"Surface Mining's High Cost". I AGREE!

Surface mining's high cost
By Bellarmine University students

As 15 college freshmen, we support the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's new regulations to sharply limit the environmental damage caused by surface coal mining in Eastern Kentucky and other parts of central Appalachia.

Before EPA's April 1 action, our “contemporary issues” class at Bellarmine University in Louisville had examined the heated controversy over this mining. We weighed the views of environmentalists, coal industry representatives, scientists, government officials and citizens. We concluded that surface mining's economic benefits come with a very steep cost to environmental and human health, a cost that can and should be reduced by stronger safeguards.

Scientific studies document mining's harm to water and air quality and the life of plants, trees and animals, and alarming new research has found that residents in mining areas suffer higher incidences of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases.

Our judgment, however, isn't based solely on a cost-benefit approach. It also has to do with how we treat what we've been given. As Wendell Berry, the world-famous Kentucky author, has written, ecosystems are not products. They are communities of living things and belong “to the mystery that everywhere surrounds us.”

Public debate has centered on a surface mining method often called mountaintop removal where trees are clear-cut and huge machines and explosives remove layers of rock and dirt in the upper part of a mountain, ridge or hill to reach the coal seam or seams below. Leftover rubble is then placed in adjacent valleys. It is these “valley fills,” the EPA says, that have buried mountain streams and polluted rivers below them.

The Government Accountability Office reported earlier this year that at least 2,343 valley fills have been “authorized” in central Appalachia since January 2000. (Because of limited data, the GAO couldn't determine how many of these fills were actually constructed.)

The industry says that mining brings economic stability and employment, and it warns that more regulation will mean fewer jobs. Kentucky, the third-largest coal producer in the U.S., has about 200 underground mines and 240 surface mines in Eastern Kentucky, according to the federal government.

It's also true that total coal mining jobs in Kentucky have declined, down from 28,500 in 1990 to an estimated 19,000 last year, the federal government reported. Most of these jobs involve underground mining, which is more labor intensive than surface mining.

The Mountain Association for Community Economic Development said that total mining employment makes up 1 percent of the Kentucky's nonfarm employment.

Steve Gardner, the president of a Lexington engineering consulting firm, says mining plays a much bigger economic role than these numbers indicate. Mining jobs, he said, help support the local economies of many mountain communities, and Kentucky as a whole benefits from the low-cost, ready electricity that its coal and coal-fired power plants provide. The low electric rates are a major reason why automobile and some other manufacturers chose to locate in Kentucky, said Gardner, who has worked with the mining industry for 35 years.

But the toll imposed by surface mining stunned us.

Take headwater streams for example. These small waterways in the mountains are often dry and easy to miss, but they're the arteries that purify and supply water and nutrients to river systems. When debris from mountaintop mining buries these headwaters, it can have irreversible consequences.

According to Margaret Palmer, laboratory director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and a biology professor at the University of Maryland, headwaters are filled largely by groundwater which is cleansed as it moves through the soil and enriched with nutrients that are necessary for healthy streams. But mountaintop mining, she said, destroys the paths along which groundwater previously flowed, and the mountain summit and its organic-rich layers of soils which harbor ecologically important communities of bacteria, fungi and burrowing insects are no longer intact. The land disturbance also can release toxins.

Surface mining also has cut down sections of Appalachian forests, which support some of the highest biological diversity in the world's temperate regions. And forests can't easily be restored because the ground on many of these sites was so heavily compacted after mining that trees can't grow on it.