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Stop Mountaintop Removal
In the United States, 100 tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last 20 years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop-removal sites in Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal is one of the most egregious environmental and social justice disasters in America today. This extreme mining practice, taking place largely in the Appalachians, has destroyed at least 500 mountains (1.5 million acres of land) resulting in a huge amount of largely unreported ecological damage and countless ruined lives.
The EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal with thousands more damaged. Where a highly braided system of headwater streams once flowed, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble.
Moreover, the problem is getting worse. As activist and author Jeff Biggers wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, "We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas--the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions---have now been eliminated from our American maps."
Dave Roberts of Grist detailed the brutality of mountaintop removal in a guest post at TheNation.com last year: "Mountain ridges and peaks are clear-cut, stripped of all trees and other flora. Explosives are buried underground, and enormous blasts dislodge millions of tons of rock, dirt, soil, and animal and plant life. That "overburden" is then carted away or dumped into the stream and creek beds in the mountain hollows below, destroying or polluting thousands of miles of running water. Huge 20-story-tall draglines pull away the rock to expose coal seams. Similarly huge machines then yank the coal out and dump the remaining waste down into those streams."
The results? Entire mountains literally blown up, devastating hundreds of square miles of Appalachia; the pollution of the headwaters of rivers that provide drinking water for millions of Americans; and the destruction of a distinctly American culture.
Other consequences? Sick children, according to an Eastern Kentucky University study which found that children in Letcher County, Ky. suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath that can be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals from mine sites. Long-term effects include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract. (Erik Reece heartbreakingly detailed the human cost in an exhaustive piece on Mountaintop removal in Orion magazine in 2006.)
Last May, the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) was introduced to the 110th Congress with 55 original co-sponsors to undo some of this damage. The bill is critical to protect the quality of life for Appalachian coalfield residents and to ensure the safety of the nation's water supply. This year with a friendlier administration and Congress, there's a real chance to pass the H.R. 1310 in the 111th Congress. Please voice your support for ending mountaintop removal coal mining.
Bonus Video: This video, from ilovemountains.org, features residents from the Coal River Mountain region making a powerful case that maintaining the mountains and responsible mining are not mutually exclusive.
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6 Comments so far
Show AllSioux Rose
The mentality that makes war also batters the planet, the living Being that is Gaia. It is cruel and disastrous short-range thinking that puts paper profits before longterm sustainability. I find it as difficult to read about the rape of rain forests and mountains as to learn of the torture of human beings. All of it screams of a hatred of life and living systems. It is an attack against Creative forces, those that make and sustain life. As usual, the key components of this mindset include an allegiance to Mars (that which seizes control over through war, conquest, or related barbarian gestures) or mammon (that which places profit over all things of innate worth and thereby establishes its own raison d'etre for the enslavement of entire ecosystems).
Boy does this nation need to have its consciousness raised; but there's nothing like no money in the pot or food in the pantry to rouse that moment of truth that leads to a new basis for discerning values.
thanks Siouxrose. perfectly expressed. The Native Americans who used to live here knew how to talk to, and listen to the mountains and streams. Too bad they had to yield to the superior values of western civ.
and besides is there not something immediately monstrous in just the phrase "mountain top removal"?
Sioux Rose
ABUELO: Thank you. Since I was a child I have spoken to trees and can read the energy in things. I remember attending a course, "Healing and Communications" taught by Dr. Paul Brenner in San Diego and in the first session he said he believed rocks were alive, just that they vibrated at a slower rate than things we take to be alive, i.e. organic. I dug the guy from that moment. He spoke about how he wanted a rock at the front of his home, but it had to be a rock that belonged there. So he went to a quarry and sat with rocks until one "spoke" to him.
A lady friend of mine has an amazing affinity with the earth. During the phase of Shirley Maclaine's traveling lectures this woman would go to Arkansas and could sit on the ground and almost hear the crystals, sense where they were buried and she became a dealer in these objects.
The Indigenous cultures of the world and their affinity, if nonverbal (sometimes they of course emulate the sounds of other creatures near perfectly) with other Beings is a spiritually based discourse the world would miss if like certain spoken dialects, it passes out of circulation, not to mention cognition.
During the campaign leading up to the election of Barack Obama, I attended the debates at a local theater filled with Obamamites. They cheered practically each time he made a quip. But, the crowd got eerily silent when he announced his endorsement of clean coal as one solution towards the energy crisis. Sounds like an oxymoron if you ask me.
tHER'S A PHOTO IN i THINK THE aUGUST ISSUE OF nATURE MAGAZINE THAT SHOWS AN AERIAL VIEW OF AN MTR.iF IT WASN'T DOCTORED-THE SIGHTS RESULTING FROM THE EXPLOSION ARE POIGNANT BEYOND OUR ORDINARY PERCEPTION.oNE SETION OF THE BLOWN-OFF TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN APPEAR TO BE LARGE TEARS.
sTOP MTR NOW,OR WE LOSE OUR SOULS AS A PEOPLE.
Its amazing what they (coal companies) can get away with when the majority of people (those of us who do not live in Appalachia who need electricity for our A/C) don't care.
Having grown up between two coal tips, knew widows and orphans of the Gresford disaster, and saw the pictures and graves of the Aberfan disaster evry time I drove up to Merthyr, saw first hand the destruction of communities and friendships during the last miners strike ( I lived 100 yds from Whitwick pit, Coalville) I have a love hate relationship with coal.
My good friend Dave Cooper is devoting his life to stopping mountain top removal and I commend his for that, I wish I had his convictions (see The Mountaintop Removal Road Show http://www.mountainroadshow.com/.
BUT......
unless we start to see the people of Appalachia as important and worthy of dignity, then we will continue to ignore them and see what is happening to them as beyond our control.
It has always been the same. From the coalfields of Wales, Midlands, Yorkshire, Scotland, Kent (see video of Coal not Dole written by Kate Sutcliffe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB8ublmImNU ) and America, people are disposable, they are beyond the pale.
We will not solve this issue till we care about what happens to the people of Appalachia if there is no coal mining.