The Mourning Mountains

After a 30-minute climb in the darkness, I stopped to rest a few minutes. It was 6:45 a.m., Dec. 2, 2004. A deer blew at me about 75 yards on up the mountain; somewhere up in the oak timber, so I decided to wait for daylight right where I was.

As the pinkish glow in the east gave way to another day, I found myself unable to concentrate on scanning for deer, as the totally unnatural and ungodly view 600 yards to my left dominated my full attention. I was shocked and sickened.

The entire uppermost section of the left side of 4 Mile Hollow – bordering the Kanawha State Forest, near Marmet, W.Va. – was gone! The thousands of giant oak, hickory and beech trees which stood there for the past century had vanished forever (see photo on page 24).

Anger, then rage set in. One of the most beautiful, big-timbered, wildlife-rich hollows in Kanawha County is now a mountaintop removal wasteland. And the world is expected to just accept this shock and awe campaign against the Appalachian Mountains.

Our state and federal regulatory agencies and our elected politicians just turn their heads and let them get by with this, in seeming homage to the coal industry’s propaganda and deceptive slogans: I Love Coal; Cleaner, Greener Coal; Friends of Coal; and Mountaintop Mining – It’s the Right Thing To Do.

The vast majority of the rest of the educated world – many of whom were involved in the draft environmental impact study (EIS) on mountaintop removal – think it is simply The Wrong Thing to do. The research confirmed that approximately 1,200 miles of mountain streams have already been buried forever with blasted "overburden" and over 1 million acres of the most supreme forests on Earth have already been or will be obliterated. Forever.

Polls have shown that the majority of West Virginians are opposed to mountaintop removal. So, why are we permanently annihilating the landscape of large portions of southern West Virginia, altering the aquatic systems of Mother Nature, creating ghost towns out of dozens of 150 year old communities, allowing a practice which, with it’s accompanying permanent forest mutilation, is the direct cause of the severity of all the recent ravaging floods in southern WV, and furthermore, impairing both the physical and mental well-being of human beings who live near mountaintop removal projects? (While, promoting, of all things tourism!)

The answer is so very simple. All of these atrocities against Earth and crimes against society are for the sake of a couple of multi-billion dollar corporations that mine coal using the absolute cheapest method possible, while employing the absolute fewest number of workers possible!

Yes, presently coal provides 52 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States. But, has government or industry ever conducted any research to determine if this 52 percent could still be feasibly produced with time-honored and respected underground mining, coupled with more easily mined Western coal? And, how many more thousands of coal mining jobs would still be in West Virginia and Kentucky if mountaintop removal had not reared its ugly head?

Folks, it’s never been clearer: The Will Of The People is being totally ignored, because of the sickening greed of the owners and managers of large corporations, who immorally and unjustly pander their influence with policy makers.

When an industry that has approximately 3 percent of the total workforce of an entire state has the power to successfully appeal and unfairly overturn every ruling that federal judges have made against illegal mountaintop removal practitioners, then we have already entered a period in American history which one of our most famous and respected presidents warned about many decades ago: Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said, "The Liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself."

That brings to mind another famous and respected President’s statement. Abraham Lincoln said, "…and that Government, of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth."