Filed under: enviromental issues, political issues | Tags: Robert F. Kennedy jr, Mountaintop Removal Mining
A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?
If ever an issue deserved President Obama’s promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia’s mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia’s rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not — obliterating the hemisphere’s oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas — while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry’s promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry’s fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains — with their impoverished and alienated population — are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.
First, the White House should fix the “fill” rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the “fill” rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored “buffer zone” rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are “reclaimed.”
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of “fill” permits that will cause “significant degradation” to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the “function and structure” of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine “may have significant environmental impacts,” individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate — an illegal practice that should stop.
Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama’s legacy.
President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining — then in its infancy — that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation’s richest natural resources, was home to America’s poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.
The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.
Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.
© 2009 The Washington Post
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is chairman of the Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.
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Let us hope that the son will pick up the torch of his dad and join us fellow Greens and help build our party or start a real Progressive party with people like Bernie Sanders and other real Progressives.
I somehow think that he is finding out the truth and is doing some serious thinking. Let us hope that he will find the courage and strength within him to do the morally right thing and that he will find the encouragment and inspiration to fight the battles that must be fought to save this country.
Anyway I do pray for him daily, and believe in the end he will do the right thing.
Comment by chrisy58 July 3, 2009 @ 5:18 pmThis comment was on Common Dreams, and I wanted to post the comment here because I agree with it.
elohim July 3rd, 2009 11:57 am
I respected and admired your Dad, Robert. As a kid I did volunteer work for his presidential run.
What surprises me is your surprise about Obama. You really did not expect anything different out of the duopoly did you?
Now, I am a card carrying member of the Green Party. I voted Nader twice and Mckinney once. But the last Dem I voted for was McGovern.
Why not join the real environmental movement, and quit pinning about our corporate owned representatives and president.
I think that had your dad lived, he would now be advocating for a political transformation by repudiating the Dems. It is not too late for you to do the same.
Comment by chrisy58 July 3, 2009 @ 5:24 pmThis is another comment from Common Dreams that I thought was really good and heartfelt.
Siouxrose July 3rd, 2009 11:48 am
Sioux Rose
Thank you Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for all that you do. And God bless you for standing up, like David to Goliath, against forces that would break a lesser man’s heart.
The nation’s ecological holocaust drives me to despair. I can’t say I have the remotest faith that Obama will hear your words. Apparently his ego is ablaze with being the first Black U.S. president, and from there, he just does the bidding of those that groomed him for the role. He has stood firm on absolutely nothing, but is useful in putting on a nice show of words which has managed to fool too many intelligent persons. We are way past tragic now, as for all our jokes about politics and lies, after the hit-job the Bush team executed not only on our nation, but with serious reverberations around the world, something else–or should I say someone else–was desperately needed to shift the agenda driving the nation to ruin.
As state after state falls like drunk dominoes, the woefully bankrupt priorities that set this calamity into motion show. What is particularly egregious is that just as the failed banking system became the excuse to allot more power to its criminally-minded engineers, it is likely that those sell-outs that helped forge legislation to bankrupt the states will be first on board to “fire sale” precious assets claiming this is the path to remedial action. We can’t say Naomi didn’t warn us!
There needs to be a revolution, but with so many armed forces (police, sheriff departments, DEA, marine patrol, Homeland Security, FBI, private armies, etc) the capacity to stand up to an utterly corrupt government seems impossible. As the money runs out, the pattern right now is for more claims to be made (forced insurance!!!!) against the few who still CAN make their bills/payments.
It is a terrible set of circumstances the full impacts of which have hardly been felt. The U.S. is in for at least 5-7 years of tribulation, and it has in part been brought on by the population going willfully to sleep, when not being aided and abetted into that state by anti-depressant medications, or the hypnotic drug of T.V. where all the talking heads do the thinking for them. And what a result!
I really hope Divine intervention ameliorates the otherwise inevitable ramifications of the warped priorities of the beast turning inward (onto the homeland.)
