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TechnoratiBattle Over Mountaintop Mining Slowly Gains Ground
Despite gains, mountaintop removal mining foes battle Americans' indifference, ignorance
The activists have harnessed the power of the Web, social networking and satellite phones. They've chained themselves to heavy equipment, blocked haul roads and climbed trees to stop blasting. They've marched for miles, hung banners and been arrested.
![[In this Sept. 18, 2008 file photo, a mountaintop removal mining site at Kayford Mountain, W.Va. with Coal River Mountain, left, in the background. Environmental activists gained more momentum this year than in the past decade against the destructive, uniquely Appalachian form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal. But they have yet to mobilize the millions of supporters they want. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner, File) ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/mountaintop.jpg "mountaintop.jpg")
They've even enlisted support from celebrities like actress Darryl Hannah, country singer Kathy Mattea and attorney Robert Kennedy Jr., who is expected to attend a rally Monday at the state Department of Environmental Protection in Charleston.
And yet they struggle to overcome the collective indifference of average Americans, plugged in to affordable electricity produced largely by coal-fired power plants.
Consumers, it seems, aren't debating mountaintop mining at the dinner table.
"It's not part of the national conversation yet, but it definitely needs to be because it's an indication of what's wrong with our country - corporate greed," says ex-Marine Bo Webb, whose Naoma home sits below a mountaintop mine and within 10 miles of three coal-waste dams.
In mountaintop removal mining, forests are clear-cut. Explosives blast apart the rock, and machines scoop out the exposed coal. The earth left behind is dumped into valleys, covering intermittent streams.
Coal operators say it's the most efficient way - in some cases, the only way - to reach some reserves. They also argue they reclaim the land so it can be redeveloped. Critics say the land is ruined forever, and that people, property and the environment suffer unnecessarily.
"This is sort of the quiet apocalypse that is happening in the hills and hollows of West Virginia that people in Los Angeles don't know about," says Nell Greenberg of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network. "We're trying to take the shroud off."
Greenberg says she senses a "bubbling up" of national interest that dovetails with growing demand to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources. One day last month, she says, more than 65,000 people e-mailed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Her group has chapters in Philadelphia and Atlanta taking regular action, "and MTR isn't happening there," Greenberg says. "But they get the connections."
So why don't others?
Although the practice may seem tailor-made to stoke public outrage, it lacks a cuddly mascot. Its victims are not photogenic polar bears or spotted owls; they are people and places.
Mountaintop mining occurs in sparsely populated parts of Appalachia, places tourists don't visit. It is rugged, unglamorous country, filled with valuable natural resources, yet slow to inspire passion.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Americans voiced strong opinions on whether oil companies should drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. People cared because the debate pitted $4-per-gallon gasoline against Alaska's majestic, snowcapped mountains.
But there is no sticker shock at the light switch. The cost of electricity has grown slowly and steadily. Tolerably, even.
"A lot of people who live directly in the shadow of this do spend time wondering why the rest of America doesn't care," says Vivian Stockman, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in Huntington. "They wonder out loud whether the sort of 'hillbilly' stereotype helps people dissociate themselves from what is happening here."
But plenty of people with power are paying attention.
"The practice of mountaintop removal mining has a diminishing constituency in Washington," Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., warned last week. "Most members of Congress, like most Americans, oppose the practice."
Just before Thanksgiving, a federal judge ruled the Army Corps of Engineers broke the law by failing to give the public enough of a say before issuing permits. The corps was already considering rules to end a fast-track system for obtaining such permits, and the EPA was already holding up 79 strip mine permits in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee for additional scrutiny.
The environmentalists are "waking up a pretty big industry that has maybe taken the opposition from some of these groups for granted," says Chris Hamilton, senior vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association.
The industry fights back by equating support for coal with patriotism, and by portraying opposition to mountaintop removal as opposition to gainful employment.
Virginia-based Massey Energy organized a "Friends of America" rally on Labor Day. A "Faces of Coal" ad campaign focuses on people whose jobs the industry says are at risk. TV ads tout the ways the industry benefits communities.
