Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

(Photo by Phil Taylor)
Former coal miner Pete Ramey, 79, grew up in the mountains along Virginia’s border with Kentucky. He said mountain-top removal mining has become so prevalent that his scenery changes daily.

By Phil Taylor, Medill

When you turn on your computer, do you know where the electricity lighting your screen originates? What about the coal used to generate that electricity? Depending on where you live, it could have come from the top of an Appalachian mountain, through an environmentally degrading process known as mountain-top removal mining.

Just where the power actually comes from was an unsettling thought for Matthew Wasson, conservation director for the environmental justice group Appalachian Voices in Boone, N.C. He took to unraveling the mystery. “I’d been kind of dreaming about it for a couple of years,” said Wasson, who holds a PhD in ecology from Cornell University. “Mountain top removal is awful.”

By scouring data from the Department of Energy, and harnessing the addictive potential of Google Earth, Wasson helped build a computer database that tells you where the electricity in your home has its roots. It turns out my electricity in Chicago comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, about 1,000 miles away.

But the companies that mine my coal also take part in mountain top removal in central Appalachia, from where I am writing. You can check out the database at www.ilovemountains.org. By most accounts mountain-top removal is one of the most environmentally menacing ways of extracting coal because the coal doesn’t lie very deep. It is used in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia where coal can be found only a few feet below the surface of the ground. The technology is cheaper than mining underground in shafts because it requires less labor costs, but it virtually wipes out the surrounding landscape and has filled in over 1,000 miles of natural streams. At current rates the process will cause a projected loss of more than 1.4 million acres by the end of the decade, according to a federal EPA Environmental Impact Statement, which was issued in 2003. To many area residents, it is appalling. “The only way to get this coal is to destroy these mountain sides,” said Larry Bush who lives in the community of Exeter, Va., less than a mile down slope from a mountain-top removal mine near Black Mountain. The barren land is replanted with soil and grass, but the process of ecological recovery is slow. “You can dig up these gobs (waste coal) and you won’t even find a worm living in it.” Bush worked 12 years as an underground miner for the now-defunct Prescott mining company before becoming a federal mine inspector. He took me to a mountainside removal site that looked like a tiered, windswept moonscape. “How do you justify doing that to this Earth?” he said. Coal production in Appalachia has been relatively steady since 1973, according to data from the federal Energy Information Administration, but coal employment has been cut by nearly a third over the same period. The fossil fuel has been a boom to the economy and a plague to the environment, which makes it a very sensitive subject in Wise County. Nearly all of the individuals I spoke with on this leg of my trip are opposed to expanding coal-fired power production, but they all had either worked in the mines or had close relatives employed by the mining industry. A new coal plant in Virginia City proposed by Dominion, which broke ground on the project here last Tuesday, is legally bound by its permits to get all of its coal from Virginia mines. But there is no stipulation as to whether or not the mines can be mountain-top removal sites. Critics here say the new Dominion plant will create new incentives for expanded mountain top mining. The company has said it expects the plant to generate 350 much-needed mining jobs, said Joyce Payne, executive director for the Wise County Chamber of Commerce. “It’s still a large economic driver, and it’s been a great energy source in the region,” Payne said. “Our reserves in this region are still tremendous.” It is one more example of how flipping on that ceiling fan is never as simple as it seems. I typed in the zip code for Cliffside, N.C., where Duke Energy is expanding its Cliffside coal facility. It turns out Cliffside gets some of its coal from a mountain top mine site at Toms Creek in Wise County.