See accompanying blog post from Peace, Social Justice, and Truth for All on the last remaining scientist to debunk global warming – lucratively sponsored by King Coal.
August 3, 2006 at 12:28 pm
According to a recent article in the Augusta Free Press on the impacts of coal fired power plants, mountaintop removal coal mining in Southern Appalachia is responsible for:
* Leveling one in five mountain peaks
* Clearcutting 7% of hardwood forests
* Burying 1200 miles of streams with overburden
A couple other facts:
* Over 1,000,000 (one million) acres or 1500 square miles of mountains have been destroyed in Appalachia by mountaintop removal (aka contour and cross-ridge) coal mining
* The appalachian mountains are considered some of the oldest mountains in the World – 300 million years old
August 3, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Join coalfield citizens and community activists in Charleston, SC, August 4-6 for the Governors Association Convention.
Because of the indifference and complicity of the governors of these states [TN, KY, VA, WV] over 500 square miles of forested mountains have been leveled in southern Appalachia, lost forever to the greed of politicians and businessmen.
For more information, see
August 1, 2006 at 11:41 am
“Exploding Heritage”, the radio documentary on mountaintop removal coal mining by NPR’s former Bob Edwards, which aired on Friday via satellite radio, is available from
July 31, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Rape, raped, raping. Violent, ugly words, make you squirm and you want to look away when you hear them. Best saved for use in thier literal context, lest you disarm them. Sometimes, though, the word, the picture of it, finds its perfect embodiment elsewhere. Susanna Rodell, outgoing columnist for the Charleston Gazette uses her last editorial column, Farewell to the Mountains, to tell us what she really thinks about mountaintop removal coal mining.
Over the three years I’ve been in this job, the subject that provoked the strongest emotions, the fiercest outrage by far, was mountaintop removal. Some of those who are involved in practicing this method of getting the black stone out of the earth think this newspaper is out to ruin them. Many of those who oppose the practice have pleaded with me to come out fighting against it. I’ve bided my time. But now that my time is up (sooner than I expected), here’s what I think.
I’ve seen what mountaintop removal does and it’s truly appalling. It makes huge swathes of the state’s forested hills — the kind of primeval landscape now so precious and rare in America — look like the surface of the moon.
Yes, the mining companies are supposed to ameliorate the destruction, but don’t kid yourself. The landscape that’s been subjected to this sort of rape will never recover. I’ve seen some of the so-called reclaimed sites. A flat-topped mound covered with grass does not replace virgin forest.
July 31, 2006 at 11:48 am
Jeremy Peters’ post on the blog Hillbilly Savants has a thoughtful listing of articles, organizations, books, and other sources on mountaintop removal. It was this image of a MTR site, though, that struck me as so beautifully evil that it continues to stay in my mind’s eye. Something about this image seems to capture the depth and breadth of this spectacular evisceration.
July 28, 2006 at 11:58 am
But during Correll’s years at the agency, MSHA withdrew or delayed final action on eighteen mine-safety rules, including the establishment of on-site mine-rescue teams, caches of oxygen and breathing devices for trapped miners and flame-resistant conveyor belts. Price speculated that had these rules been instated, the lives of the fourteen miners killed in the recent Alma Mine and West Virginia Sago accidents may have been saved.
John Correll is Bush’s pick to direct the US Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM). I’m continually astonished at how this administration picks the candidate most likely to fail in doing the job set before him. Read the rest at the New Standard.
July 25, 2006 at 2:48 pm
In his recent piece in Common Dreams (originally published in Rolling Stone), “Crimes Against Nature,” Kennedy horsewhips Bush’s anti-environment record. He devotes several paragraphs to mountaintop removal. I’m glad its on the radar for him. Here are the salient, incriminating references to mountaintop removal:
The new administration also trumped court decisions that would have enforced greater degrees of wetlands protection and forbidden coal moguls from blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.
