Obama Must Stop Mountain Top Obliteration

Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental
tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration
finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?

If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, this is
it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day
-- the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly -- to blow up
Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have
demolished 500 mountains -- encompassing about a million acres --
buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and
uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to
the region's air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia's rich
woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of
North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing
what the glaciers could not -- obliterating the hemisphere's oldest,
most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized
processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older
than the Himalayas -- while employing fewer workers for far less time
than other types of mining. The coal industry's promise to restore the
desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry's fallback
position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for
economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its
Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains
-- with their impoverished and alienated population -- are dismantled
by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent
them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.

Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of
Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally
weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke
hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats
promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better
enforcement of existing laws.

And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the
holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act
protections. Obama must restore them.

First, the White House should fix the "fill" rule the Bush
administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams
as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water
Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under
mining waste. Obama could reverse the "fill" rule to reflect
its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped
into waterways.

Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely
ignored "buffer zone" rule that forbids dumping waste within
100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.

Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their
original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction
that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where
trees will never grow and streams will never flow are
"reclaimed."

Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of "fill" permits
that will cause "significant degradation" to waterways. It
is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that
filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The
president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where
operations will cause downstream damage.

Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that
they can restore the "function and structure" of affected
streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or
structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act.
Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this
requirement.

Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an
environmental impact study for each permit when a mine "may have
significant environmental impacts," individually or cumulatively.
The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this
mandate -- an illegal practice that should stop.