Just Take A Little Off The Top

My first job out of college was as an Environmental Investigator for the Natural Resources Cabinet Department of Law Surface Mining Division. It sounds like an important position but we were really only hired because the federal government had sued the state of Kentucky to force them to put forth at least a minimal effort in collecting fines owed for coal mining violations. Within the first week I realized that any ideas I had about protecting the environment were only pipe dreams.

The department’s policy was to prosecute the person who signed the permit package. This was usually some poor worker the coal company suckered into signing in exchange for a $12 an hour job as a heavy equipment operator. $12 an hour might not sound like much to a lot of people but back in 1989, in one of the poorest areas of the country, that was damn good money. It was a hell of a lot more than I was making. My job was to go out to the county courthouses and find all the assets these people had hidden away so they could pay off their $150,000 fine for polluting the water and scarring the landscape. After the first couple of months my running joke was that I didn’t even need to travel to the courthouses anymore, I already knew what I would find, a doublewide, some financed furniture and a 75 Chevy pickup.

The damage surface mining can do is bad enough but mountain top removal was just getting geared up when I left the department in 91. I remember driving by a few mountain top removal sites back then and they are hideous. It’s kind of like that woman on Oprah who was attacked by the monkey or the lady whose dog chewed her face off. It’s that disfiguring. That’s not even including the polluted water and cracked house foundations and millions of pounds of explosives going off 24 hours a day that the poor people who live there have to deal with. Every time there’s a hard rain they have to worry whether or not that will be the day they lose their home altogether because the coal companies have removed everything that used to block the water’s path.

From my experience with Kentucky state government, I think it’s a given that they’ll side with the coal companies every time but Obama has shown that he is at least open to the possibility of stopping the rape of the mountains that’s going on now. I’ve been hiking and camping in the Appalachian Mountains and it’s one of the most beautiful areas on earth. Even though I’m not religious, some of my most spiritual experiences have happened in those very mountains. It just really chaps my ass that no one would even consider suggesting that we lop off the tops of the Rocky Mountains but somehow the Appalachians are fair game. If you want to find out more about how destructive this practice really is, check out this video at http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2198