Returning home on a dark evening,
you walk into the kitchen and flick
on the light.
Chances are, you’re not thinking
about dusty black coal as the room
fills with light, but environmental
advocate Dave Cooper, who spoke
Thursday at the University Student
Commons, said you should.
More than 50 percent of the energy
in the United States comes from
coal, said Cooper, who joined other
advocates to discuss the dirty side of
coal power.
“Think about every time you flip
the switch on the wall, a mountain
top explodes,” Cooper said.
New mining techniques that coal
companies, such as the Richmondbased
Massey Energy Company, use
involve explosives to blast off the tops
of mountains to get to coal, instead
of tunneling into the mountain.
Every day the coal companies
use 4 million pounds of explosives
to take 600-800 feet off the top of
mountains to get coal, Cooper said,
causing irreparable damage to the
mountains and the communities of
Appalachia.
The rubble from the blasting is
deposited into river valleys. The coal
is washed at the mining site, creating
tons of black coal sludge, and dust
drifts down into the valleys, providing
residents with a constant reminder
of what is occurring above in the
mountains.
The environmental ramifications
of mountaintop removal mining are
widespread, Cooper said, and include
water contamination, air pollution
and flooding caused by the decimation
of trees and vegetation in the area.
Containment ponds that hold the
sludge sit on top of the mountains
and are often abandoned, Cooper
said.
In 2000, a dam holding 250 million
gallons of coal-mining sludge burst
and made its way down a Kentucky
mountainside, destroying wildlife and
homes along the way.
The Environmental Protection
Agency reported that the spill was
more than 20 times larger in volume
than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill
in Alaska.
Such disasters seem to go handin-
hand with the destruction caused
by the nature of the mining, Cooper
said. A slide presentation illustrated
that mountaintop removal mining
has destroyed 500 square miles of
mountains thus far.
According to Cooper, the rebuilding
process is painstakingly slow.
“Experts say it takes 120 years to
rebuild one inch of topsoil,” Cooper
said.
Although a congressional law
called the Surface Mining Control and
Reclamation Act of 1977 requires coal
companies to rebuild blasting sites to
their original form, it is not required
if the area is slated for residential or
industrial use, Cooper said. These
barren mountaintops remain widely
unused, because people feel that if
trees cannot grow on the unstable
rubble, neither can communities and
industries.
Mountaintop coal mining has
economic ramifications as well, said
Robert “Sage” Russo, who spoke on
behalf of Christians for the Mountains,
a nonprofit group that urges
Christians to respect what they see
as God’s gift.
People are paying for these mining
operations with their lives, he said,
as he held up a picture of a child
who had been killed when illegal
mining practices caused a boulder
to tumble down a mountain and into
his home. Besides lives, Russo said,
communities are losing mining, logging
and recreational jobs, and entire
towns are being relocated because
of floods, water contamination and
other things directly related to these
mining practices.
Many Virginians feel far removed
from the hills of West Virginia and
Kentucky, where most mountaintop
removal occurs, Cooper said. Such
activity, however, is happening in
Wise, Lee and Dickenson counties in
the western part of the state.
“It affects all of us,” Cooper said.
Dominion Virginia Power is planning
to build a coal-fired power plant
in Wise County. According to a press
release by the Chesapeake Climate
Action Network, a nonprofit organization
devoted to fighting global
warming in the mid-Atlantic region,
the plant would use coal that would
come from Virginia mountains.
Tom Owens, Virginia campus organizer
from the Chesapeake Climate
Action Network, told students it was
up to them to stop the power plant
and the nod of approval it gives to
mountaintop removal mining.
“We are young people, and we are
the future,” he said.
Owens urged students to take
matters into their own hands, saying
that if all Virginians switched to
energy-efficient compact fluorescent
light bulbs, Dominion Virginia Power
would not need to build the plant.
The student movement to change
America’s energy use to more efficient
means is bigger than ever, he said,
reporting that last weekend, during
the second annual Power Shift youth
summit in Washington, D.C., 5,000
students gathered to urge Congress
to implement bolder energy-efficient
policy.
“We want 80 percent reductions
by 2050,” he said, referring to carbon
dioxide emissions.
Some of the biggest social movements
have started in the schools,
said Grace Howard, president of the
Sierra Student Coalition at VCU,
and VCU is mobilizing. The group
is working alongside the Student
Government Association to turn VCU
into a carbon-neutral campus.
“This only seems devastating
if we don’t do anything about it,”
Russo said. “Let them know what
you think.”