Earth Day, Bush-Style

Mountaintop Removal Site
Used for Federal PR Stunt

by Vivian Stockman

"How does the nation’s top strip mine regulator celebrate Earth Day? By touring a mountaintop removal mine site, of course."

So began Ken Ward’s April 23 article in the Charleston Gazette about Office of Surface Mining director Jeffrey Jarrett’s Earth Day public relations stunt.

Jarrett, with media in tow, came to Arch Coal’s 18-square-mile Samples Mine to tour the company’s "reforestation" test plots. He planted some white pine seedlings with about a dozen Riverside High School students.

"Jeff…celebrated Earth Day 2003 by planting trees at an innovative West Virginia site where the nation’s second largest coal company has joined hands with the local community, watershed groups and schools to restore mined lands," gushed a press release sent out by OSM.

Sierra Club’s environmental justice resource coordinator for our area, Bill Price, pointed out that Riverside High kids could hardly be called "local." The local high school was Clear Fork, but it has been closed. Bill also noted that kids from Marsh Fork High would be more "local" to the Samples Mine area, but that school may be forced to close too. "This is the pattern in the coalfields since they have started blowing up our mountains," Price said.

"This is the mine that partly surrounds Larry Gibson’s 50-acre family graveyard and park – what a joke it is to think you are doing some kind of good amidst all that gross destruction," said Julian Martin, a board member of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.

One OVEC member e-mailed that she had toured Arch’s Hobet 21 mountaintop removal site, and the "overburden that they use as soil on their prize-winning reclamation site would cut your feet to pieces if you walked on it barefoot. I’ll never forget that place."

Coal companies are razing the most biologically diverse temperate forests on earth, destroying everything, from the hardwoods, to the understory herbs like ginseng, to the topsoil, to the seed bank in the topsoil, to the streams that are essential to life.

Jarrett’s planting of some pine trees on Earth Day in the soil-less rubble of our former mountaintops was a pathetic public relations ploy. His Earth Day stunt also gave an official stamp of approval to the environmental and cultural destruction of mountaintop removal. It was shameful – but typical of the Bush administration.