Earth Week speaker decries mountaintop removal
By Stephanie Laird
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
April 17, 2008
Earth Week 2008 keynote speaker Erik Reece, author of “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness,” discussed the devastation that mountaintop-removal coal-mining has on the environment and nearby communities with a panel of activists Monday evening.
“They blast off everything that’s not coal,” explained Reece, a native Kentuckian who teaches at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
Mountaintop removal, he said, is a radical and destructive coal mining practice executed throughout Appalachia by coal companies because they realized blowing the top off mountains is the fastest and cheapest way to mine coal. During the process, he added, the “overburden” – the rocks, topsoil and trees concealing the seams of coal – are dumped into the downslope valleys and streams as “fill material.”
The Clean Water Protection Act, a bill currently pending in Congress, will redefine “fill material” to not include mining “waste” under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Reece said the redefinition will revert the law to what it was before the Bush administration changed it in 2002.
In West Virginia, where the mining practice is used extensively, 1,000 miles of streams have been buried by mountaintop-removal valley fills, according to panelist Julian Martin, vice president for state affairs for the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy. She is also vice-chair of the Kanawha State Forest Foundation and board member of the West Virginia History Association.
According to Reece, 95 percent of the streams surrounding mine sites have been degraded or are dead due to coal-mining practices. Acid-mine drainage, another mining side effect, has contaminated many streams in areas with mining operations (including Athens County, though mountaintop removal isn’t used here). In addition to water resource depletion, mountaintop removal is “occurring in one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America, which is incredibly distressing,” said Reece.
He noted that once the trees have been shaved off and burned from the face of the mountain and deposited in the neighboring valley, there’s nothing left to hold the water back. Consequently, flash floods can wash out an entire community downstream from a mountaintop-removal operation, said Reece. Even worse, he continued, communities near coal-sludge impoundments – areas constructed by coal companies to hold the liquid waste known as sludge or slurry produced from washing and processing coal –risk being drowned by this carcinogenic cocktail if a dam fails.
This potential disaster became all too real for Kentuckians when an impoundment owned by Massey Energy Company released 300 million gallons of viscous sludge in 2000, resulting in the flooding of homes, gardens and the contamination of 75 miles of waterways. While modern impoundments are less likely to falter, they are much larger and more numerous, according to the Sludge Safety Project.
While disasters of this magnitude bring the controversial mountaintop-removal issue into the spotlight, the proliferation of coal dust in communities near mining operations is a less sensational but still significant side effect.
Reece maintained that the coal dust coating Appalachian communities in mining regions results in increased cases of bronchitis. Additionally, “60,000 newborns in our country are at risk because females have mercury in their breast milk,” he said, adding that coal-fired power plants are the leading cause of increased mercury levels in the environment.
“Distance negates responsibility,” said Reece. “We need to take responsibility to negate the difference.” Distance is an issue in mountaintop removal because the people who are impacted are not the people with the power to halt the destruction of the Appalachian mountains.
The ramifications of mountaintop-removal mining are viewed as “externalities” to the people in charge, said Reece, since they are not factoring in the cracked foundations that blasting incurs, losses due to flooding, the decrease in the songbird population, or the coal dust that clouds communities in the vicinity of mountaintop-removal operations.
“The love of money is the root of all evil,” declared Reece. “The coal industry is an interesting demonstration of this,” he added, noting that it regularly contributes millions of dollars to politicians to protect their mineral investments and irresponsible methods.
“Corporations are acting in ways that are fundamentally immoral,” said Reece. “The love of money has corrupted these corporations, which don’t have a moral compass because they’re not an individual; they’re not a real person.”
According to Reece, citizens need to think about themselves as members of the land community so they can begin making the fundamental changes necessary to live sustainably into the 21st century.
Supporters of mountaintop-removal mining, including the coal industry and some economic development officials, argue that it has helped maintain a crucial industry in depressed regions of Appalachia, with jobs and economic development. They cite examples where such mining resulted in rare flat sites for development in otherwise mountainous areas, and have even argued that the resulting habitat can be good for wildlife.
IN HIS DEBUT BOOK, REECE chronicles a mountaintop-removal project at “Lost Mountain” that he witnessed over the course of a year in Kentucky. Month by month he watched the once-majestic mountain vanish, along with the animals and vegetation that formerly called it home.
Reece also ties in the social, class and economic issues associated with this explosive method of coal mining, including testaments from local residents impacted by mountaintop removal and the governmental and corporate shortcomings that permit its continuation.
The panel of activists joining Reece Monday evening included: Julian Martin, a man who was witnessed the devastation of mountaintop removal in his own backyard since his youth; Bill Price, Sierra Club environmental justice coordinator and Clean Water Protection Act lobbyist, whose home and community in West Virginia was flooded in 2001 due to mountaintop removal; and Ohio Student Environmental Coalition member Mattie Reitman.
In relation to the environmental justice theme of Earth Week 2008, Price said the regions of the country producing coal can be overlaid onto areas with the highest poverty rates.
“If the people of Appalachia got the money from the coal mined from the region, we would be one of the richest parts of the country,” he said.
In addition, mountaintop removal not only depletes the environmental quality and resources of a region, he said, it hampers economic development opportunities, since businesses don’t want to locate in regions where you can’t even drink the water.
For information on additional Earth Week 2008 events visit: www.facilities.ohiou.edu/conservation/earthweek.htm
Comments
Please log in to post a comment.
jazzolog commented, on April 17, 2008 at 11:52 a.m.:
While the typo is corrected later in the article, it may be helpful to emphasize Julian Martin is a man. Congratulations to Stephanie for fine coverage. Hopefully an article about Jeff Goodell will show up soon. OU's Earth Week has been spectacular!
