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

Bush Admin. Finalizes Mountain Massacre “Study”

A New York Times columnist noted, “This administration’s grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they’re promoting national security when they’re hurting it; they say they’re squelching terrorists when they’re breeding them.”

And so it goes with the draft environmental impact statement on mountaintop removal, which BushCo finalized

in November.

The Charleston Gazette editorialized on Nov. 11: “The government has ignored its own scientific findings that point to the need to protect streams and mountains. Instead, the EPA produced a $5.5 million doorstop of a report that would lead the nation in the opposite direction.”

The editorial below calls it for what it is:

And Now to ‘Streamline’ King Coal’s Beheading of Appalachia

  by Frank Clines, Nov. 7, 2005, New York Times editorial

Six years ago, Jim Weekley…defend(ed) his seven-tenths-of-an-acre homestead in West Virginia’s Pigeon Roost Hollow from a gargantuan mining process with a formidable name – mountaintop removal – that tells only half the truth.

The other half is the obliteration of countless streams, forests and hamlets lying below as mountaintops are systematically decapitated with dynamite to leave mesa-like tabletops. Rich low-sulfur coal veins are thereby exposed and mammoth 20-story-tall bulldozers move in to dump millions of tons of slag waste down into mountain hollows like Pigeon Roost...

Surprisingly, Mr. Weekley’s court challenge – that federal environmental law bars such vast destruction of streams and forests – succeeded well enough to make the industry still known as King Coal tremble on its throne.

Companies ballyhooed “environmental awards” for Potemkin restoration projects. “Lipstick on a corpse” was the apt description of Ken Hechler, a firebrand politician and environmentalist trusted in the community hollows.

Pro-industry officials scrambled to order up election-season studies of mountaintop removal – even while they permitted it to continue.

That was five years ago. Last month, the Bush administration demonstrated just how regal King Coal remains when it issued a long-delayed report on mountaintop removal that callously announced that “these expensive studies” on damages to the countryside have become too “exorbitant” to be continued.

That’s right: the Department of Interior bureaucracy, stacked with key political appointees from the mining industry, would bury the mountaintop abuses and complaints like so much slag under the government’s deficit-bloated budget.

The report amounted to a stunning bait-and-switch in which various worthy proposals to control the size and damages of mountaintop removal, which were present in early drafts, were never dealt with in the final report. Scientific studies confirmed the damage to streams and forests but were attached as addendums, as if they were afterthoughts.

The hollow dwellers of Appalachia discovered that damage control means something quite different in Washington: the report’s main proposal was to promise companies a “centralizing and streamlining” of current paperwork to make it easier, not more arduous, to strip-mine mountains. That fulfilled a directive of Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles, a former mining industry lobbyist, that was made in 2001, before he resigned to go back to lobbying.

In the course of the study, thousands of Appalachian residents pleaded in hearings and petitions that the government bring mountaintop removal under control. Many of them are old-timers from the boom era of underground mining, dismayed that the pastoral hollows of their retirement are being buried. Many hamlets spared condemnation found the plateau-like configuration of the stripped mountains causing torrential drainage shifts and floods dismissed as “acts of God” by mining officials.

“It wasn’t God who went up on our mountain with a dozer to leave it naked,” observed Betty Banks amid the muck in her house in Kentucky’s Chopping Block Hollow.

Estimates are that by the end of the decade, an area larger than the state of Delaware will have been laid waste by dynamite and bulldozer. The Bush administration’s report, issued in the name of environmental impact, will only speed this course.

The Army Corps of Engineers, so busy lately repairing the levee devastation in New Orleans, has been just as busy rubber-stamping permits to strip mountains…

Thus does Appalachian history march on in earth-shaking fashion, with peep-peep punctuation sounds as the giant dozers move back and forth, shaving the mountaintops into the hollows below.