Mountain Top Removal

I saw an article from Mud, WV on this in the paper the other day and while I've known about it for awhile and seen it when I've flown over areas that are decimated by it - it is still one of the most depressing things. It's such a concrete example of how the American Lifestyle is destroying nature in our own backyard. Energy to power our conveniences seen as so necessary that people justify destroying entire mountains along with all of the wildlife, animals, trees, ferns, and flowers, streams, insects and all that goes with it. Surely people could be cutting back on their usage instead of resorting to this.

This article quoted Roy Carter as saying the Midwest and South were the users of the power generated by the destruction of the mountains. Another article referred to Washington D.C. and their increased population and energy use.

This site ->www.ilovemountains.org
has a way for people to input their zip code and see what connection their local power plant has to mountain top removal.

Carter speaks out against Mountain Top Removal:

In the coalfields of central Appalachia, the ridge tops themselves are being forever leveled by a coal mining practice known as mountain top removal. In the past two decades more than 470 mountains have been decapitated, more than 1,000 miles of headwater streams have been filled, and more than a million acres of hardwood forests have been stripped from an area the size of Delaware, all for the purpose of extracting cheap fuel for coal fired power plants in the Midwest and South, power plants whose pollutants cause premature deaths, hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular complications, asthma attacks, and the further deterioration of the forests in our own Blue Ridge mountains. In the name of economic development and job creation, large coal corporations in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee are sapping the economic future of coalfield mountain communities.

W.Va. town copes with mountaintop mining:

MUD, W.Va. - This is a place where moving mountains is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountaintops off their pedestals to get the kind of coal that Washington needs.

It happened here, on a ridgeline called Sugar Tree Mountain, where locals once hunted for squirrels and puckery sour grapes. Then, the top was scraped off to expose the black seams in its innards, leaving a rock-strewn plateau.

"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."

Though this isolated mine is more than 400 miles from Washington, the two places share a powerful connection: coal. The D.C. region, with its need for electricity skyrocketing, has been steadily burning more coal, buying almost a third of its supply from this part of Appalachia.

And that, analysts and environmentalists said, means that Washington's air conditioners and iPods have helped drive the region's "mountaintop" mining.

The coal industry and the Bush administration say the benefits of these mines, measured in jobs and energy, outweigh the damage.

But in West Virginia, where mining opponents can face back-roads intimidation, some neighbors say that Washington area residents might not know the true cost of their power.

"We have to go through a lot for them to get their electric," said Lucille Miller, who picked the grapes on the vanished mountain.

The links that bind the suburbs of Washington to the mines of West Virginia can be traced through federal energy records. The Washington Post analyzed almost four years of data, showing where the six coal-fired power plants across the region bought their supply.

The records make one thing clear: The plants have been buying a lot more coal. Total purchases were more than 40 percent higher in 2006 than in 2004. The increase came as the Washington region's demand for electricity grew 18 percent since 2001, driven by population growth and an increasingly wired culture. D.C. area plants do not send their electricity straight to local homes, but feed it into the regional power grid.

Records also show that about 32 percent of the coal the plants bought came from one kind of mine in this corner of Appalachia - a "surface" operation, where miners do not have to tunnel.

The region, where southern West Virginia meets Virginia and Kentucky, is home to the vast majority of mountaintop mines in the United States.... (more)

And then there is the Tar Sands

project up in Canada which is destroying forests for oil....