Jeff Biggers's Blog
Sep.10.2010
(Sept. 10) -- A tiny Christian sect in Gainesville, Fla., threatens to burn the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11; tensions continue to rise over an Islamic community center near New York City's ground zero; the construction site of a new mosque in suburban Tennessee got torched last month. And ...
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May.20.2010
posted at Huffington Post, May 20, 2010
This is the scene, when the coal-fired electricity that lights up New York City's neon theatre district lowers on stage:
We are inside the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek. With their family's 150-year-old...
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Feb.28.2010
Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2010
No American leader has done more to advance a clean energy future than President Obama. Nor has any American president done more to invoke a mandate for stricter workplace safety and environmental regulations.
And yet, ever since President Obama first visited my native...
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Dec.09.2009
posted on Huffingtonpost, Dec. 9, 2009
As world leaders gather for the Copenhagen Climate Summit, we plan to make our own Copenhagen pledge here at home: It's time to envision a coal-free future. It's time for clean energy independence.
For starters, here in Kentucky we disagree with Commerce...
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Nov.29.2009
Not that we haven't been informed--that's the message from an incredible year of new books on climate destabilization, dirty energy policies, bogus Big Coal campaigns and a vibrant anti-coal movement, a growing coalfield resistance and the tragedy of mountaintop removal, and the still big...
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Nov.25.2009
posted at Huffington Post, Nov. 23, 2009
<em>If the Obama administration is unwilling or unable to stop the massive environmental destruction of historic mountain ranges and essential drinking water for a relatively tiny amount of coal, can we honestly believe they will be able to phase out...
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Aug.26.2009
Last fall, Tom Zeller at The New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines. And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament...
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Nov.25.2008
posted on Huffington Post/Grist, November 25, 2008
Dear Al Gore,
Two months ago at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, you declared that, "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have...
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Oct.20.2008
posted on CNN, October 7, 2008
The Wall Street crisis notwithstanding, coal continues to embroil the presidential campaign into knots unlike any other issue in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
Take a look at the backflips by both campaigns in the last...
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Sep.24.2008
posted on Huffington Post, September 22, 2008
"These laws are no panacea; nor are they self-executing. More than ever, we must maintain our vigilance." --Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street Under Oath, "A Word About the Future," 1939
Bailout or otherwise, we don't need no stinkin'...
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Jul.19.2008
Huffington Post, July 19th, 2008
Whether or not the George W. Bush administration's surprising act this week of initiating people-to-people diplomacy with Iran is sincere, it presents a critical opportunity for cultural and human rights organizations in the United States to take the lead in making...
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Jun.20.2008
Call her America's first blogger, albeit two centuries ahead of her times. Today is her birthday.
Born on June 11, 1769, Anne Royall was an American original, a stranger to fear, and one of the nation's most daring, impassioned and indomitable social critics in Washington, DC. In the early...
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May.21.2008
They Came Down From These Hills and Made HistoryBy JEFF BIGGERSChronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2008After speaking at 30 universities in Appalachia and across the countryover the last couple of years, I have learned two things for sure.First, while some of the icons and milestones of the...
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Mar.02.2008
Washington Post, March 2, 2008
Every time I hear our political leaders talk about "clean coal," I think about Burl, an irascible old coal miner in West Virginia. After 35 years underground, he struggled to conjure enough breath to match his storytelling verve, as if the iron hoops of a...
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About Jeff
Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, radio correspondent, educator and community organizer across the United States, Europe, India and Mexico. His award-winning stories have appeared on NPR, PRI, and in scores of travel, literary and music magazines, and...
Causes Jeff Biggers Supports
PEN American Center
Native Seed Search / http://www.nativeseeds...




