All kinds of grassroots groups and national organizations have joined together today in a mass appeal to the Obama Administration to use its power to stop the destruction of Coal River Mountain -- the last mountain in the area to be untouched by mountaintop removal mining.
Blasting at Coal River Mountain is especially dangerous because of its proximity to the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment that keeps 8.2 billion gallons of toxic sludge from flooding over the Marsh Fork community below it. If shock waves being generated were to knock the structure apart, citizens would have very little time to get out of the way, and as many as 1,000 people could lose their lives.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy at Coal River Mountain today is that new mountaintop removal mining will foreclose a community option for clean water, good jobs, clean energy and homeland security. A detailed study has shown that the ridges on the mountain could support a 328 megawatt wind farm, and many residents have energetically put forward such a proposal to anyone who will listen.
Once the ridges are diminished by blasting, their wind-catching capacity would be substantially disabled. The community would continue to live with the threat of killer sludge floods unleashed by new blasting. More headwater streams, springs, seeps and bogs will be ripped apart and buried. Wells and surface waters already impacted by intense surface disturbance and toxic slurry leachate will suffer further assaults. The oppression and poverty of coal-unconsciousness will pollute the possibilities for a socially just economy where risk, burden, benefit and reward are shared equally.
Wars like this against people and nature in the name of resource extraction for financial gain of an elite corporate minority rage daily across the face of the Earth.
We, the people, need to rage back. Daily.
Today lets do it for Coal River Mountain and our sisters and brothers who live there. Click here and go for it!