Unburying the Voices of Appalachia
by Erica Tauzer
Destruction knows no end at the mountaintop property of Larry Gibson in Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. Huge dump trucks drive up and down of the twisted mountain roads adjacent to his property. Frequent explosions disturb the quiet of this Appalachian mountaintop, part of the one of oldest mountain chains in the world. Islands of gray, barren flatness interrupt the green rolling Appalachians, remnants of a strip-mining frenzy unseen before the late 1970s. "I call my land 'Hell's Gate,'" Gibson says in a thick West Virginian drawl, "You walk up the road and everything's green. Birds are singing...there's life all around you, everywhere you look something's moving, then you see the grey-buried the trees, the topsoil and everything else behind it. The only thing you hear is your heart beat; everything's dead."
The processes and effects of mountaintop removal (MTR) are the same throughout Appalachia. Coal is mined by surface from the top of the mountain, exposing seams of coal. These seams are sometimes buried as much as 500 feet below the surface of the summit. The broken rock generated from the removal cannot be returned to its original location and is typically pushed into valleys and streams below the mountain. This results in some of the largest manmade structures in the world: large plateaus of bare soil that stretch for miles creating desert islands in the midst of the Appalachian paradise. These created environments are void of topsoil and the nutrients needed to sustain a restored forest. Mining companies advertise restored habitats, but they are often empty plateaus of non-native grasses.
The lush valleys and mountaintops of Appalachia hosted some of the highest biodiversity rates in the US, which are now facing the highest rate of decline and imminence of threat in the country. Among these endangered species are the grey wolf and several species of salamanders, mussels, fishes and plants.
Declining biodiversity rates mirror increasing human health concerns. In recent years, Dr. Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia has noticed a 50% decrease in aquatic insects. As indicators of ecosystem health, their decline signifies poor water quality. Mining leeches chemicals like arsenic, mercury, chromium, boron, selenium and nickel directly into the groundwater and mountain streams that supply the drinking water for thousands of people.
Additionally, residents suffer alarmingly high levels of health problems like asthma, severe headaches, nausea, shortness of breath and vomiting, all symptoms that can be traced back to the sedimentation and dissolved minerals from the MTR sites. Worse of all, these health effects can affect anyone living in the surrounding community, unlike underground mining which had health affects primarily directed to the miners themselves. Specifically at risk are people with decreased immune levels. Besides poisoned drinking waters, chronic respiratory damage and long-term health effects, local communities (most which have been there for generations), are plagued with rockslides, floods, blasting noise, destroyed property and lost culture.
However, as Gibson says, "the most endangered species we have in West Virginia besides our own people that's being displaced out of the mountains and the hollers is the deep miners." Surface mining and mountaintop removal hurt both the long-term and short-term economic vitality of the area. Underground miners are steadily losing jobs as heavy machinery operators take their place. A company that originally employed entire communities of miners can now employ a single machine operator (that is often times non-unionized) for a fraction of the price. The miners are then left unemployed, and communities crumble.
Although there is a vibrant and strong grassroots movement to put an end to mountaintop removal, the upper level governments and mining companies have simply not taken the actions needed to put an end to mountaintop removal-if anything, the rules and regulations surrounding surface mining, and therefore mountaintop removal have become more lax throughout the years. With the unintended consequences from former president Clinton's sulfur dioxide cap and trade amendments to the Clean Air Act and Bush's legalization of valley, politicians from both parties have only encouraged the spread of MTR.
However, change is in the air. Although none of the candidates have a strong commitment to ending mountaintop removal, let's hope that our voices can brush of the dirt and rise in unison as we call for justice in Appalachia. After all, we are the true culprits. We're the ones who the leaders are trying to appease with cheap electricity to fulfill our perceived needs for our ever-increasing gadgetry: our cell phones, our iPods, our laptop computers. All of these need electricity, and since most of our power comes from coal, and nearly half that from Appalachia, we have the obligation to care and enact change. We can demand more alternative fuels. We can call for the moratorium of new coal-fired power plants. And the least we can do is tell our elected officials to put an end to the legalization of the environmental, economic and cultural destruction in Appalachia.
As a reminder to the graveness of the situation in Appalachia, Gibson left me with these words: "Remember when writing this story, remember: it's not about myself, Larry Gibson. It's not about the coal barons who are making millions. It's about the everyday, hardworking people of Appalachia. Get their word out."
