by Vic Robinson

Created on: May 31, 2008

Does anyone outside of Appalachia actually care about mountaintop removal? We had all three presidential contenders here in West Virginia for the primaries and not a single one of them would address the issue. Limbaugh and Hannity continually rail against our so-called liberal senators, the Hon. Byrd and Rockefeller, yet neither of them will dare say anything against the practice, they are too beholden to the coal company campaign dollars to risk that. It is not just West Virginia that is effected by this scourge on the landscape, it is happening through the Appalachian chain.

It seems that any environmentalist worth his salt is more than happy to put his foot down against oil drilling in the arctic or along the coasts, but mention destruction of entire mountains and eco-systems in Appalachia and they put their heads in the sand. They are willing to complain about the emissions from electric generating plants putting tons of particulates into the air, along with sulfates adding to acid rain and a majority of the green house gases, but it is coal that powers those generators and it is burning coal that causes those emissions.

For the last hundred years, coal has been the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. We all want electricity to maintain our quality of life, we need our lights and heat, our microwaves and TV's but God forbid we acknowledge from where that energy comes. It comes from coal, of course, and do we want to know from where the coal comes? Or at what expense? Please, we don't want to know.

Our modern world has been built on the backs of generations of coal miners who have endured everything from company stores to black lung to keep us in cheap electric. To them we owe more than thanks, we owe them the credit for allowing this standard of living to develop.

But it seems the coal companies weren't making enough money off the backs of underground miners, so they developed strip mining with huge mechanized beasts ripping up the ground for coal seams that were not economically feasible to mine with conventional methods. Strip mining is not as labor intensive as underground mining, so the companies became less interested in keeping the union on their side, the only ally the miners really had in the mine fields who looked out for their safety and working conditions.

The politicians look out for the miners jobs, of course, because laid off miners make them look bad. So it's a vicious cycle, between the coal companies, the politicians,

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