Moving Mountains for Dirty Coal

Across Appalachia, mining companies are wiping out some of America's oldest and most revered mountains -- along with all that those mountains provide to the natural systems and communities they support.

And they're doing it to pull dirty, dangerous and destructive coal out of the ground. Coal is among the greatest producers of pollution and heat-trapping carbon dioxide, threatening public health and fueling global climate change.

Each and every day these mining companies are steadily -- and literally -- working to remove entire mountaintops. The rock, rubble and other waste is typically dumped into valleys, obliterating streams, polluting the waters with toxic runoff, and damaging the biodiversity of the mountains that wildlife and people call home.

Mountaintop mining has already leveled more than 470 summits -- with no end in sight.

Piling up Destruction

This extreme form of strip mining causes environmental and social devastation across the Appalachian region. Consider:

• Just one mountaintop removal mine can lay bare up to 10 square miles and pour hundreds of millions of tons of waste material into as many as a dozen "valley fills" -- some of which are 1,000 feet wide and a mile long.
• The explosive charges used in removal mining shake and crack homes, destroy drinking water supplies and can roll huge rocks onto homes, cars, property and public roads.
• Over the last 30 years, only a fraction of the millions of acres of land that coal mining has disturbed nationwide have been reclaimed to even minimum standards -- and the habitat and biodiversity that has been lost can never be fully restored.
• A total of 1,200 square miles of Appalachian forests will be gone by 2012, according to government projections. More than 300,000 acres of hardwood forests have been destroyed or contaminated in West Virginia alone.
• More than 1,200 miles of U.S. streams and rivers were destroyed or polluted by coal mining in central Appalachia over a 10-year span. If strung together, those polluted waterways would equal roughly half the length of the Mississippi River.

Regulation Fails Communities

Not only is mountaintop removal destructive, until recently, it also violated longstanding federal regulations under the Clean Water Act and Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. But industry-friendly federal and state agencies often did little to enforce the laws.

After courts and local communities attempted to make the mining companies comply, the Bush administration changed the rules to let mining companies legally continue to dump rock, rubble and other waste into the valley streams below.

Communities across Appalachia are fighting back against this destructive practice that harms their environment, their health and their quality of life. Efforts to show their plight led to a pledge from one of the nation's largest banks to curtail commercial lending to companies that blow the tops off of mountains. It's a start.