Yesterday, coalfield residents and organizers from across Appalachia gathered on the West Virginia state capital steps in Charleston, calling for an end to mountaintop removal and surface mining.
Here, they announced Appalachia Rising, a mass mobilization set for September 27th in Washington, DC and issued a rallying call for thousands to join in demanding the Obama Administration abolish surface mining and invest in sustainable economic diversification in Appalachia. Photos are available here. Watch it here:
While local officials and the legislature are kissing the sooty ring of King Coal, West Virginians are losing their homes, their health, and their jobs.
Speaking an uncomfortable truth to power about the destruction wrought by surface mining, Boone County resident and Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition organizer Maria Gunnoe yesterday said, “Lindytown, Sharples, Mifflin, Jack’s Branch…I’ve literally watched throughout Boone County as places have disappeared forever, erased.”
Surface mining is destroying the Appalachians and everything that relies on them, including Appalachian communities. The mining practice releases cancer-causing particulates into the air and contaminates water. Giant reservoirs of toxic coal slurry loom over schools and community spaces. Coal companies are required to restore mountain elevations after their mines are used up, but they do little more than hydro-seed the gravel where mountaintops used to be. Nothing can grow or live on these “restored” mountains thereafter.
And the numbers of miners in West Virginia have fallen from over 60,000 to less than 20,000 in the past thirty years while in the same time period, coal production has nearly doubled in West Virginia. These divergent trends are partly the cause of mountaintop removal, which, despite its massive footprint, kills jobs.
Solutions exist. West Virginia’s Mountaineer Wind Energy Center is the largest wind farm on the eastern seaboard. But there’s no time to wait; when a mountaintop is blown to pieces, the lower the wind speeds are at the top, generating less electricity and less potential for more wind energy development. As the days pass, the opportunity to enact these alternatives is literally being blasted away.
Appalachia has paid a heavy price to provide a mere 7 percent of the country’s coal. That’s why residents of these communities who have for years cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the mountains, from which they’ve derived centuries’ worth of culture and livelihood, are rising up.
From the Appalachia Rising Vision Statement:
“Appalachia Rising declares that we are not a national sacrifice zone. We will not stand idly by as we see our past and future blasted to rubble, our communities and mountains eliminated, and our neighbors poisoned as coal executives and their shareholders grow rich. Appalachians are not, and never will be, collateral damage. We are proud of our coal mining fathers, hard-working neighbors, and Appalachian past, present and future!”
It’s past time to end this nightmare in the coalfields. Please join us on September 27th in Washington, DC. Learn about the many ways you can get involved!
Check out the Facebook Page and Facebook Event.
My biggest hope is that thousands take the time to be there and make our voices so loud they can’t help but to listen and act. I see the Army Corps of Engineers is finally stopping just “rubber stamping” the permits. Hey, I’ll take it. Every battle won leads to winning the war. I have faith we will win this fight. I just hope that it happens soon before any more destruction takes place.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rperks/army_corps_suspends_streamline.html#comments
You know I have read this article and my biggest laugh was when it was stated that nothing could grow or live on these reclaimed mine sites. I have seen first hand that there are things living on these mines, things are growing on these mine sites, but oh yeah it’s just all in my head!
Meanwhile, you people cry clean water, clean air and while the Coal Festival is going on in Boone county some of you people took some spray paint and painted over a state road sign, now if I am not mistaken, that spray paint fumes goes out into the air and causes bad air, you people took a bumper sticker and painted over it with one of your wonderful slogans, now where do you get the time to get out at all hours of the day and night and do this stuff, oh wait, you probably don’t work so therefore you have all the time in the world.
Have a good one…
Raychel and all other pro-MTR commenters–
Your reasoning in the above post is just wrong. Time and time again, people compare small acts of pollution (spray paint, although no anti-MTR activist I know of had anything to do with this and I hadn’t heard of it till now) to large-scale acts of pollution like mountaintop removal mining. You seem like a smart lady, from a practical point of view can’t you see the difference between a small act of pollution and a large one? Unless you are taking a moralist stance, in which you’re suggesting that all pollution, no matter how great or small is wrong (If you were, and you think spray painting is wrong, then mining’s wrong too right? Or do you really think a small act is wrong while a large one is ok? Is it because one act is “legal” while the other is not? Do you believe that all things the law allows is alright, that the government has the right to arbitrarily decide what’s ok or not? Or are you moved by the very very real point that your family, or families you know, depend on MTR to make money and survive? That’s not a concern to belittle, but one to work through and figure out better solutions.)
Examine how you come about your opinions. Challenge them by thinking of your debaters responses. Do not use the same cheap tricks over and over again. Use the smarts and empathy for community you so clearly possess to craft good thoughtful arguments, not ones that hold up about as well as paper plates in the rain.
Also, I work 40+ hours a week. That’s another argument easily proved wrong, simply by looking at the lives and activities of people fighting MTR. We aren’t rich, and we work really hard. You may oppose what we stand for, but you can do better than taking cheap (and untrue) shots.
I believe in a man working for what he has and MTR has been around for years now and I will say this if there is another way to mine the coal then I am not past the point of someone showing me, and as of right now it’s not out there.
Cheap shots are taken on both sides so get over that issue we all need a good laugh everyonce in awhile. Air pollution has been around for years and years, you should have been trying to do something about it before now, not wait till the Earth is in the shape it’s in now. MTR should be the least of our worries right now.
I will do whatever I can to help keep these men and women in a job and if you think it’s wrong then so be it. I believe a man has to work for to provide for his family be it MTR, underground or contour mining. Some people don’t see it the way I do and that is fine, not everyone agrees!
To the above poster: Underground mining. It also employs more jobs. MTR removes them, while it destroys our state.
Angela, how does UG mining employ more people when it only takes 9-10 people these days to operate a section???? On an MTR site you need truckers, loader operators, drillers, blasters, dozer operators, hoe and shovel operators, graders, etc??? Besides, these people are out to stop UG mining also, that’s what most people dont understand!
Thank you for your post and this great site. I’ve shared your information with our community over at ImagineThisTV.net around our project idea for the Marsh Forks Elementary School.
http://www.imaginethistv.net/profiles/blogs/west-virginia-mountain-top
Allyson
Just watched the video, where’s your support? All the same old tired faces.
EM The EPA just “rubber stamped” another permit for Coal-Mac in the Logan & Mingo Co. area. How’s that new “change” workin for ya?
wonder what Bush would’ve done in barack obama’s place… -kat