Mountaintop removal is one of the most egregious environmental disasters in America today by Peter Rothberg
In the United States, 100 tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last 20 years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop-removal sites in Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal is one of the most egregious environmental and social justice disasters in America today. This extreme mining practice, taking place largely in the Appalachians, has destroyed at least 500 mountains (1.5 million acres of land) resulting in a huge amount of largely unreported ecological damage and countless ruined lives.
The EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal with thousands more damaged. Where a highly braided system of headwater streams once flowed, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble.
Moreover, the problem is getting worse. As activist and author Jeff Biggers wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, "We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas--the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions---have now been eliminated from our American maps."
Dave Roberts of Grist detailed the brutality of mountaintop removal in a guest post at TheNation.com last year: "Mountain ridges and peaks are clear-cut, stripped of all trees and other flora. Explosives are buried underground, and enormous blasts dislodge millions of tons of rock, dirt, soil, and animal and plant life. That "overburden" is then carted away or dumped into the stream and creek beds in the mountain hollows below, destroying or polluting thousands of miles of running water. Huge 20-story-tall draglines pull away the rock to expose coal seams. Similarly huge machines then yank the coal out and dump the remaining waste down into those streams."
