Mountaintop removal in the spotlight

Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia By Erik Reece Riverhead Books, 2006 A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. They blow up the top of a mountain, I explained, push the rubble off into a valley, scrape off a layer of coal, blow up more of the mountain, push that aside, take out more coal–and so on, going hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of thousands of acres of ancient forested Appalachian mountains have been "removed" this way and will never again see the fabulous mosaic of biologically rich and diverse forest-and-stream communities that evolved there over millions of years. "That's horrible!" my friend said. "Why haven't I heard about it?" He hasn't heard about it because the MTR story just hasn't been in the news as much as it deserves. Although last summer the Mountain Justice campaign against MTR got decent regional press, especially in West Virginia, national coverage has so far been spotty and elusive. Recently, Project Censored named MTR one of the top ten under-reported stories of the year. But MTR's low news profile may be about to change. As plans are being made for protest against mountaintop removal through next summer, a flurry of new books and articles in the national media is calling fresh attention to the issue. Erik Reece's book Lost Mountain focuses on the destruction of one particular mountain, in eastern Kentucky, but alongside that mountain's story tells the wider story of MTR's devastation throughout the coalfields of Appalachia, in southern West Virginia, far southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee as well. In naturalist vignettes throughout the book, Reece conveys an urgent and vivid sense of what's being lost to large-scale strip mining–the diverse plant and animal life and intricate, intimate beauty of these mountains. He also exposes the Orwellian lie of "reclamation," which typically allows coal companies after mining is done to push piles of rubble into terraces, sow lespedeza (an Asian grass that unlike native grasses sometimes survives on such sites) and call this an adequate replacement for the forests, mountains and watersheds they've destroyed. It's hard to fathom how all of this is legal. One would think that the federal Clean Water Act alone would suffice to outlaw it: ask people in business outside the coalfields–construction contractors, for example–if the law allows them to bury streams under millions of cubic yards of debris, and they'll look at you like you're out of your mind. Reece covers various ways that coal companies legally get away with this and, more generally, with externalizing the enormous environmental and social costs of their business. Lost Mountain makes clear that, at the local, state and federal levels, it has long been public policy to enable and even encourage this. The result is that in one place after another "an outside corporation comes in, hires few if any local people, extracts the minerals, then leaves the community with acid streams, flooding, cracked foundations and bald hillsides," Reece writes. MTR is not just an environmental issue, but an issue of injustice and corruption as well. "Central Appalachia is poor," Reece reminds us, "because so much has been taken from it and so little has been returned." The counties from which the most coal is removed by strip mining are among the poorest in the US. But poverty is just the most general measure of the human costs mountaintop removal inflicts on communities nearby. Some of the stories Reece tells of the costs borne by specific individuals are heartbreaking: a woman whose only child was killed by an overloaded coal truck just 11 days shy of her college graduation, a mother worried about bathing her toddler in tap water too toxic to drink (bottled water is the best-seller in coalfield grocery stores), a widower whose wife committed suicide after repeated flooding of their home and the garden that supplied much of the family's food, a three-year-old boy crushed to death in his bed by a boulder off a mine site. In Lost Mountain we also hear the voices of heroes. Although most people living in the coalfields of Appalachia believe that MTR's destruction of their mountains and their people is wrong, few are willing to stick their necks out to say so–and for good reason. People who stick their necks out often get whacked in the head, particularly in the coalfields, where power has long been maintained by violence in many forms, all of them ugly. And besides, why bother? Why take care of your home if your only hope for better life is to leave it? Why take care of the mountains if they too will soon be gone? Those who stand up and speak out against mountaintop removal have done so regardless of the odds against stopping it. Standing up for what's right is part of who they are, and doing so–no matter the cost–makes them more fully themselves, more fully human and free. Lost Mountain's coverage of this story ends before the ongoing Mountain Justice campaign against MTR geared up and began taking action last year, following the model of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, hoping that public knowledge of the injustice of MTR will raise public demand that it be outlawed. Activists seeking to end mountaintop removal will welcome this book's contribution toward informing Americans everywhere about it. Even for people who already know about MTR, Lost Mountain is well worth reading. Reece is a very good writer, and his book is as graceful and easy a read as such a grievous subject allows. Those who, like my friend, wonder why they haven't heard about MTR couldn't ask for a better introduction to it. This book can be found locally at Malaprop's Bookstore, 55 Haywood St. in Asheville.