About the Center

	American Electric Power's John E. Amos Plant is the largest coal burning power plant in West Virginia and tenth largest in the country. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the plant is the largest polluter in the state and produces more than 15 million tons of air pollution each year. The Center is working to address pollution from the John Amos Plant and other coal burning power plants.

	About Us/Mission
	Priorities
	Staff and Board

About Us/Mission

The Appalachian Center is a regional law and policy organization. The Center works together with individual citizens and grassroots citizens' groups to clarify, analyze and act on the environmental and economic issues that affect our communities. We carry out precedent-setting litigation strategically designed to protect the environment and the health of communities. We also conduct research and analysis, and advocate for a sustainable and just economy for the region.

The Center seeks fundamental changes in compliance, implementation and enforcement of major environmental laws in Central Appalachia. We seek to start the long process of replacing the shortsighted economic policies of the region with more sustainable and responsible policies. All of our court actions and policy initiatives are formulated to have long-term and systemic impacts. 

Mountaintop removal coal mining sites like this one have destroyed nearly 1500 square miles of central Appalachia. Areas that were once the most productive and diverse temperate hardwood forests in the world are now waste scrublands. Because of the work of Center staff, state and federal agencies are conducting the first ever programmatic environmental impact statement to assess damage done by mountaintop removal coal mining. (Tiered structure on the left is a large valley fill).

Our activities are intended to have region-wide (and often nationwide) impacts. Our media work is directed at raising public awareness of the tragedy befalling the citizens of Central Appalachia at the hands of the coal industry. Each victory will also raise the price of coal as an energy source, reduce externalities associated with coal mining and burning and make more sustainable alternatives more attractive. We have very carefully chosen our project priorities with these goals in mind.

The Center is working to stop mountaintop removal coal mining, to protect communities from the adverse health effects caused by water and air pollution generated by resource extraction, coal burning power plants, and other destructive practices, and to protect and restore the region's hardwood forests, which are the most biologically diverse and productive temperate hardwood forests in the world.

Our Formal Mission

The mission of the Appalachian Center is to:

• Protect Appalachian communities and the natural environment that supports them by enforcing and strengthening state and federal environmental laws and by forcing the region's extractive and polluting industries to internalize their costs;

• Revitalize Appalachian communities by helping to develop and implement an environmentally responsible, sustainable economy in the region; and

• Conserve and restore the wilderness for the common benefit of the people who live in and enjoy the region's forests, streams, rivers and mountains.

Priorities

	Mountaintop removal coal mining has destroyed approximately 1500 hundred square miles of central Appalachia - removing mountain tops, dumping waste in headwater streams and destroying valuable hardwood forests and communities. The Center is working to promote alternatives to these unsustainable and destructive practices and nationalize the loss of areas like those pictured.

The Center has three long-term program priorities:

• Holding industry and government accountable by serving as a watchdog: State environmental protection agencies in Appalachia are notoriously underfunded and over-politicized. The Center works to strengthen environmental lawmaking and enforcement by bringing precedent-setting litigation designed to limit the destructive effects of polluting and extractive industries. In addition, the Center works to ensure that the federal and state agencies perform their responsibilities to enforce the law.

• Promoting an alternative future for Appalachia: For generations, resource extraction has driven public policy in our region. Yet the communities in the most resource-rich counties of the region are among the poorest in the nation. We develop policy proposals designed to right the inequities and propose alternative policies to allow sustainable economic development in the region.

• Nationalizing Appalachian issues: There are a handful of areas in the country that the environmental community, Congress, and the public treat as matters of national, rather than purely local concern. Few would say that all decisions about the future of the Everglades, the old growth forests of the Northwest and Alaska, or the Plateaus of Southern Utah should be left to local politicians seeking short-term economic gains. We seek to add the mountains, forests, and streams of Appalachia to this list of special places.

Staff and Board

Staff

Executive Director Joe Lovett, a founder of the Appalachian Center, has been a catalyst for focusing local and national attention on the devastation caused by mountaintop removal coal mining. He was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in 1995 and served as a law clerk to the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.  He has served as counsel in precedent setting legal challenges to mountaintop removal: Bragg v Robertson and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v Rivenbaugh, and through additional legal challenges added millions of dollars to the West Virginia Coal Mining Special Reclamation Fund. In a nationally precedent setting case, he succeeded in stopping the US Environmental Protection Agency from illegally weakening a central portion of the Clean Water Act in West Virginia (the anti-degradation provisions of the state and federal water quality standards).

Senior policy analyst Dr. Margaret Janes, has worked on CWA issues in West Virginia for the last ten years. She helped bring attention to serious water pollution problems from poultry farms in the Potomac Headwaters of West Virginia. She has represented environmental interests on the WV TMDL and trading stakeholder groups. She was also appointed to the State Nutrient Criteria Technical Committee. Margaret currently works on water policy issues for the Appalachian Center with a focus on mining and corporate agriculture.

Staff Attorney Nathan Fetty, an eighth-generation West Virginian, has received a two-year fellowship from the Skadden Fellowship Foundation and began work at the Center in September of 2007.  Nathan is a 2005 graduate of West Virginia University law school and completed a two-year clerkship with the Hon. Thomas A. Bedell in the circuit court of Harrison County, West Virginia. 

Equal Justice Works Fellow, Derek Teaney, a lawyer, is a native of West Virginia. Derek graduated from Lewis and Clark Law School in 2004, where he was Editor in Chief of Environmental Law. He also received the 2004 Bernard O'Rourke Award for Outstanding Writing. After law school, Derek clerked for the Honorable Rex E. Armstrong of the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Board of Directors

Ryan Alexander, co-founder of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, serves as Board Chair. Ryan was staff attorney with Appalachian Research and Defense in southern West Virginia and has worked with other non-profit organizations for 15 years as litigator, funder, and issue campaign manager. She is currently Executive Director of the Common Cause Education Fund in Washington, DC.

Joe Lovett, co-founder, serves as Executive Director. See staff information.

Calvert Armbrecht is a conservationist recognized for her over 30-year involvement in efforts to develop environmental awareness. She is highly respected in the Charleston WV area for her ongoing work with the Garden Club of America and once chaired the Club's Conservation Committee. She also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition and is currently President of the West Virginia Land Trust.

Sean McGinley is a lawyer who understands the importance of the law in protecting the rights of citizens in coal communities. Raised in a family well known for its contribution to preserving the quality of life of residents in the coalfields, Sean currently works for a major law firm in the state capital of WV.

Joan Mulhern is Senior Legislative Counsel with Earthjustice in Washington DC, a national, non-profit environmental law firm. Joan is highly valued for her ability to connect the Center with Congressional activity and the network of national environmental groups fighting recent Bush Administration attacks on the Clean Water Act and the Surface Mining Act that directly impact life in the coal regions of Appalachia.

Bren Pomponio is an attorney practicing law with Mountain State Justice, a non-profit legal services organization in Charleston, WV, serving low-income individuals.   Bren was a top graduate from the West Virginia University College of Law and was Managing Editor of the West Virginia Law Review.  He also served as a law clerk for both The Honorable Joseph R. Goodwin and The Honorable Charles H. Haden II, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.   

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