AP NEws - 3/24/09
The Environmental Protection Agency is putting on hold hundreds of mountaintop coal-mining permits until it can evaluate the projects' impacts on streams and wetlands.The decision was announced Tuesday by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. It targets a controversial practice by coal mining companies that dump waste from mountaintop mining into streams and wetlands.
I thought this was great news, until I read a press statement that the EPA didn't actually put a moratorium on MTR, and that the exuberant announcments that have been circulating are in fact 'mischaracterizations' of the EPA's intentions (which are simply to review two questionable pending permits and take a closer look at hundreds of others...though, as the PR says, the EPA "fully anticipate[s] that the bulk of these pending permit applications will not raise environmental concerns", or, in other words, they will still go through as planned. Way to dampen an already rainy day.
As a resident of Western North Carolina I hear a lot about the devestating effects of Mountain Top Removal on the communities and wildlife that surround these sites. My recent trip to Washington, DC for Powershift 2009 gave me a first hand look at the horrors that residents in Coal Mining communities in the South East face on a daily basis. One of the speakers in a panel I attended entitled Achieving Environmental Justice
through Economic Justice is a resident of a community in southern West Virginia and a member of CRMW (Coal River Mountain Watch). She is the lady in blue in the image on the right - next to her is the panel moderator and in the foreground is a representative from a group in NYC called Sustainable South Bronx. Both were excellent speakers and gave a lot of insight into the economic challenges that hinder the advancement of environmental causes, especially in low-income areas. To learn more about Mountain Top Removal, I suggest visiting some of the website below:-http://www.ilovemountains.org/ - A MTR action and resource center
-http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/ - Anti MTR activst group
-http://www.appvoices.org/ - News, information, and resource center
-Click here to see a Video
