Ted Williams on Conservation

… In addition to fish, wildlife, rivers, mountains and forests, waste products of the coal industry include people … Dr. Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, one of the nation’s leading researchers on acid mine drainage and its costs, had told me this: "I really think in 20 years eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia are going to be humanly uninhabitable. That’s even without considering the ecosystem component. Humans are not going to be able to live in this region where there’s no potable water. Kids come into this school thinking you can treat any kind of water and make it drinkable. ‘Who taught you that?’ I ask them. You can’t get manganese out of water without just torturing it. You’ve got to take it way up in pH, treat the hell out of it, take it way back down in pH, settle it out, and by the time you’ve done all that you’ve introduced so many other things that you can’t drink it.

Stout pays special attention to aquatic insects because they’re indicators of ecosystem health; and in coal country he’s chronicled a 50 percent reduction in both numbers and species. Many of his check stations are on headwater streams, which lawmakers assume don’t count and therefore can legally be buried by the coal industry.

But he has found that these streams are the ‘linkages’ by which leaves and twigs are converted by insects to fats and proteins, very rare commodities in forests. These insects take to the air and float downstream, sustaining fish, salamanders, frogs, turtles, birds and mammals, jumpstarting energy flow in the whole forest ecosystem.

Now the Bush administration is attempting to do away with the regulation that prevents mining activity within 100 feet of perennial streams. Stout calls the proposed rule "just outrageous ... pulling the rug out from under the Clean Water Act."

Excerpted from "Coal-Country Trout: Fish don’t have to be just another coal-industry waste product," in Fly Rod & Reel magazine, July/October 2004.