By Jim Hoover

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGXQ1Xwn4ws&feature=player_detailpage#t=63s

Unlike traditional coal mining, dynamiting the tops of pristine mountains to extract coal, permanently alters the beauty of the landscape.

The Appalachian Mountain System, running 2000 miles from Newfoundland to central Alabama, has graced the landscape of what is the eastern US today, originally formed over 1 billion years ago. They rose to over 24,000 feet some 500 million years ago, for when the continents of North America and Eurasia inched together to form the supercontinent, Pangaea, the tallest peak was pushed up higher than the Himalayas today.

Since then, it took 500 million years for erosion and weathering to pare them down like a masterpiece sculpture as low as 1000 feet in Canada to some 6700 feet in North Carolina, as they are today, but it has taken the coal mining industry a few decades to despoil the beauty that nature fashioned over hundreds of millions of years.

The principal company doing the dynamiting, Massey Energy, best known for presiding over the demise of 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch coal-mine explosion last year, speaks of the jobs lost if dynamiting mountain tops is stopped.

This statement distorts the truth.

From the 1960s to today, the numbers of unionized mine workers in West Virginia has gone from 151,000 to less than 15,000 miners. With more environmentally reckless and destructive coal-extraction methods now, namely blowing off the tops of mountains, the coal industry now replaces workers with explosives and mechanization.

Bill Haney, the director of The Last Mountain and Robert Kennedy, Jr., appearing in the documentary, cite the money and power of Big Coal to manipulate both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. With over 50% of electricity produced in the US coming from the burning of coal, both Congress and Obama are supporting the cheapest and easiest route to generating electricity. This is perhaps the reason Obama keeps talking about “clean coal,” which in itself is a misrepresentation.

Perhaps there are too many fights left over from the lax standards of Bush and Cheney before him, and their irresponsible encouragement of reckless methods of getting fossil fuels. Thus, we have the practice of fracking to attain natural gas that attacks the purity of drinking water and promotes other environmental hazards. We have little or no investment in alternative fuel sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, and we still have the practice of blowing off the tops of mountains.

We must decide what we want to leave for our children and grandchildren, and whether we should leave that decision in the hands of profit-based companies or a political leadership that is obligated to them for election or re-election funds.

We can acquiesce to the practice of blowing up mountains for a few extra jobs, or to calm the fears and insecurities that politicians or plutocratic forces try to impose on us.

But if we decide for a better future for ourselves and those coming after us, then our voices must be heard