She [Gale Norton] suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause “tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat”
During the first Reagan administration, Griles worked directly under James Watt at Interior, where he helped the coal industry evade prohibitions against mountaintop-removal strip mining. In 1989, Griles left government to work as a mining executive and then as a lobbyist with National Environmental Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm that represented the National Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one of the nation’s largest power producers. When Griles got his new job at Interior, the National Mining Association hailed him as “an ally of the industry.” It’s bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in charge of regulating mining on public land. But it turns out that Griles is still on the industry’s payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to his partner Marc Himmelstein for four annual payments of $284,000, making Griles, in effect, a continuing partner in the firm.
Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate made him agree in writing that he would avoid contact with his former clients as a condition of his confirmation. Griles has nevertheless repeatedly met with former coal clients to discuss new rules allowing mountaintop mining in Appalachia and destructive coal-bed methane drilling in Wyoming. He also met with his former oil clients about offshore leases. These meetings prompted Sen. Joseph Lieberman to ask the Interior Department to investigate Griles. With Republicans in control of congressional committees, no subpoenas have interrupted the Griles scandals.
At the Senate’s request, Griles had signed a “statement of disqualification” on August 1st, 2001, committing himself to avoiding issues affecting his former clients. Three days later, he nevertheless appeared before the West Virginia Coal Association and promised executives that “we will fix the federal rules very soon on water and soil placement.” That was fancy language for pushing whole mountaintops into valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry. As a Reagan official, Griles helped devise the practice, which a federal court declared illegal in 2002, after 1,200 miles of streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of Appalachian forestlands had been rendered barren moonscapes.
Now Griles was promising his former coal clients he would fix these rules. In May 2002, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers adopted the language recommended by his former client, the National Mining Association. Had Griles not intervened, the practice of mountaintop-removal mining would have been severely restricted. Griles also pushed EPA deputy administrator Linda Fisher to overrule career personnel in the agency’s Denver office who had given a devastating assessment to a proposal to produce coal-bed methane gas in the Powder River basin in Wyoming. Although Griles had recused himself from any discussion of this subject because it would directly enrich his former clients, he worked aggressively behind the scenes on behalf of a proposal to build 51,000 wells. The project will require 26,000 miles of new roads and 48,000 miles of pipeline, and will foul pristine landscapes with trillions of gallons of toxic wastewater.
July 25, 2006 at 2:08 pm
The Courier-Journal, out of Louisville Kentucky has an op-ed in today’s paper entitled “Battered, but not defeated: ‘Do Kentuckians care about the loss of mountains, forests, streams?'” Coincidently, it is written by Bob Edwards, the veteran radio reporter who is also airing the documentary “Exploding Heritage” that I wrote about yesterday.
He asks some biting questions:
Do Americans know this is happening? Why isn’t it getting more attention? If the Adirondacks or the Catskills were being blown up, wouldn’t New York camera crews be in helicopters shooting video of the devastation? Why is there so much outrage over plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and so little notice paid to the destruction of our oldest mountains? Why was there so much news coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill when a coal waste spill 30 times bigger in Martin County got hardly any national press? Do Kentuckians care about the loss of mountains, forests and streams? Is there concern about silt and mining chemicals spoiling the drinking water? How can a state with so many hunters and fishermen tolerate the loss of habitat for fish and wildlife?
and hits us where it hurts:
Finding villains in Washington and Frankfort is the easiest thing for a reporter to do. I might also look in the mirror. I’m writing this on a computer kept running by electricity supplied by a power plant that may be burning coal. I like my electric lights and my air conditioning. Would I pay a higher utility bill if it meant preserving a few more mountains in my native state? I would, but perhaps others can’t afford to do that. We’ll never know because our leaders aren’t asking us to sacrifice our lifestyle or to invest our tax dollars in developing other sources of energy. In the name of “freeing our country from dependence on foreign sources of energy,” we are blowing up our natural heritage. We are not asked to sacrifice, so nature must sacrifice. Nature doesn’t vote.
July 23, 2006 at 12:05 pm
The blog Nostalgic Rumblings has a post on an upcoming radio documentary on mountaintop removal in Southern Appalachia. Here are the basics:
What: Documentary “Exploding Heritage” on The Bob Edwards Show
When: Friday, July 28, 8:00 a.m. ET
Where: XM Satellite Radio’s public radio channel, XMPR (Channel 133)
July 22, 2006 at 11:45 am
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