This article originally published by The Charleston Gazette

May 25, 2007

Jim Waggy

Groups want responsible mining

THE MAY 16 commentary by Steve Roberts and Kenny Perdue was an attempt to kill the messenger of bad tidings. They accused environmental organizations of using the legal system to pursue “a singular mission of destroying coal mining in our state” and conduct “an all-out-assault on the economic and fiscal well-being of our state.”

Actually, the lawsuits Roberts and Perdue refer to were filed by a coalition of environmental organizations in pursuit of something simple, straightforward and eminently reasonable. They are asking courts to force government regulatory agencies to do their jobs properly and uphold existing laws.

Specifically, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged with protecting water quality and enforcing the Clean Water Act, has been issuing permits for mountaintop removal mines without thoroughly evaluating the impact on water quality of these gigantic operations. Instead, the corps has been issuing permits under a streamlined, expedited procedure that is supposed to be used only for projects that will have a “minimal environmental impact.”

The pretense that mountaintop removal projects have only minimal environmental impact is so outrageously preposterous that it is an insult to the intelligence of every West Virginian. If you fly in a small plane over southern counties, you will be convinced that war has been declared on the landscape and ecosystems of this region. And in a sense it has, between explosives ripping apart the mountains, deforestation, and burying of headwater streams that are so important to the food chains of their respective watersheds.

Coal industry boosters rightly point out the importance of coal to the state’s economy. Healthy, functioning natural ecosystems are even more fundamentally important, however. They are the bedrock foundation upon which everything else — human health, communities, jobs, and our economy — is built.

Moreover, there is a difference between the short-term economics of coal and the long term. In the short term, McDowell County thrived as a hub of the coal industry. Yet it’s now an abandoned, used-up shell of empty buildings, poverty, pollution and denuded land, so desperate that its only strategy for economic growth is to accept massive quantities of out-of-state garbage and toxic waste. That is the long-term legacy of coal.

You don’t have to look far to discover why government regulatory agencies are failing to do their jobs. The coal industry wields great political power in the executive and legislative branches of government. At both the federal and state level, regulatory agencies are headed by political appointees who are sympathetic to industry. Even though the agencies are staffed with knowledgeable and dedicated employees, these employees learn that when they write reports that tell the truth about the impact of mountaintop removal mining, it’s not the coal companies that get in trouble, but it’s their own jobs that are in peril.

Given this sad state of affairs, the environmental organizations, far from being villains, are heroes who are going to considerable effort and expense to force the regulatory agencies to do what they should have been doing in the first place.

The blame for mining permits being bogged down in the legal system does not lie with environmentalists, but with the decision-makers in the coal industry and in the regulatory agencies who have allowed quantum leaps in the destructive impact of coal mining operations, while at the same time denying the obvious fact that these methods cause significant environmental damage.

In three separate court cases, federal Judges Robert C. Chambers and Joseph R. Goodwin, and before them the late federal Judge Charles H. Haden II, engaged in exhaustive research before issuing their opinions regarding permits for mountaintop removal mining. None of these men can reasonably be considered “activist judges.” Chambers and Goodwin are, and Haden was, respected, intelligent and conscientious. All of them wrote convincingly and eloquently about the devastating ecological harm caused by mountaintop removal mining.

Does this mean that legal opinions and legal logjams are about to cause the coal industry and the West Virginia economy to collapse in disarray? Hardly. Until cleaner sources of energy are available on a large scale, we will keep mining coal. (The only near-term threat to the industry is if news keeps getting worse about global warming, but that’s another, more complicated issue.) It does mean, however, that there needs to be a serious effort to find better ways to mine and use coal that will minimize the environmental and sociological harm.

The first step toward a more responsible approach is for West Virginia coal executives to face reality. They need to admit that the ecological concerns raised by environmentalists are both legitimate and vitally important.

The industry can’t expect to continue its historic pattern of mining coal by any methods it wants, regardless of consequences. That approach is what has left us with miners suffering from black lung and other health problems; perpetual acid mine drainage; acid rain that sterilizes streams; floods that devastate communities; unstable impoundments of toxic sludge; and fish that are so laden with mercury that they aren’t safe to consume.

To date, the industry has shown no signs of responsible leadership. After all, most mining is controlled by out-of-state interests, who have little concern about negative impacts in West Virginia. Their reaction to these environmental issues has been to blanket the state with a never-ending Friends of Coal propaganda campaign. They seem convinced that if two jovial, wise-cracking ex-football coaches tell us 10,000 times that everything is wonderful about mountaintop removal mining, our minds will eventually grow numb and we will believe them.

West Virginians deserve better. If the coal industry is willing to become a serious partner in the search for solutions, then change will come faster. If not, the industry can look forward to a continuing stream of lawsuits filed by citizens who believe we have an obligation to preserve an intact, viable, healthy natural environment for the use of future generations.

Waggy is a Charleston-based writer and naturalist. He is president of Friends of Coonskin and a board member of the Kanawha State Forest Foundation.