Mountaintop Removal / Valley Fill Strip Mining In The News

Mountaintop removal continues to make the news all across the nation!

Here are just a few of the recent mentions… (scroll down for 4 separate articles)

Author Bill Mckibben made a modest proposal in a column for the July 12 Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram:

"If you’re wondering what (prior to Nov. 2) you can do about our deadly dependence on foreign energy, or about ever-rising utility bills, or about the flood of carbon into the atmosphere that’s steadily raising temperatures, here’s one answer: Let air and sun and wind do their job.

"To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.

"The average American family devotes 5 to 6 percent of its annual electric budget to the motor and heating coils inside its clothes dryer.

"Undampening your socks ties you into the vast world energy grid, with its legacy of mountaintop-removal coal mining, terrorist-vulnerable natural gas pipelines and all the rest…(t)he clothesline is the most elegant solution to the problem of drying clothes in good weather.

"And if it storms? Just leave them up until they dry again – you’ll be able to boast about rain-washed clothes.

"If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don’t have to wait to start.

"Yours could be up by this afternoon."

In Logan County, a coal truck rumbles past a formerly-quiet mountain cemetery, hauling a little bit more of Appalachia away. In the background, the mountaintop removal mine that is relentlessly creeping down the valley.

In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting a host of new examples in which Bush officials have inappropriately interfered with scientific judgment to support the president’s predetermined agenda.

News stories about the report that appeared in papers nationwide noted that, among other things, the administration has suppressed information on environmental damage from mountaintop removal:

"The administration has also shown no reluctance to shape scientific findings in service to its political agenda. In one case, Deputy Interior Secretary J. Stephen Griles, a former lobbyist for the mining industry, directed agency scientists and staff to drop any consideration of alternatives that could minimize environmental damage from mountaintop mining, which the administration was seeking to boost. ‘We were flabbergasted and outraged,’ one high-ranking staff scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service told UCS."

According to Roger LeBaron Hooke, a University of Maine scientist, humans are surpassing other natural forces (rivers, wind, oceans, glaciers) as earth movers. He finds this achievement troubling, and other scientists are taking note.

"One might ask how long such rates of increase can be sustained and whether it will be rational behavior or catastrophe that brings them to an end," Hooke noted. "I wonder how much longer we can continue making a mess of the planet."

Among the environmental problems linked to these activities are acid mine drainage and river sedimentation. Mountaintop removal, a technique for strip mining coal in the Appalachian coal belt, results in the destruction of river valleys, he adds.

Southern West Virginia beautification projects, King Coal style - mountaintop removal strip mining, valleys filled up with trees, soil, small critters and other assorted "rubble," and the ever present sludge lakes, haul roads, dust and noise from the constant blasting … need we go on?

by Jim Hightower

For those who sit around whining that the Powers That Be are just too powerful, so there’s no use even bothering with battling the b**tards – take note and take heart…

First is a coalition of environmental and citizen groups in the West Virginia area that has been battling the coal-industry giants. For years, these groups have been trying to stop the industry from using a devastating, disgusting, and just plain dumb mining practice called "mountaintop removal."

Instead of tunneling into the mountains to get at the coal, the corporations simply blow up the top third of the mountains, shove the rubble into valleys and streams below, then scoop out the coal.

Not only is this unbelievably destructive, but, thanks to the coalition’s determined push, a federal judge has now ruled that the permitting process that rubberstamps this abomination is illegal.

Sunlight and shadows play over a devastated WV landscape.