Louisville Courier Journal's David Hawpe Nails This One. Read More.
Mountaintop removal can be justified — rarely
On the one hand, I hate to appear to be contradicting Erik Reece, whose interesting column about unhappy mountain folks we published not long ago.
Reece is an activist and University of Kentucky lecturer whose strong voice is badly needed in the struggle against predatory and destructive strip mining — especially the ruinous version of stripping called mountaintop removal.
I'm with him. I have written about irresponsible coal mining, and editorialized against it, for the last 40 years. I am on the short list of those journalists whom the industry would just as soon see skewered on the sharp end of an augur.
Like Reece, I noticed the recent Gallup survey results that show (1) not only is Kentucky the unhappiest state in the union, except for West Virginia, and (2) Rep. Hal Rogers' Eastern Kentucky district is the most dissatisfied place in the country, but also (3) the least happy places in the U.S. are Eastern Kentucky, southwestern West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western Virginia — in other words, as Reece points out, the coalfields of Appalachia.
Reece argued that Diane Sawyer, in her recent"20/20" special, "The Hidden Children of Appalachia," seemed interested only in the symptoms of sadness, like pain killers and rundown trailers. "What wasn't on display," Reece argued, "because it is harder to find and to film, is the systemic cause of that poverty: namely, a single industry — coal — that has dominated the region for a century and fought every attempt to raise the region's standard of living." Reece suspects "that strip mining is a major cause of all this unhappiness."
I've visited mountaintop removal sites, which in their unreclaimed phase are monumentally depressing moonscapes. Within the last month, I have walked the vast site that lies along KY 80, just as one is passing Hazard and heading toward Hindman. It's prime locale for development.
I also drove over another site on which one now finds the Knott County Sportsplex, described by its fans as "the most modern, state-of-the art multi-sports facility in the state of Kentucky," including "66,000 Square Feet of Indoor Fun" that encompasses five full-sized hardwood maple basketball courts, five volleyball courts, three baseball fields with lights for night games, two soccer fields, an arcade with prizes, an eight-lane bowling alley, state of the art fitness center, gymnastics center, conference room, sports museum, indoor walking track, sports shop, concessions (indoor and outdoor) and eating and viewing areas. Oh yes, tanning beds, too. And home for a new Mountain Youth Baseball League. And a sports talk radio program airing live from the Sportsplex on WKCB 107.1 FM, called "In the Locker Room with Ira Combs."
The person who took me on this tour is a native of the region, a social service executive with a long and distinguished tenure in the region, and he is no friend of mountaintop removal. He says all the anticipated development on the two sites I visited will be fine, if it comes. But, he asks, "Do we need hundreds of these things?"
There really are some legitimate post-mining uses for mountaintop removal sites, but one still has to reckon with (1) the environmental and aesthetic damage inflicted by scalping the hills, and (2) the absence of real post-mining uses on the vast majority of sites that the coal operators already have mined and intend to excavate. There is a place for mountaintop removal, in very limited and carefully controlled circumstances.
The original exception for mountaintop removal permits was supposed to be granted only when operators had realistic, demonstrable post-mining uses in mind. That exception should be used only as initially intended.
Our newspaper, and I in particular, have been criticized among mining interests for calling coal "an outlaw industry," even though it provably is just that. Indeed, we have demonstrated this truth in our reporting many times, in many ways. So don't misunderstand me when I say that the campaign against mountaintop removal mining will be effective only to the extent that it deals in facts, not emotion. I wonder not about Reece, who knows the situation in Central Appalachia well, but about those who leave their comfort zones outside the region only long enough to fly over unreclaimed sites, tut-tut the perpetrators and wonder aloud at the myopia of locals who tolerate or even defend the industry.
I hope the Obama administration, and the Beshear administration in Frankfort, crack down hard on mountaintop removal mining, which at present is poorly regulated or not regulated at all. But I hope the campaign against the practice will be honest and fully informed.
There is no question that the economic, social and political grip in which the coal industry holds much of Central Appalachia explains much of the region's sadness. The people up where I was born have been raging against the dying of the light for a very long time. In a region where family and place are pre-eminent in the scheme of values, the coming of industrialization at the birth of the last century, with all its dislocations, imposed a slowly but relentlessly gathering gloom.
Who wouldn't be sad if the arrival of modernity slowly destroyed what has been most important to them?
David Hawpe's column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Community Forum. Hise-mail address is dhawpe@courier-journal.com.
