I just keep thinking about it...

Once I get fired up about a subject I have a hard time letting it go – if you want to read my rant about Mountain Top Removal check out this post.

In the meantime – here are some extracts from an older, but excellent article I recently read about what MTR really does. Read the whole article here there are several pieces I originally pulled to quote but I decided to try to keep this short so for those of you short on time – here are few excerpts to think about…

Environmental Impact
"… Hundreds of feet of forest, topsoil, and sandstone -- the coal industry calls all of this "overburden" -- are unearthed so bulldozers and front-end loaders can more easily extract the thin seams of rich, bituminous coal that stretch in horizontal layers throughout these mountains. Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, 6,700 "valley fills" were approved in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2001. The U.S. EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal and thousands more have been damaged. Where there once flowed a highly braided system of headwater streams, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble. From the air, it looks like someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon…."

Social Impact
"…In the language of economics, Debra Burke's death was an externality -- a cost that simply isn't factored into the price Americans pay for coal. And that is precisely the problem…

…The specific injustice that had drawn together a group of activists calling themselves the Mountain Justice Summer movement was the violent death of 3-year-old Jeremy Davidson. At 2:30 in the morning on Aug. 30, 2004, a bulldozer, operating without a permit above the Davidsons' home, dislodged a thousand-pound boulder from a mountaintop-removal site in the town of Appalachia, Va. The boulder rolled 200 feet down the mountain before it crushed to death the sleeping child. But Davidson's death is hardly an isolated incident...

…maps generated by the Appalachian Regional Commission show that the poorest counties -- those colored deep red for "distressed" -- are those that have seen the most severe strip mining and the most intense mountaintop removal…."

You really need to read the whole article.

This issue doesn’t directly affect me – it isn’t happening in my backyard. It isn’t my child that might be killed by a dislodged boulder, it isn’t my family that suffers from the specific pollution caused by MTR – but it does affect my country, and it upsets me that this great country, The United States of America – and I don’t care what your politics are – if you are honest with yourself you have to admit that the USA is still one of the best places in the world to live – allows this to happen on a daily basis. Does it surprise me? No. But, this is America and, if enough people start speaking up something will be done about the atrocity. Need an example? Think Civil Rights, Women's Suffrage, The Abolition of Slavery.