8 years ago
Friday, December 5, 2008
WV Mountain Top Mining
Listening to NPR yesterday, I was both amused and disgusted by the twisted logic that removing the tops of mountains and dumping the tailings into streams gets exempted from the "Clean Water Act" because it obliterates the stream entirely. Incredibly narrow minded. Eastern KY & TN (mostly east of I-75, that I used to traverse many times each year when I lived in SC and visited Midwestern relatives), western VA, and most all of West Virginia are regions where this is practiced often. I get absolutely no hits from West Virginia (or servers or IP addresses located within WV geographically), so I have the penchant to say "so what, let'em ruin their own local environment". I know that's short sighted, but I'm not one to strap myself to a mammoth drag bucket to try and preserve Appalachian wilderness when the local denizens are saying ""those damn environmentalists, they took our jobs!"
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Maybe 15 or so years ago I remember watching a documentary on deforestation in the pacific northwest, in which loggers, lumber companies, and environmentalists could not even agree on basic facts (the claim that "there will always be old-growth forests" by the lumber company rep seemed a bit daft, though). Anyway, it was easy to see how skillfully the loggers get played by their corporate masters. For example, it's easy to get a logger worked up into a froth about how environmentalists are ostensibly preventing them from work, while keeping them oddly ignorant or unperturbed about the large number of local jobs their own execs had moved overseas to cheaper milling and processing operations.
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