The person who took me on this tour is a native of the region, a social service executive with a long and distinguished tenure in the region, and he is no friend of mountaintop removal. He says all the anticipated development on the two sites I visited will be fine, if it comes. But, he asks, "Do we need hundreds of these things?"
There really are some legitimate post-mining uses for mountaintop removal sites, but one still has to reckon with (1) the environmental and aesthetic damage inflicted by scalping the hills, and (2) the absence of real post-mining uses on the vast majority of sites that the coal operators already have mined and intend to excavate. There is a place for mountaintop removal, in very limited and carefully controlled circumstances.
The original exception for mountaintop removal permits was supposed to be granted only when operators had realistic, demonstrable post-mining uses in mind. That exception should be used only as initially intended.
Our newspaper, and I in particular, have been criticized among mining interests for calling coal "an outlaw industry," even though it provably is just that. Indeed, we have demonstrated this truth in our reporting many times, in many ways. So don't misunderstand me when I say that the campaign against mountaintop removal mining will be effective only to the extent that it deals in facts, not emotion. I wonder not about Reece, who knows the situation in Central Appalachia well, but about those who leave their comfort zones outside the region only long enough to fly over unreclaimed sites, tut-tut the perpetrators and wonder aloud at the myopia of locals who tolerate or even defend the industry.
I hope the Obama administration, and the Beshear administration in Frankfort, crack down hard on mountaintop removal mining, which at present is poorly regulated or not regulated at all. But I hope the campaign against the practice will be honest and fully informed.
There is no question that the economic, social and political grip in which the coal industry holds much of Central Appalachia explains much of the region's sadness. The people up where I was born have been raging against the dying of the light for a very long time. In a region where family and place are pre-eminent in the scheme of values, the coming of industrialization at the birth of the last century, with all its dislocations, imposed a slowly but relentlessly gathering gloom.
Who wouldn't be sad if the arrival of modernity slowly destroyed what has been most important to them?
David Hawpe's column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Community Forum. Hise-mail address is dhawpe@courier-journal.com.
Editor's comment: Mountain Top Removal (MTR) is simply very destructive to everyone except the owners of the mountains tops. I have toured those mountain tops, therefore I have been there, done that.
That sad situation would not be the case if reclamation (and other) efforts do not leave one with spasms of belly laughs.
Until we get serious about "regulating" MTR practices, we might as well prohibit the darn thing.
On the one hand, I hate to appear to be contradicting Erik Reece, whose interesting column about unhappy mountain folks we published not long ago.
Reece is an activist and University of Kentucky lecturer whose strong voice is badly needed in the struggle against predatory and destructive strip mining — especially the ruinous version of stripping called mountaintop removal.
I'm with him. I have written about irresponsible coal mining, and editorialized against it, for the last 40 years. I am on the short list of those journalists whom the industry would just as soon see skewered on the sharp end of an augur.
Like Reece, I noticed the recent Gallup survey results that show (1) not only is Kentucky the unhappiest state in the union, except for West Virginia, and (2) Rep. Hal Rogers' Eastern Kentucky district is the most dissatisfied place in the country, but also (3) the least happy places in the U.S. are Eastern Kentucky, southwestern West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western Virginia — in other words, as Reece points out, the coalfields of Appalachia.
Reece argued that Diane Sawyer, in her recent"20/20" special, "The Hidden Children of Appalachia," seemed interested only in the symptoms of sadness, like pain killers and rundown trailers. "What wasn't on display," Reece argued, "because it is harder to find and to film, is the systemic cause of that poverty: namely, a single industry — coal — that has dominated the region for a century and fought every attempt to raise the region's standard of living." Reece suspects "that strip mining is a major cause of all this unhappiness."
I've visited mountaintop removal sites, which in their unreclaimed phase are monumentally depressing moonscapes. Within the last month, I have walked the vast site that lies along KY 80, just as one is passing Hazard and heading toward Hindman. It's prime locale for development.
I also drove over another site on which one now finds the Knott County Sportsplex, described by its fans as "the most modern, state-of-the art multi-sports facility in the state of Kentucky," including "66,000 Square Feet of Indoor Fun" that encompasses five full-sized hardwood maple basketball courts, five volleyball courts, three baseball fields with lights for night games, two soccer fields, an arcade with prizes, an eight-lane bowling alley, state of the art fitness center, gymnastics center, conference room, sports museum, indoor walking track, sports shop, concessions (indoor and outdoor) and eating and viewing areas. Oh yes, tanning beds, too. And home for a new Mountain Youth Baseball League. And a sports talk radio program airing live from the Sportsplex on WKCB 107.1 FM, called "In the Locker Room with Ira Combs."
