If you want to see an end to mountaintop removal/valley fill coal mining, then please, please come to a public hearing on March 30 and speak out to oppose the Bush administration’s latest attempt to legalize illegal stream burial.

Example of how well the buffer zone rule is currently working in West Virginia - not at all. Yes, that is a stream struggling out from under all that formerly majestic mountain that is now a heap of blasted, lifeless rubble.

What are the hearings about? "King Coal’s Return," a Jan. 11, 2004, editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal sums it up:

The Bush administration wants to change the Buffer Zone Rule of federal surface mining law (SMCRA). We all know that mountaintop removal coal companies and regulatory agencies have been ignoring the Buffer Zone Rule by dumping former mountaintops directly into valleys and streams.

Citizens opposed to mountaintop removal have been making progress by organizing to demand that regulators enforce this law. Lawyers have been suing regulators for the same ends. Now Bush - in a staggering display of governing by quid pro quo - wants to stop our progress. He’s offering up a huge gift to his coal industry funders by moving to make the illegal legal.

Stop this outrage! Help us have a big turnout for the hearing! Please attend and bring your neighbors. You can download fliers to post in your town. 

For the latest information on this event, check OVEC’s webpage, or call the office at (304) 522-0246.

National media is also taking up the Buffer Zone battle cry, as evidenced by the following Jan. 13, 2004, editorial in the New York Times:

Environmental protection under the Bush administration often seems to refer to the political environment and not the stewardship of the nation’s precious resources. In the latest attack on existing safeguards, the Interior Department is quietly gutting yet another legal safeguard against the wholesale pollution and burial of streams in Appalachia by the strip-mining industry.

In 2002, the administration essentially repealed a long-standing provision of the Clean Water Act prohibiting the dumping of mining wastes in streams. Now, under what is advertised as a "clarification" of the law governing surface mining, the administration is eliminating a ban dating from the Reagan era against mining activity within 100 feet of a stream.

Taken together, these two rollbacks can only encourage and accelerate the horrific process called mountaintop removal, which has already buried about 1,200 miles of Appalachia’s vital streams under mammoth piles of bulldozed waste. This serial decapitation of the coal-rich hills has long been a matter of furious conflict between the mining industry and the residents and environmentalists defending the life and beauty of the Appalachian hollows. Hundreds of square miles of mountaintops have been dynamited away, and dozens of communities bought out and buried.

The new regulation changes a standing prohibition against mining within 100 feet of a stream if it will degrade water quality. In the future, mining companies will be required to respect the buffer zone merely "to the extent practicable."

This is an open invitation to industry to ignore a rule that, as a practical matter, has been routinely abused as regulators looked the other way.

Anyone who has visited the ravaged heart of Appalachia can see that hundreds of streams have been snuffed from the landscape, not merely degraded. Industry’s ballyhooed reclamation projects stand out as Potemkin oases along the scarred horizon. Meanwhile, a federal study uncovered by a Freedom of Information Act initiative warns of more devastation to come.

Another buffer zone "success story." Right ...

It may be a coincidence that the new rule comes as Republican fund-raisers are priming the campaign donation pump.

But the "clarification" brazenly certifies the protection of Big Coal at the expense of the environment.

Remember that letters to the editor are great tools to tell the world about MTR. Use them! Below is one submitted by an OVEC member that was unfortunately not chosen for publication:

Dear New York Times Editor: