The Bush administration has proposed new rules that sanction the ongoing destruction of the landscapes of Appalachia and other coal-rich parts of the country. Rather than reining in the devastation, the rules, presented as “clarifications” of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, affirm the rights of the mining companies to keep blowing the tops off mountains and dumping the soil and polluted mining wastes into streams.
An Environmental Protection Agency report from 2001 estimates that throughout the country, coal mining has polluted over 9,709 miles of streams. Seven hundred and twenty-four miles of streams were actually buried under mining debris between 1985 and 2001. And, says the report, “…there are over 18,000 miles of abandoned highwalls, 16,326 acres of dangerous piles and embankments, and 874 dangerous impoundments” (translation: many coal town residents live in daily and nightly fear of dams, mudslides and rockslides, and deaths from those causes get little publicity in other parts of the country).
The new rules and even the language they’re written in carry the stamp of the Bush culture. In one of the most circular statements since the Tautologist-in-Chief remarked that more and more of our imports come from overseas, one section states that mining through streams will be exempted from the rule against disturbing land within 100 feet of the water “because it is not possible to maintain an undisturbed buffer around the original waters when mining through a stream…” Analogy: Burglary will now be exempt from the laws against breaking and entering because I can’t rob your house unless I can break into it.
The new rules help answer the question of what was going on behind closed doors when the White House famously refused to disclose who concocted its energy policy. It wasn’t just the oil people. Coal was there and got its payback for $20 million in donations to Bush and other Republicans in the 2000 election cycle. For more on coal and a whole lot of mountaintops now missing in Appalachia, see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Crimes Against Nature.
