Our coal, our responsibility.

• Author: Bass, Rick

In the old days, our country could be counted on for making a stand, for doing the hard, if not always convenient, thing. Or that was the myth I was raised on. Maybe it wasn't true. It doesn't really matter: If it wasn't true, it should have been.

Once upon a time, there were certain countries we would not do business with, certain products we would not sell: weapons, poisons, that kind of thing. The fact that another country might proceed with those lucrative arms sales, or chemical sales, or what-have-you, did not dissuade us; we used not to subscribe to the logic that "Everybody else is doing it," or, "If we don't sell it to them, someone else will." We stood our ground. And we tried to discourage these other countries from making those sales. You could say that we were a leader among nations. Or so the myth went.

But now we are exporting vast volumes of dirty toxic coal--coal too dirty to foist upon our own population. Open boxcars of the stuff--more than a million tons of it at a whack--trundle and squeak and clank and groan and hiss through Montana towns and villages. The open-car rail export of these anachronistic exhumations, the guts of old anaerobic swamps, is disrupting the equanimity of our commerce and communities.

It is turning Montana into an industrial export corridor, a colony for the international energy companies once again, and that is a matter of deep concern to those of us who have chosen to make our homes in Montana for the exact opposite reasons.

We live here under the belief that our Constitution assures us and guarantees us clean air and clean water all the time, not merely when there is no one willing to pay the Treasury to take these rights away. Many thousands of times we have watched these cars pass by with the mercury dust swirling in the wind, accumulating like a silent fuse of toxicity in every town, every city. A million tons, two million tons. Even if but 3 percent of the volume is lost in waste and wind and rain spillage, this is a steadily accruing poison being injected into our communities and ecosystems.

This is coal that...