And consider the irony: for all the billions wasted on war and so-called defense, the nation can’t even repair its own schools or provide cursory medical treatment to those in need. Talk about failed priorities and the absolutely narrow-minded ego-driven blindness of the Mars-ruled state! SICKENING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by chrisy58 July 3, 2009 @ 5:29 pmHere is another comment. I like Common Dreams because they have some very intelligent thinkers.
Stephen V. Riley July 3rd, 2009 1:13 pm
Sioux Rose,……..always a pleasure reading the truths of your numerous beautiful postings. I find things so bad that I can hardly write anymore. I admire your tenacity.
Yes, there needs to be a revolution! ………But to me, the revolution will reveal to the vast majority of American people just how our once great nation has been taken over by the Corporate Capitalistic Military State…..all to enforce the diabolical nature of Capitalism that is destroying our Mother Earth and turning its people against one another.
It will be the brutal oppression from the black booted goon squads from our local police departments, former friends and relatives in H.S. and in church, that will eventually wake Americans up, and to motivate millions more to join us in the streets. We must lie face down in the streets if necessary. At age 75, this would be my ultimate pleasure, revealing to the American public the intrinsic evil of militant capitalism.
Comment by chrisy58 July 3, 2009 @ 5:35 pmI also made this comment on Common Dreams.
I think that if his dad were alive that he would tell his son to pray for wisdom and to have the courage and strength to do what he knows he has to do for the future of this country and the future of his children. I don’t think his dad would stay with the Democratic party as it is, but would either make the Green party the true Progressive Party or start a new Progressive Party. I believe that his dad was a fighter who fought for truth, justice, and freedom. He held the true values that the Founding Fathers held for this nation. He had a deep love for this nation and tried to pass that love on to his children. He also had a strong faith and I believe he would be a true American Patriot.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with those of us in the Green Party hoping that Bobby Jr would join us and realize that we need and want him in this fight. He is a leader and most important I believe he has the courage to tell the American people the truth. America is in such need of a political leader who tells the truth to the American people. One who will not lie, but who will tell the truth.
Many of us realize that there is very little difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. They are two faces to one party. Our real hope is if we can bring people like Bobby Jr, and others who are smart, honorable, and have the courage to do the right thing and joining us who believe the best hope for this country is to join a third party that becomes the true opposition party to the two corporate parties.
Happy 4th of July.
Comment by chrisy58 July 3, 2009 @ 5:56 pmWe must stop this evil practice!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2aIQRoFJvk&feature=player_embedded
Comment by chrisy58 July 4, 2009 @ 6:18 pmHere is another comment on CommonDreams. I think there are many of us who would like to see Mr. Kennedy join the Green party or form a new Progressive party with people who love this country enough to fight to save her. Who realize the solution is not in staying with either of the two corporate parties who have betrayed this country and the American people, but who believe and know that our best hope is to form a real Progressive party who can be the party of the people.
I pray that we will be able to form and build a new party and be able to start running people for political office in 2010. We have time if we can start organizing now.
Sanity July 4th, 2009 12:35 pm
Comment by chrisy58 July 4, 2009 @ 6:39 pmMr Kennedy Jr. if you are so disappointed with YOUR political party, remove yourself from their ranks publicly. How can anyone who opposes the corporate destruction of our planet still be affiliated with the Dems. They now have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. They have a healthy majority in the house of Representatives. They have the White House. They can no longer can blame the Repugs for the bills that are coming out of Congress, and being signed in to law by Obama, or the wars that are bankrupting our country. Until you are no longer a member of the Democratic party, you’ll pardon me if I’m skeptical about your motives. I suppose you and Dennis truly are nice people, but you are being USED by your political party. If you truly want to put an end to these problems join a real progressive party like the GREEN PARTY.
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Comment by chrisy58 July 7, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
what a crock of crap.
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My comment:
I think you are full of crap, lol.
Comment by Stormfront Nazi July 11, 2009 @ 8:51 pm