My conservationist friend George Beetham Jr. provided this explanation of MTR. The photo here is from the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.
What they do is cut down the forest and burn it off. Then they remove the overburden, dumping it into the adjacent valley (thus burying the stream and polluting it). This is illegal, but the Bumbleya cabal looks the other way (as do state regulators).
Then they take the coal from the seam thus exposed, removing more overburden to get to the next seam, etc. until the coal is gone.
This leads to a number of environmental disasters. First is pollution and burying of streams. Second, without forest cover and topsoil, rain flows through the rock and floods downstream. People have died in WVa and Kentucky because of this.
Third, the water table is dropped, so nothing really lives on top. They seed it with grass mats, but the grass cannot reach any groundwater so it dies. Similarly, pine trees they plant also die.
And of course, all the creatures that once lived on these mountains cannot survive in what is left behind. It’s a wasteland, pure and simple.
We (the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy) and other environmental groups have been fighting this abortion tooth and nail. We’ve won a few battles, lost a lot more, and will continue to slog it out until it either stops or we all die.
Chief among the groups battling MTR is the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC for short). They are an amalgamation of all the groups fighting MTR. We contribute funding to them and whatever else we can.
Filed under: Mother Earth, mountains
