As part of the University of Vermont's Focus the Nation events that took place recently, I attended the talk by keynote speaker Judy Bonds and learned about one of the most disturbing practices happening today.
Bonds, a West Virginia native and granddaughter and daughter of coal miners, is an advocate against mountaintop removal. This practice uses powerful explosives to blow 800 to 1,000 feet off the tops of mountains to reach the coal seams below. As a result, millions of tons of waste rock, dirt and vegetation are dumped into the surrounding valley, covering miles of streams under piles of rubble hundreds of feet deep. Low-quality, dirty-burning coal is extracted from the mountain to be quickly trucked out of the impacted communities, leaving nothing more than its dirty legacy and decapitated mountains in the poorest state in the nation.
My Turn: Mountaintop removal a bad practice
