Winds of Change Newsletter, September 2005     See sidebar for table of contents

Justification for Mountaintop Removal Mining Based on Lies

by David Orr

Coming up to the crest of Kayford Mountain, we were warned that a mother bear and her two cubs were in the area. In the distance we could hear the sounds of heavy equipment. As we walked down the county road, the trees thinned out enough that we could see the war zone beyond. They call it “mountaintop removal.”

Momma bear was moving her cubs to safer ground, but the way out was getting harder by the hour. Further down the road the Massey Coal Co. posted a “No Trespassing” sign and a heavy steel gate. They don’t want people like me poking around and seeing too much. We walked ahead nonetheless. Peering over the edge of the cut, desolation was all one could see to the edge of the horizon.

The unmined remnant of Kayford Mountain stands up like a pedestal a thousand or more feet above what is now desolate land below. On the other side, the ancient graveyard of the Gibson clan looks out across thousands of acres of permanently ruined land below.

The next day we flew over the same terrain in a single-engine aircraft.  From the perspective of several thousand feet, the desolation is all around stretching over six West Virginia counties, perhaps a million acres in all – and the pace of mining is picking up.

Mines, mine wastes, slurry ponds at a scale that defies my ability to describe. The people living below the devastation share in it. Water and gravity will bring death and destruction down on them in due time. When that happens, those working for Massey Coal, Arch Coal and the other operators will, no doubt, call this an “act of God,” but it will be no such thing. It will be an extenuation of the crime committed by people working for companies who have no care for people or for God.  Their profits are their God and the devil take the hindmost is their morality.

In their wake is ruin at a scale we cannot adequately comprehend over a time scale that we cannot accurately measure.

  Why is this happening? The companies and the politicians they buy say this is about jobs and economic survival. That is a lie. Removing mountaintops, forests, and polluting water with heavy metals and acid employs relatively few and destroys the basis for a better and sustainable economy, forever.

Vice President Cheney says it is part of a national energy strategy and therefore necessary to provide cheap electricity. That, too, is a lie. Electricity made by burning coal is anything but cheap.

It is part of a foolish and destructive energy policy that kills 50,000 or more Americans each year from lung diseases caused by breathing polluted air, destroys forests and waters by acids, and is changing global climate faster than anyone thought possible  even a few years ago. Efficiency, solar, and wind energy are hands down the heart of a better national energy strategy.

Last year, Senator Robert Byrd wrote a book titled “Losing America.” I like the book and have great admiration for Senator Byrd, one of the few true defenders of the Constitution in the U.S. Senate. But for anyone with eyes to see we are losing a large part of West Virginia – truckload by truckload, mountain by mountain. And the loss is forever.

Had terrorists ruined a million acres of America and the lives of its people and the prospects of its children we would be properly outraged and moved to defend the land and ourselves. But the desolation of the mountains and their people is hidden, kept secret, and excused by the worst logic of capitalism devoid of morality and good sense.

It is a crime for which our children will not forgive us.

David W. Orr, is the author of The Last Refuge, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and Ecological Literacy. He is a professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin University.