Missed this over the long holiday weekend, but The Washington Post on Friday published a biting op-ed from Robert Kennedy Jr. in which the prominent
“„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…
“„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.
“„Considerations including the nature of the soils and rock to be disturbed by mining activities, the extent of previous mining in the watershed, the hydrology of streams to be impacted by the valley fills, materials management plans being employed to reduce exposure of contaminated soils and rock, and other considerations directly affect the extent of potential downstream water quality impacts. The agencies can not conclude categorically that 6 valley fills in a particular circumstance is too many, just as we can not conclude that three valley fills is categorically not enough to result in water quality impacts. Consideration of the potential impacts to water quality and the environment requires a project specific evaluation of all relevant factors.
“„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.