Imagine that one day you woke up and looked out your window
to see that an entire mountain was missing. You hear constant explosions that are so violent they crack the foundation
of your house. The tap water turns
black. The small creek in your backyard fills with a foul smelling, poisonous
sludge. Unnatural floods destroy the
only bridge to your town, and even carry off your dog. Think this is a scene from a third world
country or a war zone? This is happening
in West Virginia, right here in the United States of America.
Last Thursday, I attended the Coastal Conservation League Film
Festival. The feature film was called
simply “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” This is just what it sounds like. The Coal companies literally blast up to 800 feet of elevation clear off
the top of a mountain in order to access coal deposits beneath them. They use huge machines called drag lines to
scrape away the tons of rock. Thanks to
an administrative “correction” made in 2002 to redefine the list of acceptable
fill materials, the “overburden”, which is the polite name for all the debris
that used to be a mountaintop, can now be dumped directly into the valleys,
choking off streams and destroying watersheds. Already over 1200 miles of streams and 400,000 acres have been destroyed
in this area, and 1.4 million acres are at risk. 1.4 million acres. That is larger than the state of Delaware.
As the coal is then mined and processed, a waste product
called “coal slurry” is formed. This is
disposed of by injecting into abandoned mine shafts, or by creating large
earthen dams and dumping the sludge into the valleys. One of the images I will never forget from the
film is that of Marsh Fork Elementary School. This school is located 400 feet downhill from a dam holding back a lake
containing 2.8 BILLION gallons of this toxic slurry.
Now, as someone who spent countless weekends hiking in the
hills of West Virginia, or white water rafting with my family, I am horrified
by what is being done to this beautiful wilderness. For the sake of argument, let’s say you are
not a tree-hugger like me, and don’t care about that. Why should you care about mountaintop removal
mining? The USGS estimates that if
mountaintop removal continues at its current pace, over 100 million pounds of
heavy metals, including Mercury and Arsenic may find their way into the water
supply of cities along the east coast. It
also destroys jobs. The huge drag lines
take only a handful of people to operate, and replace hundreds of traditional
mining jobs. All of this destruction
generates roughly 5% of the usable coal in the United States.
I’ve probably depressed you enough by now, so I will close
with what you can do to help. The first
is to help lobby in support of the Clean Water Protection Act. Already over 152 members of congress have
voiced their support as co-sponsors of this bill. Get your local congress person to join their
ranks. There is a great website http://www.ilovemountains.org with tons of resources to help you do
this. It’s an election year, they will
listen!
The other way you can fight this is to lessen the
demand. Santee Cooper is one of the only
utility companies in the region proposing to build a new Coal-Fired power
plant. Not only would this increase
demand for coal, it would dump over 114 pounds of mercury into the Pee Dee
river each year. Santee Cooper is owned
by the state of South Carolina. For
those of us living in South Carolina, let’s tell our elected officials we don’t
need this power plant. Tell them that we
cannot condone the systematic destruction of the land and people of Appalachia in
the name of cheaper coal.
This past Thursday I picked up my first batch of produce from the fall harvest of the Ambrose Farm CSA. There are a lot of reasons I joined a CSA. It's a great way to support a local business. It helps me eat local and reduce my impact on the environment. It will encourage me to eat healthier, with more vegetables that are mostly organic. 
