What takes 480 million years to create and an instant to destroy?  Answer:  the coal-rich mountain peaks of Appalachia.  Imagine filling the Grand Canyon, building a nuclear power plant at Big Sur, leveling El Capitan, or clear-cutting the Olympics.  Unthinkable?  Then why is it that the coalfields of Appalachia, comprising a larger area than the entire land mass of Delaware, have been allowed to become a national sacrifice zone in the interests of cheap coal?

Photo credit:  Vivian Stockman, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition / southwings.org. Used by permission            

    These Appalachian ridges, located in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, are the bedrock hearts of the some of the oldest mountains in the world.  Their deciduous forests, untouched by glaciation, form the aboriginal seed pool for the forests of the most of the eastern half of the U.S.  The people who have clung to these hills for generations are displaced like economic refugees as their homes and towns are condemned, destroyed or despoiled in the interests of mountaintop removal.

            The heartbreaking legacy of mountaintop removal coal mining may finally have turned a corner.  In a March 24^th announcement, federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said the E.P.A. had sent two letters to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expressing opposition to two proposed mining permits.  Most notably, as reported in the New York Times, the agency recommended denial of a permit to a Massey Energy-owned mine in West Virginia.   The E.P.A. requested additional protections for streams for another mine in Kentucky.

            So what does this announcement really mean?

            I interviewed Lewisburg, West Virginia environmental attorney Joe Lovett to get his reaction to the news. Mr. Lovett is the crusading attorney featured in by Michael Shnayerson’s book, Coal River. He is the director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment.  For over 10 years, he has waged what has often seemed like a one-man legal crusade against seemingly insurmountable odds.

            “I think the E.P.A. has taken a very important first step to reigning in mountaintop removal,” said Lovett.  “The job has not been completed, but it is the first decent thing that E.P.A. has done in eight years on this issue.”

            In basic terms, the announcement acknowledged what Lovett has always maintained—that all these permits seek essentially the same thing, and all constitute flagrant violations of the Clean Water Act in their destruction of 2,000 miles of headwaters streams.

            In Lovett’s words, “The E.P.A. has admitted in the letters that on the permits that it has examined, those permits do not comply with the Clean Water Act—and I don’t think that they are different in any significant way from other permits.  So if E.P.A. goes through and looks at the permits, I’m confident that it will reach the same conclusion about nearly all of them.”

            In short, this is the beginning of the admission Lovett has sought time and time again—that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must follow the law of the land in reviewing mining permits.

            But the battle is not over yet—not by a long shot.  And just last month, legal teams associated with the effort to achieve a ban on mountaintop removal received a setback in the Richmond, Virginia U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit.  Asked if the E.P.A. announcement undid that damage, Lovett replied, “It is a start—not a complete reversal—we’ll see if E.P.A. keeps its nerve here.  I expect that it will.”

            But whether it will or not is an open question.  As early as last Wednesday, the E.P.A. was “clarifying” its announcement.  E.P.A. spokesperson Adora Ady said the E.P.A. was not "halting, holding or placing a moratorium on any of the mining permit applications. Plain and simple.”

            According the Charleston Daily Mail, “Rather, the EPA is reviewing the applications for new or expanded surface mines, many of which are mountaintop removal operations, pending before the federal government,” This is contrary to what the letter regarding the Massey Energy subsidiary seemed to say.

Reaction in West Virginia

            I asked Lovett’s reaction to media reports that the coal industry and the West Virginia state government were “stunned” by the news.  “If they were stunned, they aren’t as smart as I thought they were.  It should have been obvious to anyone that something like this was going to happen,” he said.

            West Virginia governor Joe Manchin (D) was off to meet with senior White House environmental officials only a day after the E.P.A. announcement was made.  I don’t think his purpose was to congratulate them.  “I told them we are looking for a balance between the environment and the economy, and they assured me that they will work with us to find that balance,” Manchin said last week.

            When asked if the announcement serves to push Governor Manchin into the arms of the coal industry, Lovett offered, “I think he’s been there all along.  I hope I’m wrong.  To be fair to Manchin, he hasn’t had the opportunity really to step up and do anything.  Let’s look at it this way:  Manchin’s department of environmental protection has allowed these mines to go forward without any analysis.  I think that Manchin is already pretty tightly aligned with coal operators.”

            And as to West Virginia’s two senators, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller’s office released the following statement last week, “Let me make very clear - America has over a 200-year history of mining West Virginia coal, and that is not going to change any time soon.”  When I asked for Lovett’s reaction to the issue of where the senators might stand, he honed in on “The Dean of Congress,” Senator Robert C. Byrd (D, WV).

            “I hope they come out and finally agree with the E.P.A.  What we hear is that they are looking into it.  Maybe Senator Byrd will change his mind.  Maybe his legacy will be protecting West Virginia.  I think there is some chance that it will happen.  I think that, whatever happens, these practices are going to come to an end.  I think that Senator Byrd should amend his legacy on the side of the state and not against it.”

            To blow the top 800 feet of a mountain to smithereens may require up to 100 times more explosives to than it took to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal building according to Mountain Justice Summer, the activist group that has long opposed mountaintop removal.  We are talking about environmental violence on a mass scale here.  The E.P.A. estimates that given our previously charted course, 2,200 square miles of Appalachian forests will be cleared for mountaintop removal purposes by 2012.  Mountain after mountain, thousands of square miles, destined for some mutant status that future inhabitants will regard as the mark of some—and this is putting it mildly—profoundly misguided national resolve.  They will ask, “Was this the only way for them to light their homes and power their industries?”

            In the face of it all, Lovett is almost upbeat. “I hope this is a first step to ending mountaintop removal,” he says.  You can tell he means it, but you know he knows he’s been burned before.

BREAKING NEWS:

            In other news, according to NPR, “U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in Charleston blocked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from issuing so-called "nationwide" permits, which streamline the process of getting permission to mine.” This just happened today.  Lovett is quoted in this afternoon’s NPR story on All Things Considered.

To see images of mountaintop removal via Google Earth, go to: http://www.ilovemountains.org/google_earth_tutorial