Mountaintop removal coal mining, often described as "strip mining on steroids," is an extremely destructive form of mining that is devastating Appalachia. In the past few decades, over 2,000 miles of streams and headwaters that provide drinking water for millions of Americans have been permanently buried and destroyed. An area the size of Delaware has been flattened. Local coal field communities routinely face devastating floods and adverse health effects. Natural habitats in some our country's oldest forests are laid to waste. Earthjustice has been in the courts and in Congress on behalf of other local and national environmental and community groups to stop this destructive practice and protect Appalachia for future generations.
How It's Done
Coal companies first raze an entire mountainside, ripping trees from the ground and clearing brush with huge tractors. This debris is then set ablaze as deep holes are dug for explosives. An explosive is poured into these holes and mountaintops are literally blown apart. Huge machines called draglines—some the size of an entire city block, able to scoop up to 100 tons in a single load—push rock and dirt into nearby streams and valleys, forever burying waterways. Coal companies use explosives to blast as much as 800 to 1,000 feet off the tops of mountains in order to reach thin coal seams buried deep below. ...
Not that back in those days they had the equipment and techniques of today's mountaintop removal, but it is as if all of the intervening decades of learning about ecology and our inter-connectedness with nature, tying into health, safety and our general quality of life, and especially to that of our grandkids, has gone unlearned. True, people should have had more common sense in the Old West, but it is easy to judge others by our modern standards, and ecology as a science began only at about the beginning of the 20th century.
Of course the mountaintop removal controversy is far from being just a matter of environmentalists versus an extractive industry, since even retired coal miners living below these excavations find their communities hurt by the damage to things like drinking water, fishing and tourism.
In the past there have been open-pit mining and all sorts of other ways to gut and denude the landscape, particularly high-pressure hydrological mining in the West, so things like this are not entirely unheard of. And not to forget that miners themselves--having a granddad who worked in a copper mine--are pretty much unsung heroes for the brutal risks they take to supply us with convenient energy.
But, again, the bizarreness persists. If this guillotining and smothering of Mother Nature weren't actually occurring and you were to write all this up in the form of fiction, many people would roll their eyes and say, "Sure, slicing off entire mountaintops and bulldozing the debris down into streams and valleys where people fish, hike and drink the water--as if that would actually be legal!"
And all this still takes place under a national administration that is often accused of environmental extremism. Well, one thing in their favor is that this war against on our mountaintops and the surrounding communities and the hapless plants and critters is entirely consistent with the untold damage to the environment and the quality of life that will be done to future generations by the administration's belief in forever redoubling U.S. population numbers through massive legal and illegal in-migration, including offspring.
As we all know, the Obama administration even goes after state governors who try to help enforce federal border laws that the feds mostly smirk at, before they chortle up their sleeves. How environmentally (and security) sick is that? And how huge a betrayal? It is almost as if America were a lush blue-green majestic snow-capped mountain that is in the process of being merrily sliced off by the very elites we elected and entrusted to protect her.
But, again, the bizarreness persists. If this guillotining and smothering of Mother Nature weren't actually occurring and you were to write all this up in the form of fiction, many people would roll their eyes and say, "Sure, slicing off entire mountaintops and bulldozing the debris down into streams and valleys where people fish, hike and drink the water--as if that would actually be legal!"
And all this still takes place under a national administration that is often accused of environmental extremism. Well, one thing in their favor is that this war against on our mountaintops and the surrounding communities and the hapless plants and critters is entirely consistent with the untold damage to the environment and the quality of life that will be done to future generations by the administration's belief in forever redoubling U.S. population numbers through massive legal and illegal in-migration, including offspring.
As we all know, the Obama administration even goes after state governors who try to help enforce federal border laws that the feds mostly smirk at, before they chortle up their sleeves. How environmentally (and security) sick is that? And how huge a betrayal? It is almost as if America were a lush blue-green majestic snow-capped mountain that is in the process of being merrily sliced off by the very elites we elected and entrusted to protect her.
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