Mountaintop Removal - Worse than the Buffalo Slaughter?

by David Cooper

In the classic 1932 biography Black Elk Speaks, the Oglala Sioux holy man describes the great buffalo slaughter of the 1870s: “The Wasichus (white men) did not kill them to eat, they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.’’

The Western prairie was once blackened by bison estimated to number between 30 million and 40 million, with herds reported to stretch 3 to 5 miles across and 60 miles long. The slaughter ended in 1883, and by the turn of the century only about 500 bison remained. Today we shake our heads in disbelief and anger at the greed of the buffalo hunters and the insanity of the slaughter. How could people be so blind? Why didn’t they think about the future?

We’re not like the buffalo hunters today, of course. We’ve learned not to waste resources needlessly or to squander our precious natural heritage. How far we have progressed!

Well, maybe. Even though we no longer tolerate uncontrolled slaughter, in many ways the massacre of our natural resources has increased since the 1800s.

Take the example of mountain-range removal as practiced in Kentucky and West Virginia. Environmentalists used to call it mountaintop removal before mining corporations began obliterating entire mountain ranges. They are blasted off with dynamite, and the “overburden” (what you and I would call the mountain) is dumped into the valleys in an operation called valley fill.

Once all the coal is removed by giant draglines whose operation requires only one or two people, reclamation mandated by the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act requires that the land be restored to a higher use.

Desperate attempts by the government and coal companies to comply with the law have resulted in huge cost overruns ($40 million to stabilize the soil for a federal prison site in Martin County) and comical attempts to create wildlife habitat on barren, lifeless soil (imported elk herds and a duck pond at Addington’s Starfire mine site in Knott County). Maybe a herd of zebra would be more appropriate for these alien mountaintop savannahs.

More than 600 coal slurry waste ponds created by these mountaintop mining operations are in Appalachian mountain hollows, destroying countless streams and threatening communities below the earthen dams.

Ignoring the Martin County coal slurry disaster, West Virginia has just permitted the immense Brushy Fork slurry impoundment near Whitesville that would hold 5 billion gallons of slurry in a pond deeper than the 900-foot New River Gorge. The dam is directly above an elementary school and the town of Whitesville, whose residents were hit with deadly floods in July as a heavy rainfall poured off the deforested mountain with its highly compacted, strip-mined soil.

It’s the same story in Kentucky, where Coastal Coal wants to build a slurry pond in Perry County twice the size of the failed Martin County impoundment only a third of a mile from the Kentucky River’s North Fork. That’s Lexington’s drinking water supply.

The buffalo have returned, thanks to strict conservation laws, and one day great herds will roam once again on the Western plains. But 1 million years from now, thanks to our generation, the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky will still be flat because of greed and the willingness of a few politicians to ignore the problem in exchange for huge campaign contributions - and because the residents of Kentucky and West Virginia didn’t demand that it stop.

Imagine what people will think about us 100 years from now. Compared to us, the buffalo hunters will look like saints!

What should we say to the politicians who defend mountain-range removal mining, who spout the idiotic mantra "clean coal", who never showed their faces in Martin County after the sludge spill, who have accepted $750,000 in softmoney campaign contributions from coal magnate Larry Addington while opposing reform of our campaign finance laws?

What would you have done if you had been alive in the 1870s, when President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed legislation that would have stopped the slaughter of the buffalo? Would you have raised your voice in protest? Or would you have fallen silent or simply turned away?

The slaughter continues.

Published Sept. 7, 2001, in the Lexington Herald-Leader