Appalachia has been here before. Not the lithium part, but the part where something valuable gets discovered underneath people who have been poor for a very long time. Coal built fortunes, just not locally. Timber came through like a haircut. Tobacco kept the Carolinas and Virginia in a kind of indentured agricultural grace for generations until the lawsuits arrived and the companies discovered that contrition, properly structured, is also profitable. Each boom followed the same basic script: outside capital arrives, extracts, departs, leaves behind a workforce with damaged lungs and a political class grateful for the attention. More

The final blow for our beloved landscape of Hansel Valley came with news of a fast-tracked 40,000-acre industrial AI park to be built in the very heart of a place that had become a part of me.  The Boxelder County Commission had been given but two weeks by the State of Utah to give final approval.  Our good governor assured us that we were no longer safe in our own land and this was good for our military preparedness. It would also bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the state and use twice as much power as the entire state’s current use.  We would be in the industrial, Make America Great Again, big leagues.  Hurry was necessary.  Time is money. No time to lose.  A non-elected paramilitary/governmental shell agency called MIDA was brokering the deal.  No mention was made of the effort to protect the Great Salt Lake from drying up and perhaps making northern Utah uninhabitable.  Pathetic an effort as it might be, it seemed that I owed the land at least the presence of one more body in protest of this very insidious plan. More

Someone told me nobody knew Monsanto like Mitchel Cohen with the No Spray Coalition. I called him up. We talked. Well, Mitchel talked and I scribbled notes on legal pads. I called again. Took more notes. I kept calling, Mitchel kept answering and giving me an activist’s very informed view of the political machinations of one the world’s most malevolent corporations, a corporation that Mitchel and his colleagues beat the hell out of for the next 20 years, eventually forcing the embattled, litigation-hobbled enterprise to be sold to Bayer, which swiftly dropped its sullied name, if not all of its toxic products, like Round-Up.  More