What is Mountaintop Removal mining?

Throughout the species-rich heavily forested Appalachian region of the Eastern United States, hundreds of mountains and ridgelines have been flattened -- first by clear-cutting forests, then by blowing off the top layers of rock with powerful explosives. Giant cranes (draglines) expose buried coal by scraping millions of tons of dirt off the mountain and dumping it into neighboring valleys and streams. This is mountain top removal mining (MTR), a particularly destructive strip mining practice that started to became widespread in Appalachia in the 1990s.

Rather than remove the coal from the mountain, MTR removes the mountain from the coal.

What is the problem with MTR?

The EPA estimates that a million acres of thick diverse hardwood forests and 470 summits of mountains across Appalachia have already been devastated as the MTR mining practice spreads across this unique American landscape. By 2012, just two decades of MTR coal mining will have destroyed more than 800,000 acres of forested mountains and clogged more than 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and sources of drinking water for local communities. Over three million pounds of ammonium nitrite explosives are detonated daily at MTR coal mining sites in rural communities across central Appalachia, the equivalent of dropping one Hiroshima atomic bomb every week. Put another way, MTR is a process of blowing up our nation's oldest and most diverse mountains, razing historic communities, poisoning drinking water, destroying some of our country's most diverse ecosystems and causing catastrophic erosion and flooding. Vice President Al Gore has termed the practice of mountain top removal, "a crime."

What about jobs?

Even as MTR mining has surged in the last few decades, the number of jobs it has created has actually declined. Underground coal mining still remains the far larger employer in the coal sector. Mountaintop removal coal mining is driving families from the land where they have lived for generations, while leaving rural communities in permanently degraded landscapes confronting diminished economic opportunities.

The majority of families near mining sites don't benefit from MTR coal jobs. They suffer from airborne dust and debris, floods, and contamination of drinking water supplies as well as the exodus of a generation of young people who are looking elsewhere for healthy, safe jobs. With its reliance on "labor saving" heavy machinery and explosives, mountaintop removal operations take out more than just coal; in the name of efficiency they strip the region of jobs and, in their single minded disregard for the wider impacts of their practices, they take away opportunities for a more diversified, sustainable economy.

What's the Alternative?

Less than 7% of coal used in the US comes from MTR; we could easily replace this with energy from new renewable sources like wind and solar, and from using existing energy more efficiently (and saving ourselves money while doing so.) In fact, expansion of MTR threatens to flatten world class mountain top wind energy sites. These could be dedicated to advancing the clean energy revolution. Instead these summits are being destroyed to feed our dated and dangerous addiction to cheap coal at any price.

Investing in wind and solar power creates at least 2.8 times the number of jobs as the same investment in coal; investments in conservation creates 3.8 times as many jobs, and mass transit investments create more than six times as many jobs as coal.

Supporting a clean energy economy can provide the jobs that MTR does not.

MTR touches all our lives

Whether you live in New York, Miami, Chicago, Denver or anywhere in between, the chances are good that when you switch on your lights you are burning MTR coal that comes from Appalachia. http://www.ilovemountains.org/myconnection/

We all live in the coalfields. MTR is a national issue. We are all connected to this atrocious practice, and if we all join together we can stop it. There is a better way.

What can I do?

Appalachia is in a state of emergency. President Obama's EPA just gave the green light for 40 more MTR permits. It is time to come together and step up our activism to stop this barbaric practice. If this on-going MTR permitting--more than even the former Bush Administration approved in recent years--is allowed to continue, it means the certain destruction of cherished Appalachian family homesteads and hundreds of more miles of Appalachian streams, crowned by the flattening of priceless summits in America's oldest mountain range.

President Obama, the EPA, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality need to take immediate action to stop the bulldozers from destroying Appalachian Mountains and the homes of families that live there. It is time to rise above the idea that the profits of the MTR coal industry are more important than the lives of the people and the protection of the environment in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.