Dear Mr. President: Declare August 3rd as Armistice Day in the Appalachian Coalfields

By Jeff Biggers, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2009.

And the peace and prosperity of some of our nation's most historic communities have been shattered, locked out from any diversified economy, and forced to bear the burden of a failed mining policy.

"When Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977," testified Joe Lovett, the Executive Director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, at an Oversight Hearing of the US House Committee on Natural Resource on the 30th anniversary of the SMCRA, "it thought that it was enacting a law to protect the environment and citizens of the region. OSM has used, and has allowed the states to use, the Act as a perverse tool to justify the very harm that Congress sought to prevent. The Members of Congress who voted to pass the Act in 1977 could not have imagined the cumulative destruction that would be visited on our region by the complete failure of the regulators to enforce the Act."

All well-meaning intentions aside, this is what is going to happen on August 3rd under our current policy: An estimated 540 million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives will have ripped across and devastated our nation's oldest and most diverse mountains since President Obama took office in January.

With military-like precision at 4pm on that day, Vietnam veteran Bo Webb's ancestral family cemetery and vegetable garden in Clay's Branch in West Virginia, for example, will be blanketed with silica dust and heavy metals from strip-mining blasts, while other gallbladder disease-stricken American citizens in neighboring coalfield areas will lug bottled water into their contaminated kitchens and bathrooms. Down the valley, teachers at the Marsh Fork Elementary School will be readying to return to work, as nearby mountaintop removal explosives send shocks through the earthen walls of a high ridge pond that holds back 2.8 billion gallons of toxic coal sludge a few football fields above their heads.

On that same historic day in August, untold tons of coal stripped from mountaintop removal mines in these areas of central Appalachia will have been mined, processed, shipped and used in the Potomac River coal-fired plant to generate the electricity for the White House's first 180 days.

In effect, by August 3rd, the White House will have decided Appalachia's fate.

That is why it is imperative that President Obama makes a public stand on this scandal, while his outstanding and dedicated administrators at the EPA, Department of Interior and Council on Environmental Quality continue their measured actions to enforce the weak laws and regulations.

By standing at the site of a mountaintop removal amphitheatre of destruction, declaring "Armistice Day" in the coalfields, and announcing an Appalachian Revitalization Program for green jobs and renewable energy manufacturing plants, a massive Appalachian Reforestation and Heavy Machinery Jobs Program, and a veritable fund dedicated to the national service and health and pension plans of the United Mine Workers, President Obama will truly bring peace and justice to our nation's coalfields.

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