Mountaintop Removal

I gazed out my window upon what was once my refuge from the world, my sanctuary, my mountain. A mountain it is no longer... no, now it is comparable to the most desolate and alien of planets in our small section of the universe. They stripped away the layers of my land in order to burn the ancient coal within.  Imagine if you had a natural sanctuary, a place of profound and magnificent beauty so spectacular that all who happened to know of it thought of it as a little piece of their heaven.  Now, imagine that one day you went to visit your refuge only to find the government had leased the land to an out of state coal company.  A company that did not see your heaven for what it was.  A company whose sole purpose was profiteering from the absolute destruction of the ecosystem in order to provide an outdated fuel to outdated power supply companies. 

This is what is happening all along the western band of the Appalachian Mountains. The mountains are being leveled in a mining practice referred to as mountaintop removal.  The name is a bit misleading as they not only remove the mountaintops but more often than not take the mountain down to the level of the surrounding valleys and sometimes even further.  First pioneered in the 1960s, MTR saw a significant increase during the petroleum crisis in the 1970s, and since the 1990s has been the key extraction method used by coal companies.  The method is the most fiscally efficient way of extracting coal that has ever been practiced and at the same time the most ecologically destructive.

The method of mountaintop removal starts with the complete deforestation of the mountain, displacing thousands of wildlife species, and increasing runoff from rainfall into the community-ridden valleys below, causing an exponential increase in economic damage from flash flooding and sudden earth shattering mudslides. The next step in the process is to remove the topsoil and what the companies refer to as “overburden.”  Overburden is exactly what it sounds like: the level of earth which separates the miners from the coal.  Once the miners begin blasting and removing the overburden they must dump it somewhere.  Often times the excess mountain ruble is dumped into the valley below with little to no regard for the rivers and tributaries which provide much needed water to the communities that reside downstream.  This excess ruble displaces water supplies and also causes more economic hardships from flooding to the communities nearby.  After the coal is extracted, which usually only takes several months, the companies pack up and move on to the next mountain to repeat the process, eventually leveling entire ranges.  

In today’s modern society are these ancient fossil fuels still a necessity?  Should we not already be liberated from this primitive source of energy and its disastrous environmental impact?  I believe we should be embarrassed that our reliance on fossil fuels is still so great.  We have the technology to do so much increase our energy capacity beyond what anyone could have ever imagined in the middle of our previous century, yet we have yet to free ourselves from the confines of fossil fuels.  Big Energy companies that extract fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil all have great political influence by contributing massive amounts of money to almost every politician in Washington; therefore, these companies are relatively unrestrained in their ability to control where the energy in the United States comes from and what technologies are used to produce it.

How can one person change the direction of this country’s fossil fuel dependency?  Many people ask this question in response to queries about their stance on fossil fuels and how to free ourselves from them. It’s true that it is difficult to hear one voice of opposition in a room of energy giants; however, when we come together and declare as one nation, “We will not stand for this any longer,” that one voice becomes undeniably powerful.  If you know of atrocities being committed and you do nothing to put a stop to them then you are just as guilty as those who wear the blood on their hands.  We must distance ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels because the autumn leaves will soon be changing and soon there will be nothing left to hide the barren wastelands we’ve created.