"Although the industry has always had challenges," Hamilton says, "I'm not sure they've been quite as dramatic or as threatening as they are today."
Ten years ago, when environmentalists began the mountaintop removal fight, few people knew the term. Now they get nods of recognition. But Stockman says cutting through an "infotainment culture ... where news is dominated by what's going on with Britney Spears' navel or Tiger Woods' private life" is still a challenge.
And that, says fellow activist Webb, is why Kennedy's visit matters.
"We have to play that game, 'What does America want to watch?'" he says. "Do they want to watch Darryl Hannah get arrested? Yes, they do. Do they want to watch Bobby Kennedy screaming at the DEP headquarters parking lot? Yes, they do."
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On the Web:
W.Va. Coal Association: http://www.wvcoal.com/mountain-top-mining/what-is-moutain-top-mining.html
Coal River Mountain Watch: http://www.crmw.net/
7 Comments so far
Show AllThe most important war this nation has ever faced is going on right now--It is the fossil fuel industry and their Wall Street backers versus everybody else. They will destroy any community, any natural environment. They attack one little community or region of the country at a time. They have the financial resources and the pro-industry regulations and legal loopholes to run roughshod over any rural area they target for exploitation.
We have to learn to recognize this for what it is--a multifront war. I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where the gas companies are getting ready to start "hydrofracking" the Marcellus Shale. To learn about this environmental horror visit shaleshock.org, toxicstargeting.com and briggsseekins.wordpress.com
It is crucial that Congress and the Senate repeal the "Halliburton Loophole" that gives energy companies an exemption to the Clean Air and Water Acts, among many other important federal regulations. These Cheney era exemptions have given the energy company the legal right to pursue their own profits at the direct expense of human safety and local autonomy. Obama and the Democrat party must be forced to repeal these fascist, Bush/Cheney era policies.
Secondly, this country must make a serious committment to lowering its energy consumption and investing in a renewable energy infrastructure.
The battle described above is not merely West Virgnia's battle. The battle my neighbors are waging in the Southern Tier of New York State is not only our battle. Everybody in the United States, everybody linked into the energy grid, everybody who wants to breathe clean air and drink clean water, needs to recognize that these battles are part of the same war. And that war is being fought against them, too.
Briggs Seekins
briggsseekins.wordpress.com
Amen Briggis, I'm with you.
AMERICA HAS BECOME A NATION OF UNCLE TOMS DOING ANY DANCE THAT
THEIR CORPORATE MASTERS ORDER! I READ PEOPLE ON CRAIG'S LIST
THAT DON'T EVEN HAVE TIME FOR A RELATIONSHIP BECAUSE
THEIR JOB EITHER LEAVES THEM NO TIME OR THEY LET THEMSELVES
BE DEFINED AS A HUMAN BEING BY THEIR EMPLOYMENT! WORKING
60-70 HOURS A WEEK AND "BEING CAREER ORIENTED" OR SUCH
DRIVEL. THIS MENTALITY LETS CORPS GET AWAY WITH MURDER
BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS TO UPSET THE BOSS ETC! THIS RANT
IS CONNECTED TO THE POST BECAUSE THIS IS THE TYPE OF
THINKING THAT LETS ALL OF THIS SHIT GO ON!
Always admiration and respect for those who are on the frontlines for the values that count for all of us: Respect and caring for The Natural Earth and for The People who live on this Earth.
In comparison to the "front-liners" everywhere representing so many important crucial issues and crucial values for The People and for The Natural Earth that shouldn't require such effort and activity, our Nation has become an empty shell of a flag-waving propaganda machine, and far too many of our people have become empty shells.
The big corporations, despite the destruction they cause, which by the day, the hour, the minute, puts this one home planet we live on in increasing jeopardy and, of course then, all of humankind and billions of species, have one constant and unyielding focus ... PROFIT. They seem to be indifferent and blind to everything else, and so too are their brainwashed and trained employees, high echelon or low.
