I read in my local news today that regulators in Missouri, my home state, have recently issued a new permit to a coal-fired power plant near St. Louis that explicitly allows for the plant to pollute the state’s groundwaters.
According to Ameren Missouri, who operates the plant, and the state, who regulates it, there is nothing untoward about this. In its previous operating permits, the state says, Ameren’s Labadie Energy Center in Franklin County, about 45 minutes west of St. Louis, had been implicitly allowed to dump coal ash into the Missouri River, source of the city’s drinking water. Previous operating permits had required Ameren to track how much coal ash was going into the groundwater, but did not explicitly prohibit that pollution; therefore, the pollution was allowed.
“When a permit contains monitoring requirements, and no obvious discharge prohibition was included in the permit,” the Department of Natural Resources said in a statement, “the permit allows that discharge.” Changing the new permit to explicitly say “sure, feel free to dump coal ash into the drinking water” was merely an honest reflection of what the state had always intended.
For its part, Ameren also wants citizens to know there’s nothing to worry about. “We always want to do the right thing for the environment,” Craig Giesmann, Ameren’s environmental services manager, told St. Louis Public Radio. “We live and work in these same communities.” This is very comforting news to me – I certainly was concerned at first, given how often Ameren has asked for extensions to their deadline to quit dumping carcinogens into the water supply at other Missouri power plants, but, well, they surely wouldn’t want to do anything like to their own communities, would they?
Xcel Energy’s Sherburne County Generating Station, a coal-burning power plant similar to Labadie, near Becker, Minnesota [Tony Webster, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
The Labadie plant was the second-highest producer of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the United States in 2020. As Ameren is quick to point out, its numbers do not violate Environmental Protection Agency standards, some of which were relaxed during the Trump administration have not subsequently been revised under Biden. (The EPA, unlike the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, has been taking some measures against the Labadie plant and other coal plants in the region, leading to Ameren closing two other Missouri plants earlier than expected.) Labadie is the most polluting plant in the region.
The Midwest, as a whole, struggles with this issue – Missouri is the 18th most populous state but the second-highest producer of sulfur dioxide, for example. But despite this, the state authorities seem largely content to let Ameren and other coal-burning plants operate on the honor system, rather than take an opportunity to actually regulate.
“We all realize the influence this company has over state politics,” said Patricia Schuba, who leads a grassroots group of Franklin County residents, the Labadie Environmental Organization, according to STLPR. “In the beginning, we were very hopeful that by engaging with our state regulators, we could get these things fixed.” But the fact is that the current rules favor the fossil fuel industry, in part because that industry has successfully captured many of its regulators. That certainly seems to be the case in Missouri, where despite the best efforts of people like Schuba – people who really do live and work in those communities – the plants remain loosely regulated.
Stories like these expose the unglamorous truth of our environmental situation. Labadie may be one of the worst polluting coal-fired plants in the country, but it’s only one of nearly 250 such plants. The coal-ash pits that leach into the water supply are to be found there, but also in all those other communities. The same dynamics between corporate interests, the state, and the health and wellbeing of the people and the land they live on play out in all those communities too.
The Missouri River near Rocheport, Missouri [Aimee Castenell, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
These stories weigh on me as a Pagan. My practice is heavy on veneration for the land-wights and other nature spirits around me. For me, these beings are not transcendent or invisible: they are not supernatural manifestations of the land I live on, but the land itself. I take seriously the idea that the Earth is a living entity. And to take that idea seriously is to understand that my spiritual life cannot be seperate from my political life. If land-wights exist, they are affected by the pits of coal-ash in Franklin County, and by the pollutants leaching into the great rivers on which all life around my home depends. If I believe that a reciprocal relationship is possible between human beings and the divinity of nature, then that has to imply something more than pouring out wine on the ground a few times a month.
It is easy for journalists to fall into reporting on climate change in only a handful of ways: there are reactive stories about the loss and misery inflicted by a calamity like wildfires or tornadoes, which detail the costs of our inaction after the fact, and there are stories about the newest statistics from scientists and international agencies detailing just how immense the problem is.
But if there is to be a way forward, much of it will rely on local and regional reports like this one on Labadie, which monitor the concrete actions of activists, corporations, and state actors that create the overall situation. This is a global disaster, but it affects us – and we can affect it in return – in personal, even intimate ways.
As Pagans, we owe it to ourselves and to that which we hold sacred to pay attention to environmental stories at this local scale as well. These are the places where we have the most ability to act, in defense of ourselves and our spirits.
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