Home » Travel » Appalachia » Mountaintop Removal: Should It Go On?

Mountaintop Removal: Should It Go On?

© Greg Cruey

"Persons who have studied the impact of coal mining on different societies from Silesia to northern Japan have usually concluded that coal has been a curse upon the land that yielded it. West Virginia is no exception. In its repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, in its seemingly endless series of disasters, the coal industry has brought grief and hardship to all but a small proportion of the people whose lives it has touched."

Well maybe... I'll reserve judgement for now.

Dan Radmacher attributes that quote to historian John Alexander Williams in a June 19, 1998 column, Coal hurts those it pretends to help, in the Charleston Gazette.

The relationship between economics and the environment is probably more heated in West Virginia than in any other state in the Union. And the emotions involved in that relationship are exploding with new force in the Mountain State at the moment amidst renewed opposition to a form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal.

Two new articles available online give some idea of the issues at stake and the emotions involved.

An August 31 Washington Post Article: Massive New Mines Shake Coal Country looks at the issue from a broad perspective and gives readers some insight into the process of mountaintop removal.

A November 22 article in the Charleston Gazette, titled Buying Blair, gives readers a closer look at the location most affected at the moment by mountaintop removal - Blair, West Virginia, in Logan County.

The Charleston Gazette has kept close tabs on the issue of mountaintop removal and a large index of Gazette articles on the topic are available online at Mining the Mountains.

The players...

Several people are involved as significant parties to the current debate.

The leading coal industry representative in the legal and political quagmire is Arch Coal, Inc.. Arch Coal is in the midst of what is probably the largest mountaintop removal operation in U.S. history. And in Logan County, WV, the St. Louis-based company has basically bought and evacuated the town of Blair to keep it from blocking the path of progress.

The West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection is the government agency most responsible for overseeing and regulating mountaintop removal mining in the state. Much of the current crisis dates back to an April announcement that a group of WV citizens intended to sue the DEP for its failure to regulate mountaintop mining: Suit will challenge mountaintop removal mining.

The copyright of the article Mountaintop Removal: Should It Go On? in Appalachia is owned by . Permission to republish Mountaintop Removal: Should It Go On? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.