I first wrote about mountaintop removal mining – the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to excavate coal - about four years ago, and the shock of the reporting is still with me. On one of my first visits to a mountaintop site in West Virginia, I stood on the edge of a vast area under excavation. A mountainside had been rendered like a side of beef. You could spy thin, darker layers of coal amid the thicker shale. Trucks crawled over the makeshift roads, carting boulders to dump in a nearby valley. Suddenly, a huge demolition blast went off; the earth shook under my feet. As a companion and I walked away, noxious-smelling yellow smoke enveloped us. In short: you can't truly understand the total war-like devastation that this does to mountains without being there. And for years, Appalachian communities and environmental groups have waged legal warfare to try to stop the coal companies, with only spotty success.
But the legal-regulatory calculus has changed. I've got a piece up on Slate now looking at a possible turning point in the Appalachian war over the mountaintops, which has been going on since the mid-1990s:
On Nov. 15, St. Louis-based Patriot Coal agreed to phase out its mountaintop excavationsand redirect its efforts back to underground mining. Adding a symbolic punch, Patriot agreed to decommission its two draglines—enormous boom excavators that do the actual mountaintop demolitions—and can sell them only on the condition that they’re never used in the Appalachian coalfields again. Coal executives usually shrug off complaints about mountaintop-removal impacts as the grumbling of dilettantes and naysayers who don’t understand the need for mining jobs. Yet here was the practically unheard-of spectacle of Patriot’s CEO, Ben Hatfield, acknowledging that mountaintop removal affected both people and ecology: “Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways, and we are committed to maximizing the benefits of this agreement for our stakeholders, including our employees and neighbors," Hatfield said in court. "We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint."
Patriot's situation is a bit idiosyncratic: don't expect other coal companies to immediately follow suit. But it shows things are changing. The scale of environmental and health damage they've done to the central Appalachians is getting harder to dismiss or gloss over. There's a growing pile of scientific evidence that shows mountaintop removal has impacts far beyond the blast zones – principally on mountain watersheds and the web of life that depends on them, up to and including humans. Meanwhile, falling coal prices and other factors are undermining the economic logic behind surface mining. These forces are undercutting the coal industry argument that mountaintop mining is an unalloyed good because of the jobs it creates, and bring more companies to the table to talk about reining in their excavators.
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