June 19, 2008 - When the shouting is over, a sad fact remains about Appalachia during this presidential primary season: When Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, trundled their liberal stop-global-warming bandwagons into the coalfields of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennesse, they blew off one of the biggest crimes against nature, and American citizens, in our modern times. Mountaintop removal, as Al Gore recently pointed out, is indeed a crime and "ought to be treated as a crime."
Gore's frankness begs the question: How could Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton come into this region and simply gloss over the fact that more than 470 mountains and some of our nation's most diverse and ancient forests -- an area the size of some eastern states -- and the adjacent communities of American citizens and their water supply and health care (and any attempts at a diversified and sustainable economy) have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed by this bizarre form of stripmining?
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