no photos of the dead, says FEMA

hi folks,

You may not have heard about it yet but FEMA has ordered the media not to take any photographs of the dead in New Orleans. This story was in Reuters on September 6, and I have seen no mention of it in any of the major media.

Kudos to boingboing for letting folks know about this alarming new edict. If it were not for technorati, this story may have been quite effectively buried.

All week I have been having bad nightmares about snakes and alligators and ruined buildings and lost children. Now these bad dreams are getting mixed up with coal slurry impoundment dams like the enormous one just above Marsh Fork Elementary in West Virginia.

Massey Coal needs to get their act together and fix the situation they have created in Sundial. It's starting to give me an ulcer worrying about those kids. And I don't even know any of them! I can't even imagine how worried I would be if I had a kid that went to school there.

Hopefully the folks at Massey will get a clue about the general level of environmental awareness people are reaching in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the lightning-fast speed with which citizens are able to route information on corporate greed and apathy.

If our friendly corporate neighbors learn anything from New Orleans, let's hope that they really begin to understand that it's not nice to rape Mother Nature, and that it's even more foolish to bank on an endless supply of miracles when you do. That's not what miracles were made for.

tags: Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, mountaintop removal coal mining, strip mining, area mining, corporate accountability, environmental ethics, ecology, energy policy, education, environmental education, resource management, Louisiana, West Virginia, Appalachia, Massey, boycott, buycott, biodiesel