Among the world’s most devastating, premeditated and ongoing environmental catastrophes, mountaintop removal coal mining has to rank near the top. Yet across the country, companies that use mountaintop removal mining have been given a blank check — in the form of a fast-track, nationwide permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers since 1982 — to dump the land, trees and boulders that they blow away into the surrounding streams and valleys. Under this open-ended permit, six southern Appalachian states, including Tennessee, have been grievously damaged by MTR mining.
The poster-child for this outrageous environmental sacrilege, to be sure, is West Virginia. There, literally hundreds of mountaintops have been blasted and scrapped away, and blown or pushed, into the land below, destroying both the mountains and the valleys, the watersheds and communities, beneath them.
It’s long been painfully apparent, visible for the eye to see and the tongue to taste, that this ongoing destruction of the creation that sustains us is not just an environmental, moral and religious abomination. It also has constituted a prima facie violation of the nation’s Clean Water Act, which was passed by Congress to protect all the nation’s blue-water streams as well as the subsurface water aquifers that filter and sustain the nation’s water supplies.
Finally last year, a federal court judge issued a ruling confirming the obvious: that mountaintop removal mining is in clear and illegal violation of the nation’s Clean Water Act. Last Thursday, the Army Corps of Engineers, which has overseen and rubber-stamped the use of Permit 21, finally suspended that dread permit with respect to West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Maryland. In Tennessee, more than half our counties, including Hamilton, now fall under this permit suspension.
Though his order strangely allows Permit 21 to be used in other states — where it is, in fact, seldom used — suspending its application in the six Appalachian states is a welcome step toward environmental sanity on this issue. The suspension will remain in effect until the Corps takes further action, or until it expires on March 18, 2012.