The person who took me on this tour is a native of the region, a social service executive with a long and distinguished tenure in the region, and he is no friend of mountaintop removal. He says all the anticipated development on the two sites I visited will be fine, if it comes. But, he asks, "Do we need hundreds of these things?"
There really are some legitimate post-mining uses for mountaintop removal sites, but one still has to reckon with (1) the environmental and aesthetic damage inflicted by scalping the hills, and (2) the absence of real post-mining uses on the vast majority of sites that the coal operators already have mined and intend to excavate. There is a place for mountaintop removal, in very limited and carefully controlled circumstances.
The original exception for mountaintop removal permits was supposed to be granted only when operators had realistic, demonstrable post-mining uses in mind. That exception should be used only as initially intended.
Our newspaper, and I in particular, have been criticized among mining interests for calling coal "an outlaw industry," even though it provably is just that. Indeed, we have demonstrated this truth in our reporting many times, in many ways. So don't misunderstand me when I say that the campaign against mountaintop removal mining will be effective only to the extent that it deals in facts, not emotion. I wonder not about Reece, who knows the situation in Central Appalachia well, but about those who leave their comfort zones outside the region only long enough to fly over unreclaimed sites, tut-tut the perpetrators and wonder aloud at the myopia of locals who tolerate or even defend the industry.
I hope the Obama administration, and the Beshear administration in Frankfort, crack down hard on mountaintop removal mining, which at present is poorly regulated or not regulated at all. But I hope the campaign against the practice will be honest and fully informed.
There is no question that the economic, social and political grip in which the coal industry holds much of Central Appalachia explains much of the region's sadness. The people up where I was born have been raging against the dying of the light for a very long time. In a region where family and place are pre-eminent in the scheme of values, the coming of industrialization at the birth of the last century, with all its dislocations, imposed a slowly but relentlessly gathering gloom.
Who wouldn't be sad if the arrival of modernity slowly destroyed what has been most important to them?
David Hawpe's column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Community Forum. Hise-mail address is dhawpe@courier-journal.com.
The person who took me on this tour is a native of the region, a social service executive with a long and distinguished tenure in the region, and he is no friend of mountaintop removal. He says all the anticipated development on the two sites I visited will be fine, if it comes. But, he asks, "Do we need hundreds of these things?"
There really are some legitimate post-mining uses for mountaintop removal sites, but one still has to reckon with (1) the environmental and aesthetic damage inflicted by scalping the hills, and (2) the absence of real post-mining uses on the vast majority of sites that the coal operators already have mined and intend to excavate. There is a place for mountaintop removal, in very limited and carefully controlled circumstances.
The original exception for mountaintop removal permits was supposed to be granted only when operators had realistic, demonstrable post-mining uses in mind. That exception should be used only as initially intended.
Our newspaper, and I in particular, have been criticized among mining interests for calling coal "an outlaw industry," even though it provably is just that. Indeed, we have demonstrated this truth in our reporting many times, in many ways. So don't misunderstand me when I say that the campaign against mountaintop removal mining will be effective only to the extent that it deals in facts, not emotion. I wonder not about Reece, who knows the situation in Central Appalachia well, but about those who leave their comfort zones outside the region only long enough to fly over unreclaimed sites, tut-tut the perpetrators and wonder aloud at the myopia of locals who tolerate or even defend the industry.
I hope the Obama administration, and the Beshear administration in Frankfort, crack down hard on mountaintop removal mining, which at present is poorly regulated or not regulated at all. But I hope the campaign against the practice will be honest and fully informed.
There is no question that the economic, social and political grip in which the coal industry holds much of Central Appalachia explains much of the region's sadness. The people up where I was born have been raging against the dying of the light for a very long time. In a region where family and place are pre-eminent in the scheme of values, the coming of industrialization at the birth of the last century, with all its dislocations, imposed a slowly but relentlessly gathering gloom.
Who wouldn't be sad if the arrival of modernity slowly destroyed what has been most important to them?
David Hawpe's column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Community Forum. Hise-mail address is dhawpe@courier-journal.com.
Editor's comment: Mountain Top Removal (MTR) is simply very destructive to everyone except the owners of the mountains tops. I have toured those mountain tops, therefore I have been there, done that.
That sad situation would not be the case if reclamation (and other) efforts do not leave one with spasms of belly laughs.
Until we get serious about "regulating" MTR practices, we might as well prohibit the darn thing.
Labels: Keeping them honest, Political economics, The Environment
posted by KYJurisDoctor at 7:50 PM
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