Deltachord

The Abuse Called Mountaintop Removal Mining2

The top of the mountain is blasted off, after the land to be mined is clear-cut, which is deforestation. The cleared land is used for “arable land, pasture, urban, logged area or wasteland,” according to the article Deforestation in Wikipedia. This article also explains that the amount of intact forests has more rapidly declined worldwide since the middle of the 18thc.

West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky in the U.S.A. have more extensively suffered the abuse of mountaintop removal mining, while central Tennessee and southwest Virginia mountaintops are quickly catching up.

The Clean Water Act has been violated because the mountaintop removal mining brings big bucks to the mining companies, while many miners lose their job. In seven years, 1990-1997 coal industry work declined by 10,000 jobs.

Mining companies have gotten permits on four occasions that allowed them to dump valley fill into streams, which violates The Clean Water Act.

The EPA says that about 724 miles of streams in the Appalachian mountains were loaded to the brim with so called valley fills from 1985-2001.

Also, the biodiversity of the land area is destroyed because of the destruction of the environment.

The EPA says that, by 2010 MTR mining will claim more than 1.4 million acres– a larger land mass than the state of Delaware.

The Civil Society conducted a survey recently and found that 65% of Americans are against the Bush Administrations push to allow more MTR mining, 74% are against MTR mining period, and 90% think that MTR mining should be stopped until the U.S. government has determined for itself what the effects of MTR mining are on the damaged mountain, surrounding land, and rivers. The problem that these American citizens face is that the Bush Administration has rewritten little parts of the environmental laws, which allow huge abuses to legally occur.

An example is given by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post:

Today, mountaintop removal is booming again, and the practice of dumping mining debris into stream beds is explicitly protected, thanks to a small wording change to federal environmental regulations. U.S. officials simply reclassified the debris from objectionable “waste” to legally acceptable “fill.”
Look At This: It Will BreaK Your Heart

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
Huntinton West Virginia
High Resolution Mountaintop Removal Pictures
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/

To be Continued
We will explore what the current administration has done to weaken enviromental laws and which muscians support the environment.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6462-2004Aug16.html
THE FINE PRINT: A Word Accelerates Mountaintop Mining
Appalachia Is Paying Price for White House Rule Change

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A01