Editor,
So many working class Americans are voting for Trump because he does not appear to give a hoot about the environment when it comes to mining jobs he wants to bring back to the US, like for coal. But what about the danger to the health of the worker that mining inherently engenders? Thus for coal, what about black lung disease?
No, mining is best left to robots, if not abolished altogether on a planet where the supply of mined materials is limited because you can only plunder Mother Earth so much.
But thanks to our “needs” in the West for things like fossil fuels and elements that go into computers and buildings and stuff, we are creating a supply of mined materials available to us cheaply from third world countries. This is simply resulting in poor health among the hordes of mining workers there. And so we have sandstone mines in India where starving mothers and their little starving kids sit and pound sandstone chips into gravel by hand, and being a desert the heat is so high, it suffocates them were they to wear facemasks, so many of them get silicosis. Is this what we in the West want for the rest of the world’s workers?
Better for our coal miners in Appalachia to follow Clinton’s suggestion and be retrained away from such a nasty, dirty, dangerous occupation. Better for the world to be educated as to how much mining and its products negatively impacts the environment with pollution and deforestation through strip mining, which affects not just miners but the health of all.
Arun Ahuja
UNM stduent