By a mistake of a former judge serving as clerk of the court writing a summary abstract of a legal case in the late 1800's, he interpreted/declared Corporations PERSONS, with the same legal rights as persons. This was not the finding in the actual case.
Unfortunately, for actual persons, these legal rights are dwindling, but not for the corporations. Further this summary abstract naming a Corporation as a Person with legal rights, evidently did not require anything in the way of responsibilities of a citizen or those of an ordinary human being. The Corporation is responsible to its stockholders in turning a profit. Period.
Thus, to be high on the rung of Corporate life means that one must erase, lop off, a good part of one's human self so that one can embrace the concept of ANYTHING GOES TO MAKE A PROFIT.
Our citizenry has been wooed in every way imaginable to believe they NEED and MUST BUY, MUST HAVE what Corporations represent or produce and create. With the help of mega-advertising corporations and constant advertising commercials on television, we are manipulated to believe, to embrace fads, life-style changes, and acceptance of what is not good for you, us, the earth.
Whether it's sugar-coated cereals, corn syrup in almost every packaged food, a new, spiffy car, thirty-seven different kinds of pills to take religiously because we have been hypnotized to forget that the vast majority of us have an outstanding immune system as part of our DNA and genetic heritage, ... a physical body that regulates and balances all kinds of complex functions that also heals a lot of maladies all by itself. Being sensible, eating right, or, for example, letting a common cold run its course with a little help from lemon or orange juice for Vitamin C and some rest would eliminate most of the unnessary traffic to hospital emergency rooms. But we are now dumb and frequently panicked because we look to the "experts," we look outside of ourselves, as if we didn't have instinctual wisdoms and an extravangantly efficient physical body to partner those wisdoms.
Obviously, parts of our thinking minds have been skillfully lopped off too.
Thus we, as empty shells, and corporations, as empty shells, could care less, can no longer understand that we are related to the earth, and that the earth is also an organism with a magnificent "immune system," but we are destroying it with every mountain top we lop off, for every river clogged with the fall-out debris, with every tree, animal, insect, plant that has been sacrificed for PROFIT. And that is all over the world.
West Virginians, like so many others in various locales, also are losing the very natural beauty that feeds the soul and the heart and results in magnificent stories, poems, paintings, music and song, and one's own and one's family memories and history.
It's all just a Shell game really, and produces uncaring, indifferent people and also angry and violent people because what they treasured has just been dissed, discounted, destroyed, erased ... like it was nothing and they are nothing.
And when a country and a people are just empty shells reduced to NOTHING, it's perfectly fine to torture and kill others and make wars [FOR PROFIT!] because if the Nation is NOTHING and you and I are reduced to NOTHING, how can one care or feel for all those other NOTHINGS out there including the value and grandeur of the Natural World.
Next to shopping at Wal-Marts and having a nice, warm, cozy home, who cares about where the stuff comes from or how it got here.
My and my family's needs are met. Who cares about anybody or anything else.
Ain't life grand?
... until I lost my job, ... until the bombs fell on our house and destroyed the neighborhood, ... until there was no drinkable water, ... until the drought came and we ran out of water, ... until we couldn't breath the air anymore without choking, ... until our last two kids were born with severe birth defects, ... until we lost our home and sort of live on the road now, ...
How did all this happen anyway?
/cm
Great comments Cee Miracles and all...
-- I don't have access to TV but does anyone know if there has ever been a documentary film about mountaintop removal shown on such channels as Discovery or History? Or how about an ad spot being shown during a football game or American Idol or Dancing with the Stars? That would be the best way to inform people IMHO.
I have sent emaillinks to photos and films to everyone I know and not one person responded.
It's not just WV that will lose its beauty. The same will happen to neighboring states along with rising cancer rates and higher premiums. Did you know that Walmart is ironically the biggest employer of WV?
But, of course what's needed is faithful enforcement of the Clean Water Act's 1985 deadline at least NOW for ELIMINATION of such water pollutant (SPOIL FILL) discharge into the Nation's wetlands. NOT BIG COAL'S GAINING "GROUND"!