Personal Point of View: Coal industry is destroying Appalachian communities through mountaintop removal
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As you read this paper, over a thousand pounds of explosives are erupting in a small rural community. This detonation will expose a very valuable resource to be sold at great profit.
The excess material of the blast will be dumped into the surrounding community's streams, burying them with pollutants.
As this resource is removed, deposits of pollution will fill the air, to be breathed by the community members.
As you read this paper, the land, life, and heritage of this community is being sacrificed. I am not describing the colonizing of the third-world. This takes place every day in the United States of America, in my backyard.
The Appalachian Mountains are home to our country's largest environmental and human rights violations.
The streams of coal fields run red with iron and arsenic. Many homes do not have tap water fit to drink or even wash their children in. Surrounding communities are flooding at rapid rates, with the mountain tops no longer absorbing rainfall.
Through mechanization, a mining job that once employed 200 now needs only 12 miners. The few miners left are plagued with health problems and continuously put their lives at great risk to retrieve this commodity.
This mineral hidden in their lands will never make them rich, but instead keep them poor.
Rather than produce jobs, as the coal industry would have you believe, they actively force new commerce and employment out of Appalachia, by both polluting the environment and working to keep competitive, safe industry from the area.
Communities across Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia are being robbed of their land and culture, as the coal industry works to depopulate the areas.
Since they no longer need the miner, the people of Appalachia are seen as mere blocks in the road to coal. Pioneered as the great, cheap source of energy, coal is the disease infecting my people.
The true cost of coal cannot be measured and may never be fully known. As the oldest and most bio-diverse mountain range, along with its people are feed to this machine, Appalachia may slowly become a forgotten land and people.
As you read this paper, I challenge you to call me a liar and research this disaster yourself. Truth is not told, it is realized. At
www.ilovemountains.org, you can find out how you are connected to coal, as it is burned across our nation, polluting your community too.
Coal is not forever. Let us not wait until Appalachia is a memory to find alternative energy.
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