Resisting Mountaintop Removal in Tennessee

By Kari Lydersen, The NewStandard. Posted November 21, 2005.

Appalachian Tennessee, Nov 15 -- Paloma Galindo's chihuahua skittered ahead of her, jumping back in surprise when a small cascade of loose rocks and dirt at the Egan Mountain mine in Tennessee tumbled down a jagged cliff created by the type of mountaintop removal mining that has left the mountains of Appalachia increasingly scarred, pocked and leveled.

Galindo, an environmental activist with the group United Mountain Defense who has come to know the mines of Tennessee like the back of her hand, gestured toward a scrub-covered hillock at the end of a gently sloping meadow, a "reclaimed" strip mine that was once home to lush forest.

"It looks like it's back to its original shape, but it acts like a big sponge," she said of the hillside, which was reconstructed out of rubble after part of the mountain was blasted away to get at coal seams. "It's all broken rock slapped on there and compacted with no hydrological system, so it will soak up water, and five years down the line you'll get massive landslides. Then the mining company will have already bonded out so the cost will fall on the taxpayers."

During a flyover of Egan and other mines in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky the next day, landslides of the type Galindo was describing were visible: gashes of jumbled gray boulders, upended trees and debris cutting through the autumn colors.

From the air, the North Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee look like the coat of a once-beautiful animal with a debilitating case of mange. Mountaintops are laced with strangely shaped bald spots, where trees give way to brushy undergrowth. Giant hunks have been bitten out of the mountainsides, revealing sores of crumbling sand, broken rock and black tar. Once-neat layers of sediment are visibly torn asunder, cascading down hillsides. Strange top-hat-shaped protrusions of land rise up sharply. For miles and miles, it looks as if someone took a giant potato peeler to the side of the range.

And six days a week, fleets of enormous dump trucks and bulldozers crawl along the open wounds of the earth, drilling, blasting and extracting truckloads of shiny black coal.

Even after decades of drilling, digging and blasting, Appalachia is still rich in coal -- 28.5 billion tons of it according to a 1998 US Department of Energy. And coal, in the eyes of the Bush administration, is the energy source of the future. The White House's energy plan designates the black rock as one of the country's main sources of fuel, and calls for 1,300 new coal-burning power plants by 2020. The relative efficiency of strip mining versus the more traditional "deep" mining means that coal companies can harvest more coal faster and with fewer workers.

Setting Up the Battleground

Activists view Tennessee as an important proving ground in the fight against mountaintop removal since the pace of destruction is accelerating rapidly and there are still more state environmental protections in place in Tennessee than in neighboring states. But activists in Appalachia say the environmental and cultural price of powering the country with coal -- especially when it is mined through techniques like mountaintop removal -- is too high.

The harshest effects of mountaintop removal can be viewed in West Virginia, where mining companies have decapitated roughly 300,000 acres of mountains and filled in about 1,000 miles of streams with rubble. Mountaintop removal is also practiced in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This fall the US Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies released an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the effects of mountaintop removal mining. The statement, part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed in West Virginia in 1998, catalogued sundry negative effects of the practice but concluded that better cooperation between federal agencies and a better permitting process could lessen the harm. Environmentalists called the EIS a green light for coal companies to proceed with mountaintop removal.

In Tennessee, the process is officially called "contour mining," when the sides of a mountain are excavated, or "cross-ridge mining," when the peak is shaved right off. They do not call it "mountaintop removal" because Tennessee law mandates the mountain must be "reclaimed" and rubble cleared from the streambeds. However, environmentalists say the process and effects are virtually the same.

In order to reach coal seams in the mountains, mining companies literally blast off their tops. The debris is pushed down the mountainside, creating a "valley fill" at the base, or stored in large piles where it can deposit minerals and ooze toxic metals and compounds into rivers and groundwater.

Kari Lydersen is a core contributor contributor to The NewStandard. She is also an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »