Does EIS Really Stand for 'Environment Isn’t Saved' or 'Everything Is Screwed'?

We waited all this time for this?

In May, nearly 2 1/2 years after it was due as part of a lawsuit settlement, several federal and state agencies finally released their draft Environmental Impact Statement on mountaintop removal. For anyone who cares about the future of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, it was a long wait for a brutal smack upside the head.

Joan Mulhern with Earthjustice reminded us that the original intent of this Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as published in the Federal Register was "to consider developing agency policies, guidance, and coordinated agency decision-making processes to minimize, to the maximum extent practicable, the adverse environmental effects to waters of the United States and to fish and wildlife resources affected by mountaintop mining operations, and to environmental resources that could be affected by the size and location of excess spoil disposal sites in valley fills" (64 Fed. Reg. 5778).

The two attorneys who filed the case that brought about the EIS were Joe Lovett, now with the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, and Jim Hecker of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. In an e-mail, Jim wrote:

"The draft EIS is a wholesale retreat from the promise made by the federal government when it agreed to do this study in December 1998. The promise was to reduce environmental harm caused by valley fills. Instead, the DEIS does not propose a single substantive limit on fill size, location or impacts.

The government trumpets its funding of over 30 studies to prepare the EIS. The studies show that mining and valley fills are causing major environmental harm. The impacts are even greater now than earlier studies suggested. Stream miles filled have increased from 560 to 724, and stream miles impacted have increased to 1,200. Yet despite this harm, the DEIS does not propose a single specific action to limit that harm.

Furthermore, the government is not using two of the most important studies it commissioned – the ones that evaluated the economic impacts of reductions in valley fill sizes, and the cumulative environmental impacts of past and future valley fills. The only reason for this is that the government did not like the results of those studies, because they showed that the economic harm was tiny, and the cumulative environmental harm was enormous. Those studies showed that restricting fill size would only increase coal prices by a dollar a ton, and increase electricity costs by a few cents per megawatt hour.

Instead, the DEIS only proposes more process and more studies. At the same time, the DEIS makes no commitment to retain the only existing limit on fill size-the 250 acre limit that has been in effect since 1998.

All of the alternatives propose to eliminate the buffer zone rule, which is the strongest current protection for intermittent and perennial streams."

The draft DEIS says that "surface mining" has already claimed nearly 400,000 acres of forested mountains.

Future "surface mining" could claim over 1.4 million acres of this incredibly biologically diverse ecosystem.

Patricia Bragg was one of the litigants on the lawsuit, as were the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and an OVEC board member. When the DEIS was released, Trish wrote:

"This EIS has not reported how our communities have been changed by this mining, and how we are physically, emotionally, and spiritually gutted. We are laid to waste as the rest of the USA allows big corporations to profit at our expense. The politicians would not allow this destruction to take place in their back yards, why should we? They have awakened a sleeping giant and as the people shake themselves, they will arise with even more determination to correct the wrong our very government has inflicted upon us. Every change made in America’s history has come about when the masses of people bind together and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ "

On the day the draft EIS came out, bind together we did.

Earthjustice hosted a telephone press conference, which was well attended by members of the media, and which helped enormously in counteracting the public relations spin put on the document by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Office of Surface Mining.

Their press release was a new low in Doublespeak, even for the Bush administration:

"The draft EIS recommends actions designed specifically to ensure more effective protection for human health and the environment while enabling the Nation to continue to receive the energy benefits of cleaner burning Appalachian coal. The additional steps recommended in the draft EIS build upon Federal and State actions undertaken in recent years that are effectively reducing mountaintop coal mining related environmental impacts."

Fortunately, the folks on the tele-press conference (reps from Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, Coal River Mountain Watch, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, OVEC, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy) were able to interpret the Doublespeak for reporters and lay out the truth.

"The EIS studies confirmed the obvious fact that blowing up mountains and burying streams has enormous and irreversible environmental consequences. It is astonishing, even for the Bush administration, that their response to this information is to further weaken the environmental limits on mountaintop removal mining," Joan Mulhern told reporters.

For more information about this draft, e-mail vivian@ohvec.org, who can forward you good summaries, or call the OVEC office at (304) 522-0246.

West Virginia gets its copy of the draft EIS right in the ... chest.