EDIT
"This is not ordinary strip mining. This is mountaintop removal - activists dub it 'strip mining on steroids'. It is the stuff of science fiction and it is booming in the Appalachian mountains, bringing with it environmental degradation and human despair. It is fuelled by a mining industry that has paid millions of dollars into Republican campaign coffers and received in return an unprecedented relaxation of rules.
Mountaintop removal mining does exactly what it says - in order to get at thin seams of coal that lie within, like cream through the middle of a sponge cake. Millions of tons of rock are blown up, scraped away and poured into surrounding valleys, filling them to the brim. What was a mountain range is turned into a flat and almost barren desert of rock. The streams that once flowed through the valleys around Maria Gunnoe's house lie underneath hundreds of feet of boulders. 'It breaks my heart,' she said. All over Appalachia, a series of mountain ranges running from Pennsylvania to Georgia, there are similar stories. Already 1,200 miles of streams have been buried and 400,000 acres have been blasted away. At current rates, over the next decade 2,200 square miles of land will be affected. That is an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. In order to shift the mountaintops more than 3,000 tons of explosives are used each day.
EDIT
For Gunnoe the issue is an immediate one. Since the mountains and valleys went, her property has almost been washed away. Her home is now isolated behind a deep gorge that cuts her off from any road. 'It used to be just a little stream you could step over,' she said. The stream has now cut a gully 20ft deep and 67ft wide. Gunnoe's house has lost all its value. She cannot get insurance. She knows that she will eventually have to leave. Not only the floods are contriving to drive her out. Since she began to speak out publicly last summer, the tyres on Gunnoe's truck have been slashed, she has been verbally threatened by mineworkers, her dog has been shot and its body dumped at a shop frequented by her two children. As she travelled with The Observer last week, a man driving a white SUV closely tailed her, its driver making an obscene gesture at her before forcing her to swerve as he overtook. But she will not be intimidated. 'They have already taken away my future,' she said. 'I guess I am just pushing the envelope to see if they take away my life.'
It was a meeting on an airport runway in August 2000 that paved the way for the mining boom in West Virginia. George W Bush met local mining executives as he prepared to fly out from the state capital, Charleston. They complained mining permits were becoming hard to get because of environmental measures. Bush said he understood their problems. In 2002, after Bush became President, regulations governing mountaintop mining were loosened. It was as simple as changing a word. The rubble produced by scraping off mountaintops was defined as 'fill', not 'waste'. Fill can legally be dumped into valleys, waste cannot. The effect was immediate. In 2002 just three sites were approved in West Virginia. In 2003 the figure was 14."
EDIT
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1391448,00.htmlAnd while I'm sorry for Ms. Gunnoe and those fighting the mining companies, ask yourself one simple question: for whom did West Virginia cast its electoral votes in 2004?
Time for lil' ol' West Virginia to pay the piper.