Blowing the Top Off Mountaintop Mining

In an age of expanding awareness about the dangers our environment is facing, its startling to see stories like this, which point out how relentless our search for fossil fuels has become.

Food for thought. Here’s an excerpt:

There as elsewhere in the Appalachian coal country that stretches through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, coal is produced by what’s self-descriptively known as mountaintop-removal mining.

Mining companies clear forests from mountaintops, dynamite the peaks, excavate buried coal, and dump the waste into nearby valleys. It’s cheaper and more efficient than old-fashioned mining, but the effects of mountaintop removal — or MTR — are devastating.

In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also dangerous to people who live in the region.

Here’s the link to the Wired.com story:

Link to Blowing the Top off Mountaintop Mining