Mountaintop Removal Mining

A relatively new form of strip-mining, this is the supremely insane practice of deploying high explosives to more efficiently (read: profitably) extract coal from mountainous regions, and is rapidly becoming the trademark image of Appalachia; it is also the primary motivation behind our conservation and solar development mission. Because roughly 50% of our electrical power is coal-based, it is highly likely that when we flip a light switch or blow-dry our hair, we are quite literally connecting our lives with this tragic system. So far, nearly 500 named mountains have been blown out of existence; worse, this material is not removed from the site but is instead allowed to settle or is otherwise pushed into the adjacent valleys (aka “valley fills”) resulting in over 1500 miles of formerly pristine stream corridors gone forever – - in West Virginia alone, this devastation covers a portion of the almost 500,000 acres that have been rendered biologically sterile, and another 2 million acres in the Appalachian region have met the same fate. Furthermore, the daily dose of 2 – 3 million pounds of explosives not only provides for a significant portion of our energy needs, but it has a human cost in that the residents of these regions must endure the relentless blast noise as well as the threat of flying (or rolling) debris. Perhaps the most frightful reality of life in coal country is that many of these communities lie in close proximity to coal sludge impoundments (storage for the highly toxic slurry waste from the cleansing process) that can contain hundreds of millions to billions of gallons, all of which is held back by earthen dams. The alternative waste storage scenario is only worse: abandoned mines are pumped full of the deathly fluid, which inevitably leads to permanent ground water contamination.