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According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in addition to the more than 700 miles of streams buried by valley fills, thousands more miles have been contaminated with sediment, heavy metals, and acid mine drainage, a toxic orange syrup that kills everything in its path. And these are headwaters, so their contamination affects all life downstream. In Letcher County, Kentucky, children suffer extremely high rates of diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, and shortness of breath, all of which can be tied to dissolved minerals in nearby streams. Presumably the Clean Water Act was established to prevent such degradation. But early in the Bush administration, coal lobbyist Steven Griles was named a deputy secretary at the Department of Interior. Officials changed one word of the act -- replacing "waste" with "fill" -- so that toxic mining debris could be dumped into rivers as benign fill material.
There will soon be enough flattened mountaintops in Appalachia -- 1.4 million acres -- to set down the state of Delaware on former summits. Try driving across the 10,000-acre wasteland that surrounds Larry Gibson's home on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. Hundreds of people, like the photographer J. Henry Fair, make that trip every year to see, in Gibson's words, "what hell looks like." Kayford Mountain, more than any place I know, illustrates the power and the willingness of some human beings to convert the natural world into money and "cheap energy" as quickly as possible. If that means the total destruction of an entire region, its people, and its culture, so be it.
And yet the majority of Americans have never heard of mountaintop removal. Many insidious cultural biases account for this. Almost all mainstream media treat rural people as dim and backward -- folks not smart enough to make it to the city. And mountain people -- "hillbillies" -- get the worst treatment of all. Why not turn their homes into a sacrifice area that will provide cheap energy for our cities? But there is also a problem of perspective. It is difficult for most people to see what happens on top of a mountain. Fair has gone a long way toward solving that problem, showing how industrial aggressors cut the heart out of a mountain and turn one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America into a lifeless void.
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