And Now to 'Streamline' King Coal's Beheading of Appalachia

[davidinalameda]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/opinion/07mon3.html

Six years ago, Jim Weekley, a watchful retiree in Appalachia, became angry enough to defend his seven-tenths-of-an-acre homestead in West Virginia's Pigeon Roost Hollow from a gargantuan mining process with a formidable name - mountaintop removal - that tells only half the truth.

The other half is the obliteration of countless streams, forests and hamlets lying below as mountaintops are systematically decapitated with dynamite to leave mesa-like tabletops. Rich low-sulfur coal veins are thereby exposed and mammoth 20-story-tall bulldozers move in to dump millions of tons of slag waste down into mountain hollows like Pigeon Roost.

"I ran free in this hollow all my life," explained Mr. Weekley, the lone holdout who refused to sell his place in one of the serial hamlets routinely bought for evacuation and obliteration by mountaintop miners.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

1. Thanks for posting that!

We need all the help and awareness we can get here in "Almost Level: West Virginia!"

To find out more about Mountain Range Removal, feel free to visit www.ohvec.org as well as www.crmw.net

On edit: fixing misspelled link.

[melody]

2. It all started a long time ago and continues through today

The Appalachians were partly gobbled up by the Federal government for the Great Smoky, only part of which became a National Park, and the rest of which was turned into - gosh, how surprising - rich peoples' houses.

Big industry did the rest.

Thereby creating much of what we call "trailer trash", which are really just shanty Irish villages.

Many of these families have farmed that land for centuries. The Cherokees have even put their own legal might behind fighting for them, but alas... we're talking Bully Government here.

[No Exit]

3. Disgusting. If a government destroys its own people's habitat

what good is that government??

[blindpig]

4. O mama won't you take me back to Muhlenberg county...

:cry: