Citizen Power

This is about where not  to get energy.   Look at this photo — it was once beautiful green mountains.  Appalachia mountaintop explosions still happen, caused by coal mining by large coal companies .  Huge amounts of TNT are used to blow the tops off the mountains in a few southeastern states.    Boulders and dirt roll down the rolling green mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia, and North Carolina.  This type of coal mining literally removes the tops of mountains. The results are moonscapes — miles and miles of vegetation free, flattened hills where mountains once graced the landscape.   These beautiful natural landscapes  are now literally ruined forever because of coal mining, and the irresponsibility of coal mining companies.

This is environmental devastation in so many ways.  The toxic runoff from the procedure kills wildlife and poisons drinking water.  This is nothing less than a crime.  Why do people allow this to happen?  I Love Mountains is one  activist group and website trying to change these practices.  I like promoting their site because it’s a good portal to more information on this terribly damaging coal mining in an area of the U.S. that not too many people know about.  The coal plant nearest to me, in South Dakota, uses coal from this area of the U.S.

Last Christmas millions of tons of coal fly ash from a holding pond in Tennessee broke through its levees and devastated the area around the holding pond for miles and miles. This created a disaster the scope of which is still being discovered.  The sheer volume of this coal slurry itself was 48 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of about 20 years ago.   At least two rivers, and the groundwater, were contaminated with many different pollutants,  including radioactivity,  and arsenic and barium.   This spill was a major catastrophe, and yet when is the last time you heard the mainstream media in the U.S. write about this spill in terms of catastrophe, or in any way at all?  It’s not yet been cleaned up. Not even close.   When is the last time you heard the mainstream media talk about coal waste as radioactive, or about mountain top removal, or about how damaging coal mining is?  Oil shale mining is nearly as bad.

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