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Fouling the nest.
By Tom | August 23, 2007
Tomorrow the federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) will publish regulations that, in effect, legalize the coal-mining practice of mountaintop removal.
Over at DailyKos, Devilstower does a fine job of expressing the outrage we all should feel about this development. I won’t repeat those points. But I do want to add a little.
I grew up in coal mining country in a small town across the Ohio River from Wheeling, WV. I drive back there through the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia several times each year.
I have to confess I don’t have much fondness for those hills or that part of the country. I’m not going to wax poetic about the beauty of the mountains and hollows. It’s a tough place to live, a tougher place to grow up. Someplace, for the most part, you want to be from — as in gone from there.
But by and large the people who haven’t left are good people who deserve better.
What you probably don’t know about this part of the country is that one of its many problems is a lack of safe, clean drinking water.
I worked for a time with a non-governmental organization that tried desperately to do something to solve that problem, working with rural communities in places like West Virginia and Kentucky to bring water and sewer infrastructure up to date.
While stories about mountaintop removal dismiss the nature of the debris dumped into the headwaters of streams as “rocks and dirt,” there is more to the story. The coal seams unearthed this way aren’t laid down in neat straight layers. Inevitably, some coal and other minerals locked into long-buried formations are dumped along with the more benign debris.
I lived in an area where the hills behind my town were riddled with abandoned coal mines, the water that leaked from these mines was acidic enough to dissolve iron. All coal, even low-sulfur coal, has sulfur in it. Water and sulfur make sulfuric acid. The junk that’s thrown in the valleys as part of mountaintop removal will almost certainly turn reasonably clean streams into acidic cocktails full of leached out metals.
People in the nearby communities have few other sources of water. This regulation will eventually turn these towns into ghost towns or make many people very ill, or both. It is the worst kind of fouling of the nest imaginable.
As much as we need to end our dependence on foreign oil (and mining coal doesn’t help that) we also have to remove our dependence on coal. The extraction of coal kills miners, destroys communities, contributes mightily to global warming and fouls the surrounding environment.
Unfortunately, coal generates campaign contributions as easily as it generates electricity.
Topics: Politics |
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