This news story originally provided by WV Metro News

March 31, 2005

Hoppy's Commentary For Friday

Talkline Host Hoppy Kercheval

Environmental activists say they are targeting West Virginia this summer. The goal of the “Mountain Justice Summer” campaign is to end the mountain top removal mining in the state.

Mountain top removal mining is destructive and controversial. After all, it involves removing the top of a mountain to get to the coal. The coal industry has improved reclamation techniques, but you can’t bring back the top of the mountain.

But mountain top removal mining is an integral part of the coal industry in West Virginia. Severance taxes alone amounted to $214-million in 2003. More tax money is generated by businesses that support the coal industry.

Coal mining is a dirty, dangerous business that happens to be critical to the state’s economic needs and the country’s energy needs.

That’s primarily why the “Mountain Justice Summer” campaign will fail. But there are other reasons. The environmental campaign includes few if any of the leading state environmental or citizens groups.

That’s because those associated with “Mountain Justice Summer” take a more radical approach to their causes. Its website says one of the goals of the campaign is to “escalate resistance to Mountain Top Removal from a regional to a national level.”

Organizers stress nonviolence, but some have links to “Earth First!” an activist and aggressive environmental movement that believes in “biocentrism, that life of the earth comes first.”

The movement is too extreme for most West Virginia environmental and citizen groups.

Norm Steenstra of West Virginia Citizen Action Group is candidly dismayed with the planned frontal assault on mountain top removal mining by the activists. Steenstra says outside groups come into the state and make a big splash then West Virginia environmental and citizen groups are left to clean up the mess.

The West Virginia organizations prefer to work within the system, do the daily legwork at the state capital, and push for incremental change. Most of the environmentalists who work system here are devoted, realistic and pragmatic.

The East First! extremists believe the traditional environmental movement is wimpy, that’s why they take their efforts to the edge and over.

It’s hard to say what the “Mountain Justice Summer” campaign will involve. The leaders stress nonviolence. But Earth First! welcomes a variety of supporters, from committed passivists to “monkeywrenchers” who are willing to damage “inanimate machines and tools that are destroying life.”

The activists may be successful in mucking up some mountain top removal mining operations in the state this summer. But by next winter they’ll be gone.

And the environmental and citizens groups based in West Virginia who do the daily grunt work will still be here, their job made even more difficult by extremists who will have taken up another cause someplace else.