I'm always surprised by the things that can on in this country and go by my attention completely unnoticed. I try to keep up on things, I subscribe to email updates from lots of different groups, listen to news podcasts, etc and still things just slip by. Perhaps the biggest example of this in a collective sense, is the problem of mountaintop removal mining, which just happened to be the topic of my ten page paper. The following is probably going to be long, but I'll try to be brief.
Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining is a process of mining that does exactly what the name implies: it removes the tops of mountains to get at coal seams underneath. For a more in-depth explanation, go here: http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/facts/steps.php
It is an incredibly destructive practice that basically uses bombs to blow up hundreds of thousands of years of forest and mountain and rock, then shoves all the debris down into the valleys. So far over 500 miles of river have been buried because of this process, and enough mountaintops have been removed that collectively they're approaching the size of Delaware.
I had never heard of this until I started working at the Sierra Club, mainly because they are just beginning to get involved. When I was doing research for this, I found that most articles in newspapers and scholarly journals were from the past two years or so. It was amazing how little coverage this got, especially considering the environmental and human impacts that it has.
For one thing, when the overburden from MTR buries rivers, it takes away the places that rainwater would usually go, ie away from towns and houses. So, when it rains, as it does a lot Appalachia, the surrounding areas flood very badly. The coal dust that comes from overloaded coal trucks flying down back country roads and the explosions themselves, which send dust everywhere clog up air conditioning systems and causes asthma in children. Heavy metals such as mercury get into water systems from the overburden.
According to law, coal miners must wash coal before it can be burned in order to make it cleaner. However, the irony is that the toxic sludge that gets washed off has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is usually in huge "impoundments" in Appalachia that look like lakes of black mud. These are held in by dams.
In 1972, one of these dams broke, killing 125 people and making 4000 homeless, not to mention tainting every water source in the vicinity. The company called it an "act of God" and took no responsibility.
Again in 2000, another dam was breached. This time, no one died, but aquatic dead zones were declared all over the place and it was labeled as the worst environmental disaster in the southeast, bar none. Once again, the company called it an "act of God". Many more of these impoundments are all over Appalachia, one of which is situated directly above an elementary school. Concern about this from community members is brushed aside.
There are a lot of organizations that work to stop this, like Mountain Justice Summer where you can actually register to go there and work at gathering information (http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/index.php).
Or ilovemountains.org does a lot of good work and has a youtube video you can watch that shows MTR at work. Register for email updates from here: http://www.ilovemountains.org/take_action/campaigns/mountains/register/ 3c3860483b2d7e0a5264a8d072e0971c/ Most of these organizations are run by people who either live in Appalachia currently, or had to move because of MTR. The more help and attention this tragedy gets, the more likely it will be that we can stop it.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
