To Julia Bonds, the once-proud mountains in her home of southern West Virginia are no more real than a movie-set facade. Those visible from the road are forested, richly hued and full of life. But a glimpse behind the towering Appalachian peaks offers a starkly different view.
Mining has sheared off mountaintops and flattened the land into a barren, rocky moonscape. Once dozens of shades of green, the mountains have been turned black, brown and gray and are stripped of undergrowth.
“It looks like someone dropped a bomb on the mountain,” said Bonds, a coal miner’s daughter who now fights mining.
Mountaintop-removal mining blasts off the tops of mountains to access coal seams and dumps the debris into streams and valleys. Though studies confirm that mining this way inflicts a high price on the environment and neighboring communities, no action has been proposed to limit the number of streams buried by the waste.
Instead, the Bush administration wants to streamline the permit process and enhance environmental protection by working more closely with state and federal agencies to review permits on an individual basis.
Removing the leftover mining debris long has been an issue. In 1999, courts found that the dirt and rock were considered “waste” rather than “fill” material and could not be dumped into nearby streams. The Clinton administration tried to redefine the material to legalize dumping fill into valleys. But after a flood of public opposition, the change never was finalized.
Last year, the Bush administration resurrected the idea, broadening the definition of what may be dumped into a stream. The administration also successfully appealed a court ruling that said mountaintop-removal mining violated clean water laws.
“What we did, for the first time in 10 years, was solidify more stringent regulation of mountaintop mining,” said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “We don’t have the authority to ban it, but we can put more clear and effective regulations. Our critics are not happy: They want us to manipulate the legal process to ban.”
Mountaintop removal began on a small scale in the 1960s and became the dominant coal mining technique in the East in the 1990s. Massive “drag line” equipment made it possible to shear off mountaintops. The resulting waste-towering piles of rock and earth that can reach 90 stories high-is discarded in the valleys between mountains. These landfills kill everything underneath and have choked 724 miles of headwater streams of the Appalachian watersheds from 1985 and 2001.
One report showed 350 square miles of mountain land have been flattened.
About 28.5 billion tons of high-heating, low-sulfur coal remain beneath 12 million acres in parts of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, where mining is a key component to the economy.
The coal industry has said the flat regions they are creating are useful for bringing new business and industry to a mountainous region. But critics say that in the three decades that companies have been leveling mountains, only 2 percent of the sites have been used for redevelopment.
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THE ISSUE:
Mountaintop-removal mining, which gained popularity throughout the 1990s as energy demands increased, is polluting streams and flattening the landscape.
RECENT ACTION:
A federal assessment found that mountaintop-removal mining has done substantial harm to the environment. Yet the document also proposed streamlining the permit process and did not recommend further environmental protection.
‘In order to become less dependent on foreign sources of energy, we’ve got to find and produce more energy at home, including coal.’
— President George W. Bush, Charleston, W.Va.
‘Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Bush administration ignored the government’s own science showing massive pollution from mountaintop removal.’
— Daniel Rosenberg, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney.
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THE AUTHORS OF THIS REPORT
Pete Souza is the Tribune’s national photographer, based in the Washington bureau. He traveled to 13 states during the last year to take the photographs in this report.
Julie Deardorff is a staff reporter who has written extensively about health and the environment.
