Appalachia

On Thursday night, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will step onto a stage in the heart of Appalachian coal country to debate Mr. Coal himself, Massey Energy CEO and global warming skeptic Don Blankenship.

There’s little question who has the home field advantage at the University of Charleston in West Virginia.

Six months after EPA officials announced they had serious concerns about water contamination from mountaintop mining in Appalachia, the agency is starting to tighten the reins on mining permits.

The EPA outraged the coal industry last week when it asked the Army Corps of Engineers to suspend, revoke or at least modify a two-year-old permit covering the largest mountaintop mining project in West Virginia.

Today, EPA officials announced that they were also requesting closer reviews of 79 pending mountaintop mining permits on the grounds that "all of the projects would likely cause water quality impacts requiring additional review under the Clean Water Act."

Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Driven in part by consumer appetite for cheap beef, leather, timber, biofuels, tropical oils and products, as well as paper products, deforestation is proceeding at the rate of an estimated 13 million hectares a year. That translates into 50,000 square miles, an area more than half the size of the United Kingdom, being lost every year.

While there is growing international support for tackling global deforestation -- there's even generous support in the Waxman-Markey bill for the effort -- action has been stymied by the overall lack of progress on a global climate agreement. The circumstance is exemplified by the UN's program on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). It has only one donor, Norway, and six projects off the ground.

While addressing deforestation has remained difficult, around the world there has been encouraging progress on the opposite process - reforestation and afforestation. Governments, companies, organizations and individuals are putting trees back on some of the lands devastated by deforestation. 

Earlier this month, Pakistan broke a Guinness World Record previously held by India for the most trees planted in a single day – 541,176. There are even reforestation vacations for enterprising travelers that want to get in on the act. But popular events are just the tip of the iceberg of a far more difficult process that is proceeding largely unseen in many pockets around the world.

If the Obama administration wants to protect the people and mountains of Appalachia, it needs to end the destructive practice of mountaintop mining, not settle for promises of stricter scrutiny of the mining permits, advocates say.

This morning, the White House announced what it described as an “unprecedented” agreement among the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department to better coordinate and tighten the agencies’ oversight of mountaintop mining and to review the mining existing laws.

In a memorandum of understanding, the agencies promised to:

• Require more stringent environmental reviews for future mountaintop mining permits, including using the Clean Water Act to reduce contamination in streams and watersheds;

• Propose a rule change to stop allowing a type of nationwide permit that doesn’t require site-specific reviews for mining operations to dump the mineral-laden debris of former mountaintops into streams;

• Strengthen oversight of state agencies, both in their permitting and enforcement;

• And, if the U.S. District Court vacates the Bush administration’s 2008 Stream Buffer Zone Rule as requested, return to the 1983 rules restoring the 100-foot buffer zone around streams for mining waste.

These are all steps in the right direction, but they aren’t enough, says Willa Mays, Executive Director of Appalachian Voices:

"Their priorities do not take into account that mountains are being blown up today, and until mountaintop removal coal mining is ended, residents will continue to suffer from high disease rates, floods, and poisoned water supplies directly attributable to this mining practice."

Advocates across Appalachia echoed her concern.

In Appalachia, there is a growing struggle between two formidable forces – the coal industry that provides jobs in this impoverished region and the religious leaders who knit its rural communities together.

As with everything here, the mountains and the coal they hold are at the heart of the conflict.

When the mines were underground, faith and mining could co-exist. But then the coal giants found a cheaper way to get at the wealth: They began blowing the tops off mountains and scrapping out the coal, contaminating streams and ravaging the landscape in the process.

“God put humanity in the garden to care for and cultivate it. We forget that,” says Father John Rousch, who takes anyone willing to listen to witness the devastation.

Rousch's Catholic Committee of Appalachia is one of several religious groups that have begun speaking out in Appalachia's churches, communities and state capitols against a practice they see as an outrage against creation: mountaintop removal.

Half a dozen major religious denominations have issued statements opposing mountaintop mining in recent years, but the strongest voices in this fight are coming from the local churches.

Unlike activists who sweep in from the cities, these religious leaders belong to coal country. They have the trust of the people, and they understand that when it comes to jobs here, coal is still king.