Mountaintop Coal Removal
bcohen | December 16, 2008Alright, Nicky's telling me some people had trouble accessing the Washington Post graphic I linked to in yesterday's MTR post. So here it is, reprinted below in full. This shows how a mountain--called "overburden" if you want to mow it down; called nature if you have any sense of decency--goes from geology to valley fill.
Created by Patterson Clark for The Washington Post - April 19, 2008
bcohen | December 15, 2008The Bush Administration put Mountain Top Removal (MTR) on its list of "midnight rules" - a parting shot at the end of this administration in favor of an environmentally destructive industry, a final gut punch undermining of ecosystems in Appalachia. The Times wrote about this a few weeks ago and Friend of the Fair Jody Roberts wrote about it last week over at The Center. Roberts points out that the new ruling "makes it easier for coal-mining companies to deposit the "waste" they create (otherwise known as "mountain") into adjacent valleys."
Don Wright, Palm Beach Post (from here)
Here is an…
bcohen | April 24, 2008The Washington Post ran an excellent story on Mountaintop Removal (MTR) in West Virginia on the front page of this week's Sunday paper. The story is notable for several reasons.
"This area once was once an open valley with a stream."Image credit: Michael Williamson, Washington Post.
One reason is that front page placement: not only does it provide visibility to the issue, but it also adds a degree of legitimacy to it as a topic of public debate.
On my read, though, the story was even sharper for the focus it offered on connections. Just as with the last MTR post we ran (in February, here…
bcohen | February 20, 2008I'm continuing to play up this same theme of blowing up mountains not to beat a dead horse but because not many people, still, know about the horse. Click below for a link that shows how you personally are connected to mountaintop removal. It goes to addressing this question: what's mountaintop removal have to do with me?
From Surface Mine No. 2 (on the north end) to Bent Mtn (on the South), a power plant in Central Virginia draws its coal.
This all follows from our last post on Mountaintop Removal, where we were fortunate to have Lenny Kohm pitch in at the comments section. Mr. Kohm is…
bcohen | February 10, 2008Clearly there is now a growing need for a special section at the bookstore on Mountaintop Removal (MTR). We made a section at this blog for MTR posts when we started, since it is an issue of local immediacy (I'm close to the Appalachian mountains being blown up, at least regionally speaking), a clear case in need of more attention from environmental ethicists, one that has to be understood as part of a far deeper historical context, one that brings up the issue of energy consumption and use patterns, and one (because of all of those) that isn't as easily resolvable as we might like it to be…
bcohen | December 7, 2007
Looks like cartoon week is continuing in these parts; perhaps we have a cartoon month on our hands. The above is from The New Yorker, back on Nov. 19, and offered now as a long-awaited continuation to the dialog on blowing up mountains here.
bcohen | April 3, 2007Honestly, I didn't intend to barrage the site with this series of MTR posts, but a lot of news came through in the past few weeks.
One is this New York Times Editorial on Mountaintop removal legal action (I'm also pasting it under the fold). Another is the court case that the editorial refers to (here in full, as an 89 page pdf). This link is a third resource, an Audubon Magazine photo essay. Then we have the postcards I just added earlier today, as a fourth example. Go download them, post them, advertise. Plus, fifth and finally is the post I offered last week about other updates (…
bcohen | April 3, 2007Check these out: "postcards" from Appalachia have been placed as ads on Washington DC Metro. The new ad campaign --from the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC and at this new website, Stop Mountaintop Removal.org) -- takes the issue of visibility as its premise: if we can see/are forced to see the connections our consumption patterns have to the natural environs being consumed, we might re-envision those connections.
Another sample. (The link above has four posters.)
bcohen | March 29, 2007Grist has been posting many excellent links, discussions, and interviews about Mountaintop Coal Removal in the Appalachians. It's been a while since we added to our MTR posts (one, two, three, four), so allow me to do so now.
photo source: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
First is an article in Blue Ridge Country by Peter Slavin.
Slavin reports on the anti-MTR movement over the past year, with successes in Tennessee, large protests in West Virginia, with sit-ins, congressional action, and with new popular press articles ("Features have appeared in 2006 in Orion (January), National…
bcohen | July 28, 2006[When we last left our dueling bloggers, they were reading Erik Reece's Death of a Mountain. And now, part 2, as continued from the first part of the conversation, wherein -- beyond the Reece article -- the bloggers made mention of mountains, their Appalachian disappearance, the new availability of golfing in West Virginia and Kentucky, the new opportunity to land planes safely on formerly hilly terrain, and the questions oddly left unasked about coal, energy, and where we get it.]
DN: You know that article is quite the eye-opener. And it's some of the smaller statements like the following…