The most recent issue of the Earth First! Journal has a really good article about Mountaintop Removal written by my friend Dea. Turns out she’s posted it online as well. From the article:

Madison Cook’s miniature hands were covered in the sooty remains of a lump of bituminous coal. She had been collecting treasures all down the road—a yellow spotted salamander, a turkey feather, a magenta leaf—and this was her latest find. But unlike the other members of her Sunday afternoon collection, the coal wasn’t found in the biodiverse Appalachian forest that blanketed part of Cook Mountain. Rather, chunks and pebbles of the infamous fuel littered the top of the high wall that marked the edge of an advancing mountaintop removal site.
Several hundred feet behind us sat the Cook family cemeteries, where 29 of Madison’s ancestors lay at rest. In late June, her uncle, Danny Cook, discovered the access roads—required to be maintained by West Virginia law—blocked by five steep, human-made berms of mud and tree trunks. On the dirt road directly alongside the cemeteries, Horizon Resources LLC, the company mining Cook Mountain, drilled holes to ascertain how deep down the coal seams lay. Should Horizon get its way, explosives will blast away the bones of the dead, exposing a thin strip of coal that will be mined and loaded onto a train, to be burned quickly and cheaply in a factory or plant. Because the Cooks do not own mineral rights to their ancestral mountain, and are unsure of their surface rights, Horizon Resources is free to decimate it.

read the rest

These are photos from the Kayford, Brushy Fork, and Pettus actions. More than half of our folks are still in jail, as we attempt to raise bail. Note that many of these people are facing a $100 fine as their maximum penalty, yet have $2000 bail. One West Virginia Resident, Sid, wasn’t allowed to post his own property as proof that he wasn’t a flight risk. It’s ridiculous.

Today, three different acts of civil disobedience confronted mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia, all under the banner of Mountain Justice. Six people locked themselves down to mining equipment on Kayford Mountain, bringing operations to a halt for hours. Two people kayaked out onto the Brushy Fork Coal Slurry Impoundment and proudly displayed a “No More Sludge” banner. (this is, by the way, the tallest dam in the western hemisphere, and it holds back 9 billion gallons of coal toxin concentrate. You see, to “clean” coal, they wash out the toxins and dump them in giant toxic lakes poised above towns, and then act surprised when they fail and destroy towns.)

Then, this afternoon, people went out to Pettus, West Virginia and engaged in a symbolic line crossing, marching boldly off to arrest for trespassing. When this dam bursts, the coal sludge will be almost 20 feet high as far away as 28 miles down the road. Conservative estimates from Massey Coal themselves say that 998 people at least will die if it the dam fails. Oh, did I mention they’re about to start blasting away Coal River Mountain as close as 100 feet away from the dam?

So these people were all arrested, and they’ve been treated unprecedentedly harshly. 9 of them (include the line-crossers) are being held on 2000 cash bail… what this means is that they will not accept bond, they will not accept checks. They will only accept cash, for all 9 of these folks.

So people are trying to raise bail. Please help. Jail sucks. Mountaintop removal sucks.

This is not a plateau. Well, it is now. It’s the remains of a mountain in southwest virginia, Wise County. They blew it up to get the coal out, and they dropped what was left into nearby valleys, destroying entire towns. The kind folks at Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards told us where to find the place, but it turns out these places are everywhere. Over 450 mountains have been completely destroyed since mountain top removal began. I’ll be blogging more about this (with more photos), in the coming weeks.