It's funny how these embarrassing announcements always come on late Friday afternoon.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Activists with
Mountain Justice, Rainforest Action Network and other groups planned
protests at Environmental Protection Agency headquarters and across the
country Friday to demand the end of mountaintop removal mining in
Appalachia.
An online map showed more than two dozen planned
events from California to Maine, including demonstrations at a regional
EPA office in Philadelphia and a New Jersey office of JPMorgan &
Chase Co., a bank environmentalists say is the biggest financier of the
destructive form of strip mining.
BREAKING NEWS: The Coalfield Uprising is spreading across the nation.
As millions of pounds of explosions rip across their mountain
communities, including the clean energy landmark of Coal River
Mountain, scores of residents from the Appalachian coalfields have
joined with supporters from across the country in a series of sit-ins,
die-ins, protests, and a haunting "Day of the Dead" funeral procession
and sit-in in the courtyard of the Washington, DC headquarters of the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Appalachian community advocates and environmentalists across the nation are expressing outrage that mountaintop removal coal mining operations have begun on Coal River Mountain
in West Virginia, a mountain that has become symbolic in the nationwide
campaign to end mountaintop removal mining.
The Battle at Coal River Mountain has officially begun.
When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn't have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family's ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.
In a stunning blow to mountaintop removal blasting operations in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia this morning, two fearless protesters scaled massive trees and unfurled banners from their 80-foot-high platforms. Within 300 feet of the Massey Energy's Edwight mountaintop removal blasting site, above Pettry Bottom and Peachtree in Raleigh County, West Virginia, the protesters called on the federal agencies to crack down on the scandal-ridden West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WV DEP) and the stop the unsafe and reckless blasting in the area.
Last fall, Tom Zeller at the
New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines.
And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament from various political parties in the eastern part of the state of Maharashtra put aside their differences and called on the Prime Minister to stop a coal mine in a forest reserve.
This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal EPA and Office of Surface Mining to take over the key duties of the dysfunctional state agency.
