11:39 am Green Around the Hills: There is nothing like a mountain
By:Jennie Young
Our first words are those of gratitude to the Elizabethton STAR for providing this space for environmental stewardship talk. Our goal is to inform, start a conversation and inspire involvement in environmental concerns critical to us all.
Steven Cope is a Kentucky poet, songwriter and author. His work, Sayings of the Appalachees, contains a thousand original proverbs. Number 663 teaches, “There is a sort of humanoid that would destroy a mountain for a nugget, drain the sea for a pearl, annihilate a species for a tusk.” He is right. There is.
Such humanoids are advancing an assault on a common birthright: Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. They fully intend to explode off even our signature ridgelines, which so define us, for the thin layers of low-grade coal which those mountains hold. And they wish to prevent the citizens of Tennessee from saying how our mountains will be treated.
Our goal is twofold. First, we hope to provide verifiable information about the process of Mountaintop Removal Mining (MTR), its human and environmental impacts and the real costs involved. We will examine MTR’s place in the context of our energy needs and economic considerations. Second, we will endeavor to keep readers updated on national, interstate and state legislative news. It is with this information that the people of Tennessee will continue to have a voice in the legislative process. Without this information, our voices will be made silent.
The folks of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia face great obstacles because their states didn’t claim and frame the issue legislatively before the first of 500 of their mountains were leveled. Let us learn from their loss.
Mountaintop Removal Mining employs powerful explosives and machines as big as houses. After it’s all over, huge piles of rock replace fully forested mountaintops, including vital headwaters. Counter to what has been promised, these ecosystems cannot be restored. This has been proven 500 times over.
Currently, 23 surface mines are active in Tennessee, with 18 actively producing coal. Most are small and do not use MTR methods. They account for only two-tenths of one percent of U.S. coal mining. Bull Ridge, Mingo, Double Mountain, Leach, Cross and Zeb Mountains are MTR sites and represent the largest operations. Eight more surface mining permits are under review at the Federal Office of Surface Mining. According the National Parks Service, the proposed new areas for MTR mining include 53,000 acres in the headwaters of the Big South Fork watershed of the Cumberland Plateau. This watershed contains over 1,900 miles of streams, five lakes and five national and state wildlife areas.
Request information/action packets at not1more@embarqmail.com. These packets were created locally for churches and other groups who would rather not have Mr. Cope’s sort of humanoid sneak up on us unawares. Till next week, then, we leave you with original proverb number 529: “There is nothing like a mountain to teach a man right where to stand.”
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– Jennie Young is a retired educator and a member of First Presbyterian Church in Elizabethton. Each week, she will provide insights into environmental stewardship and offer ways to protect and preserve the world around us.
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