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This article originally provided by
The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sarah Willis
If you want to blow off the top of a mountain and
dig out the exposed coal, you'll need a permit from the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers. They're the ones responsible for America's
waterways. The top of the mountain will end up in the valleys,
filling in rivers and streams. Also, coal mining produces toxic
liquid waste called slurry. You'll have to build an impoundment to
store the slurry so it doesn't contaminate the water supply. For a
big project like this, you would file for an individual permit, but
then you'd have to make a public announcement to allow people to go
to a hearing and voice their opinions.
Or you can divide up the land into sections and get a "nationwide
permit 21" for each one. These permits are for smaller projects that
will "cause minimal adverse environmental effects," and they require
no public announcement. The only way your neighbors will find out is
when they notice you blowing up the now sectioned mountaintop.
The Clean Water Act forbids segmenting this way, but that hasn't
stopped the Army Corps of Engineers from allowing it. By the time
anyone objects, significant damage already has occurred, and company
lawyers will point that out. In a wondrous Catch-22, they can ask:
Why stop the mining when the damage is already done? Advertisement
Legal chicanery and the machinations of the coal industry are scary
to read about, much less to fight against. In the past year, several
compelling books on the topic have landed, all worth reading: "Lost
Mountain," a first-person story with photos by Erik Reece; "Moving
Mountains" by hardworking activist Penny Loeb; the remarkably
concise "Big Coal" by Jeff Goodell; and the lyrical, heartbreaking
novel "Strange as This Weather Has Been" by Ann Pancake. The novel
tells of an indigent family living beneath the earthen wall of a
slurry impoundment.
But journalist Michael Shnayerson's "Coal River" is a must if you
want to educate yourself about mountaintop mining. The cover
photograph shows a landscape that looks like the canyons of Utah,
but it's really an aerial photo of mountaintop mining in the
Appalachians.
This well-researched book tracks a series of lawsuits brought by
nonprofits and citizens to try to force the Army Corps of Engineers
to obey the law: to allow permits only after properly analyzing the
potential for damage and the means to offset that damage. In the
center of this story is attorney Joe Lovett and the people he
represents -- people whose health, homes and land have been hurt by
mountaintop removal, who argue that harm done in the name of cheap
energy is more than they are willing to pay.
It's not always an easy read; the narrative gets lost in examples.
Nor is the writing unbiased. Shnayerson, a Vanity Fair reporter, is
clearly seeking an emotional wallop. He wants to show us the stakes
when we flip on a light.
When I mentioned what I was learning from this book to my daughter,
she said, "You'd think it would be on Oprah' and be fixed by now."
But it's not that straightforward, neither summing up the legalities
nor my daughter's easy hope. "The story of mountaintop mining -- why
it happens and what its consequences are -- is still new to most
Americans," Shnayerson writes. "They have no idea that their
country's physical legacy -- the purple mountains majesty that is
America -- is being destroyed at the rate of several ridgetops per
week, the result of three million pounds of explosives set off every
day."
As our demand for energy escalates, "Coal River" asks us to really
see the people who have lived in the Appalachians for generations.
They, and the land, are worth our attention.
Willis is a novelist, teacher and critic in Cleveland Heights.
To reach Sarah Willis:
books@plaind.com
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