Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 6

The Clean Water Act, a law to regulate detrimental practices to bodies of water, was amended in 2002 to allow mine waste to “fill in streams for development and other purposes.” Now, the US Office of Surface Mining (which, apparently, exists) has proposed more changes to the Act. According to the New York Times, these new regulations would only serve to legalize mountaintop removal mining. Their article, Ravaging Appalachia , from last August, blasts politicians for continually attempting to condone this horrendous form of mining.

And apparently it’s not enough that hundreds of mountains have been obliterated. Now coal companies want to destroy streams. As per the article, 1200 miles of streams have been buried under mine debris, known as ‘spoil.’ To compare, that the same length as Florida’s entire coastline (Source ).

Having coal mines in such close proximity to streams and other water sources has many negative effects. Drinking water in West Virginia can be brown, and it is dangerous to drink, as shown in the trailer for the documentary, Burning the Future: Coal in America. West Virginia is a poor state, and people there cannot afford to buy something else to drink. These people are dying from coal mines without even going in one.

Photo credit: cindy47452 on Flickr 

Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 5

I have stumbled across a reason for strip mining, why companies thought it was a reasonable way to mine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr wrote an article on his father’s fight against strip mining, and it gives a bit of history on the situation. It starts with unions. In the sixties, there “were 114,000 unionized mine workers in West Virginia digging coal from tunnels and supporting the families and communities of Appalachia. Today, there are less than 11,000 miners in West Virginia taking the same amount of coal and only a fraction of them are unionized because the strip industry isn’t.” Strip mining requires heavy machinery that can do the work of many men. With more machines, fewer workers – union workers – were needed to mine the land. Non-union labor is cheaper, and having fewer workers to pay is cheaper, and companies certainly like a profit.

The initial reason for this practice to be thought up is explained as well: “The mining industry debuted strip mining in the 1940s in the Western States, to extract coal seams that lay a few feet below the surface and therefore inaccessible through traditional tunnel mining. To extract the wealth, all you needed was a bulldozer.” They were only thinking of immediate return, with no eye towards the future of the land.

Well, here’s the future:

The most shocking statistic I have read is from the same site. Strip miners set off 3,000 pounds of dynamite A DAY in West Virginia. Added up, it is the size of the Hiroshima bomb each week. The US Department of Energy estimates that 70,000 people died from the initial blast (Source ). Buildings were destroyed; everything was destroyed. If that’s how much one bomb did, and to humans and buildings, imagine the effects of one of those each week on the trees and natural elements.

Photo credit: Kent Kessinger

Hannah Feldman
Reflection 2

I am falling behind. Just putting that out there. In other news: It is beginning to feel like I have made a case already, and I’m sounding repetitive. There is so much information out there, but when I think about what to write for a post, I don’t want to write what I’m thinking, because it sounds the same as what I’ve already said.

The change agent. My one main concern in deciding on one is not preaching to the choir (Sorry for the cliché. I happen to dislike that one, but I used it anyway.). I don’t want to give my elevator pitch to, say, Appalachian Voices, because they don’t need to hear it. They said it first. So, I am thinking about perhaps tackling PECO. According to ilovemountains.org, they provide energy gained from mountaintop removal, so I would most definitely not be preaching to the devotees.

On the bright side: I am really excited to make the elevator pitch. I love commercials, and I cannot wait to make what is essentially a commercial. I want to make a video similar to the one we were shown in class about the situation in the Congo . It was direct, it presented the situation in black and white (literally and figuratively), and it was polished. It is still an awesome project.

I am in the process of reading A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson . It has many statistics and useful information that I can use in my writing (Thank you Patrick Higgins Jr ).

I will put out my next blog posts hopefully extremely soon (Where has all my self discipline gone?) and until then I will be holed up somewhere reading the book!

Hannah Feldman
Post 3

Coal is already generating protestors because it is nonrenewable, but what not many people know is how coal is mined. Strip mining, a type of surface mining, is one method coal companies use to extract coal from the land. Strip mining is basically razing the vegetation in an area, then drilling holes and blowing up the ground, and then actually mining the coal, as described by Thinkquest . At times, whole mountaintops are simply blown off to reach the coal. Why? Well, according to iLovemountains.org , “Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.” Verifying that, Appalachian Voices says, “although coal production rose 32 percent between 1987 and 1997, mining jobs dropped by 29 percent over the same period.” So, it’s cheaper. Well, coal mining companies may lose a bit of money, but everyone loses the oxygen those trees produced, and simply the beautiful views and landscapes they provided. Over 450 mountains have been destroyed in Appalachia so far, and there are myriad more surface mining permits granted for the area.

There are laws in place to regulate strip mining, but they are not well enforced. “While reclamation efforts such as stabilization and revegetation are required for mountaintop removal sites, in practice, state agencies that regulate mining are generous with granting waivers to coal companies. Most sites receive little more than a spraying of exotic grass seed” says ilovemountains.org. Mountains are not just grass. What about the forests that used to thrive? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither do forests grow back in a day, especially not hardwoods. According to PBS , “300,000 acres of hardwood forest in West Virginia have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.” West Virginia is the Mountain State, and hopefully it stays that way. I also strongly encourage you to go here and see your connection to this disastrous practice.

Note: Hold on tight, topic is shifting! The reason I chose the topic of deforestation in the beginning was because I remembered an article I read a year ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer about deforestation and how Pennsylvania is one of the better states in reforestation efforts. So, I guess I should have realized that PA doesn’t really need help! However, in my research, I have stumbled upon the problems outlined above in Appalachia, and have decided to focus on the negative effects of strip mining and mountaintop removal.