs over the bodies of small farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen. I see it, still, driving my neighbors off their farms into the factories. I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value. Its principle is to waste and destroy the living substance of the world and the birthright of posterity for a monetary profit that is the most flimsy and useless of human artifacts.
(For more of this: http://practicingresurrection.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/let-us-tilt-against-the-windmills/)
Thanks for all you efforts, support and kind words.
What bothers me is that the decision lays in Richmond, in the hands of men and women who will not pay any price or have any consequence to their decision. They benefit but the cost will be paid by those in your community. How is possible that our legal system has allowed others, not your elected representatives, to make this decision. For instance, for our community, Miami, the State of Florida representatives (most of whom I did not elect) should not have the power to vote and decide to allow gambling only in my county. Why is this scenario possible?
Exacly Leslie! How can they claim to be legislating for Virginia if they pass a bill that lifts the ban on uranium mining ONLY in our community?? If they pass a law making it legal to miine uranium in Virginia, then fine. I wouldn’t agree but at least they’d be treating every community with uranium deposits the same. But what they’re doing instead is “isolating” it to a part of the state their consituents don’t care about. It is infuriating.