CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

Entry 12/27: "Mountaintop Removal"

"Mountaintop Removal"! What is it?


I direct you, for example, to


http://www.earthjustice.org/our_work/campaigns/stop-mountaintop-removal.html


http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/site/mtr_overview/


http://www.ilovemountains.org/





When I lived in Southern Appalachia, from mid-1993 to mid-1999, and again from summer 2004-March 2006, I was very aware of this subject. In fact during 1996-mid-1999, I spent many days driving throughout the mountains. One of the sites I regularly visited was a town called Pikeville, KY. Pineville's claim to fame (their claim, not mine) is that in the latter half of the 20th century, the city arranged to move:


a highway


a railroad


a mountain.


All this: in the name of Progress.


Pikeville bills itself online as


"the city that moves mountains"





Pikeville offers a free DVD titled, "Then and Now." I can just imagine--





I just checked out my zip code on www.ilovemountains.org, to see what connection my locale has to Mountaintop Removal. Now, I live in Georgia, west central to be exact. Here is the result for my locale:

You are connected to mountaintop removal. Your electricity provider, Georgia Power Co, uses coal from mountaintop removal mines

Pretty serious!!





To my perspective, the idea of destroying-in a few hours' or days' time-a mountain that took untold eons of geological time to rise from sea level to current height, is the "height" (pun intentional) of hubris, and ranks as high on the list of human inanities as destroying entire valleys, farmsteads, and village communities to dam a river and construct boating and jet-skiing opportunities (that's another of my pet peeves: witness what happened to the locale of Smith, Kentucky, in 1972, when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Martin's Fork River to create a lake. As close in time as 1995, no one in the area recognized the name of Smith--though it still appeared on online maps.)