Bush's "Parting Gift" To Coal Industry

Posted on Sat, Sep. 01, 2007

Satisfying U.S. energy needs should not involve defacing Appalachia
By C.W. GUSEWELLE
The Kansas City Star

In what the head of an environmental watchdog group terms “a parting gift to the coal industry,” the Bush administration has moved to give surface mining companies greater freedom to disfigure Appalachia.

The effect of the proposed new rule, drafted by the Interior Department, would be to extend and expand the ability of strip miners to dump debris from shattered and decapitated mountains into the streams and valleys of the region.

It is a practice whose consequences are horrific. According to the mandatory environmental impact statement, some 33 miles of waterways are being buried under mine rubble yearly — a rate that is certain to increase.

And that is only one aspect of the catastrophe.

In 1971, I spent a month in eastern Kentucky on a magazine assignment to write what was to have been a 3,000-word piece about the people and conditions of life in the all-but-moribund coal fields...

• • •

On a clear day, above the hamlet of Lookout, Ky., I’m standing at an overlook with a young man, Estil Bartley, not yet 21 but already a veteran of two years in his family’s underground mine.

He has parked his pickup truck at the very lip of a dizzying ravine and stares now across a gaping reach of distance.

“Lookit there,” Bartley says, and has to whistle to himself. “They’re tearing that mountain all to pieces!”

But it is not a mountain any longer. It is a mesa, its side remade in shelves and verticals, a step-pyramid with its top removed.

And down the side of that has come the mud, glacial in proportions — a flow of sterile muck not to be measured by the foot but by the quarter-section of frontage. So large that the gullies eroded in it are themselves considerable terrain features, carrying foul streams of a size almost to deserve naming.

Down all of that reaches — 800 feet, a thousand — down to the bed of Sycamore Creek, which vanishes entirely under the slide and comes out the lower side as a snaking, ochre ribbon.

Having ceased to be water and become some other substance, the stream would most certainly stop flowing if the valley were less steep. By gravity’s persuasion, it oozes on, mingling all the while with the ruins of other hillsides in torpid suspension.

There is about this a kind of magnificence, the grandeur of sheer scale — of blitzed cathedrals, of killing grounds after the battle has passed on, of nuclear clouds over coral atolls. It does not merely deface what is. It changes what is — creates new facts for eternity’s contemplation.

Estil Bartley’s pale eyes traverse the hideousness.

He whistles softly again, then climbs in and lets the truck roll on down in gear.

• • •

“Lookit there,” Bartley says, and has to whistle to himself. “They’re tearing that mountain all to pieces!”

- This is the same as the ignorant hick elected president of the U.S. - karennkc.