I’ve written many times about the “despicable practice” of mountaintop removal mining. (Al Gore called it that – and he couldn’t be more right.) There’s an op-ed in the NY Times today from one of the co-authors of a new book: Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. Silas House remind us in “My Polluted Kentucky Home” that this is not only an environmental crisis, but “…it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.”
Welcome, Appalachia, to the Global South, where oil companies take what they want from the jungles of Ecuador and the shores and mangroves of Nigeria, the people be damned. You belong to the same world of the Navajo in Arizona and the miners in Niger and their families, exploited for uranium. Pioneering groups like Global Witness have long recognized the links between resource extraction and conflict, corruption and “…associated environmental and human rights abuses.” And coal extraction, at the expense of everything else, retards the local economy, preventing people from expanding their job and development opportunities. It’s called the resource curse.
But Appalachians have been fighting back. And, finally, the EPA is joining in, drawing a line in the sand.
Is coal really more important than people’s lives? It’s absurd to even have to be asking that question.