Appalachia under attack - Society lives with its impact

Comment: Yes, we need to stop Mt. Top Removal but future uranium mining will be thousands of times worse. The State of Virginia wants to blowup our hillsides for open pit uranium mining! Demand all our leaders to stop the insane practice of Mt. Top Removal and uranium mining all over America!

November 7, 2009
By Mary Popham
Special to The Courier-Journal

‘If the American people could witness the destruction I have seen in the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia there would be a revolution in this country,” says Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Mountaintop-removal mining is devastating southern Appalachia, tearing up mountains, burying streams, flattening forests and extinguishing the region's rich culture.”

Kennedy is one of the activists presenting the deplorable, unbelievable story in Plundering Appalachia, an expose of the ruination by the coal companies for maximum profits. This collection reveals the horror with lavish, large-format photographs and comprehensive pieces, many reprinted, from ecologists, environmentalists, educators, writers, community organizers, and residents of the mountain ranges in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee.

In the Foreword, Douglas R. Tompkins says that the “attack on Appalachia speaks to more than coal mining, it reveals us as a society.”

The passionate essays include substantiating information: the history of coal-mining, how mineral rights were stolen, testimony from the residents, accounts of studies that are ignored and laws that have failed to control this outrage. They go beyond describing the effects of getting coal from the ground.

Along with the missing mountaintops, and the falsehood of “reclamation,” we live with the impact of coal's processing and use. Big Coal discards trees and topsoil, whose removal causes flooding.

The fallacy of “clean coal” is proven: toxic wastes from “washing” the coal leach into the rivers and ground waters.

Black water flows from taps. Black dust is always in the air, on furniture and in the lungs of the residents. Black sludge ponds overflow and compromise the water supply. Coal mining-related acid damage has poisoned over 8,000 miles of eastern U.S. streams.

The book also contains significant information on coal as fuel and its effect on global warming — a concern of far more than a region or a country. Nothing in the world produces more greenhouse gases than the burning of coal (much of it to generate electricity). It's easy to see why this may be the greatest threat ever to confront humanity.

Wendell Berry states, “We are destroying our country — I mean our country itself, our land … Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well.”

Lend your voice to the court of public opinion and commit to the immediate cessation of the plundering of Appalachia and our own hometowns beyond.

Mary Popham is a writer and critic who lives in Louisville.

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