Bush Administration Declares War on Mountains and the People Who Live There

President Bush is poised to issue regulations that will permit and encourage mountaintop mining, a controversial practice in which the tops of mountains are blasted off and dumped in nearby valleys.

A relatively new practice, mountaintop mining was introduced two decades ago in the coal country of Appalachia. Since then, and in the absence of clear legal and regulatory guidance, it's become a viciously controversial issue.

The new rules, drafted by the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, are a gift to the coal industry. I know that the coal industry is more than corporate executives: it's working people in Appalachia. And for these people, who are affected by pollution generated by surface mining waste, the Bush administration has delivered a poisonous gift indeed.

Before leaving Dayhoit, Blanton and I stopped at the White Star
Cemetery, which sits in a small clearing. Some of the headstones were so old I could barely distinguish them from the large rocks that had rolled down the mountainside. "Hey, this is pretty," Blanton said. "I
don't think I've ever been up here on a day I wasn't burying someone."
Many of the newer tombs were set above-ground in cement vaults. Blanton pulled back some plastic flowers beside one of her cousin's markers.
"She lived next to what we called the killer well," Blanton said.
"Everyone who lived around that well died."

In the middle of the cemetery were buried two of Garnett Howard's three sons, the two who were born after he started working at the McGraw
Edison plant. "They both developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma before they were thirty and died," Blanton said. We stared in silence at the dates on the markers. "Almost nobody in Dayhoit lives past fifty-five," she went on. "At the meetings the people from the EPA would accuse us of being too emotional. I told them, 'Let all of your family members and friends die around you and see if you don't get emotional.'" She knelt beside the grave of a high school friend. On the headstone was a depiction of a father and son standing beside a stream. "He was a real redneck," Blanton said, breaking into a smile. "I loved him."

That's from Erik Reece's "Death of a Mountain," an award-winning essay published in Harper's and later turned into a book. He describes both environmental and human desecration, with pollution ending up in people's homes and bodies. And neither is the practice economically sensible: in the era of mountaintop mining, it doesn't take many workers to destroy a mountain, so coal jobs have dropped by half.
Rule to Expand Mountaintop Coal Mining [New York Times]

Death of a Mountain [Harper's]
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Image: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition*