On Monday, April 11, the Beehive Design Collective shared with students what they called “The True Cost of Coal.” The Beehive Design Collective is a group of artists and activists that want to see changes made in our culture to give back to and work with the earth. They created large-scale artistic banners, using the imagery of animals to represent the struggles of humanity.

 The event, which was sponsored in conjunction by Reconnect, The Voice and the National Organization for Change (NOC), involved members of the Beehive Design collective sharing their insight on the effects of mountain-top removal, a process of coal mining that involves using dynamite to explode the tops of mountains, rather than drilling into them, in order to extract coal from within them.

The Beehive Collective expressed their concerns for the natural environments and for the people residing in coal mining areas that are affected by the pollution and deconstruction of nature caused by coal mining. They also discussed with and challenged students to think of ways to create energy with less pollution and to consider ways to work with and give back to the land.

“I learned so much tonight,” said sociology instructor Rebecca Hensley. “I learned so much from these people talking about what’s being done and why it’s being done and how it’s being done. Now, I knew how strip mines work and I knew that bad things were happening, but I didn’t really understand how it worked in the bigger sense.”

The speakers also talked about clean coal and the costs and effects of cleaning coal. They mentioned that a large amount of our country’s electricity comes from coal.

“I had no idea,” said Hensley. “So that makes coal crucial. And I didn’t know that clean coal was not really any different from dirty coal. I didn’t know any of those things. So it’s really important, the work that they’re doing, I think. And I’m grateful to them to see how similar it is what we’re going through here in Louisiana, to what my mothers and fathers people, for 200 years, have been going through.”

For more information about the Beehive Design Collective or their mission, you can visit their Web site at www.beehivecollective.org.