When coal companies go to blast the tops off Tennessee’s mountains and high-line ridges to extract coal once gotten by underground miners, they generally use the coal industry’s whitewash euphemisms. They talk of “mountain top removal” and clearing a mountain’s “overburden,” as if a mountain’s higher elevations and ecosystems can be surgically excised without destroying its life.
What they actually do in Appalachian states, including Tennessee, with the mountain’s “overburden” is this: They clear-cut the forest and then use tons of dynamite to blast off the top of the mountain and all its remaining meadows, wildlife, boulders and earth, which typically slide down into the streams and valleys below, poisoning downstream waters, habitat and extended ecosystems.
Or, as a Republican bill now due for a vote tomorrow in Tennessee’s Legislature would provide, they push the raw earth into a corner of the flattened mountain’s barren and lifeless stump, and after extracting the coal, push this rubble back across the stump into a shape intended to suggest the “approximate original contour” of the mountain that has been utterly destroyed. Where an ancient majestic mountain or high ridge line actually once stood with all its diverse forest and wildlife, there would be just a pile of raw earth with humps and bumps, more like an overseeded dirt high-rise.
This bill is a travesty for many reasons. Foremost is the pending loss of a larger portion of Tennessee’s heritage mountains and high ridges, now underway in the northern reaches of the Cumberland Plateau. Another reason to oppose it is the stunning bald-faced lie used by Tennessee Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey to describe the legalized destruction of our mountains.
When the bill (SB577) passed out of the Senate’s Energy and Environment Committee last week, Ramsey issued a gushy and totally untrue statement. He said the bill “outlawed” mountaintop mining in Tennessee and he called it an act to “protect the beauty and integrity of Tennessee’s mountains.” Both claims are patently untrue.