Between 1985 and 2001, miners leveled about 800 square miles of mountains in Appalachia. *
Photo: Courtesy of Vivian Stockman * View Slideshow 
At 4 o'clock every afternoon except Sunday, the blasting starts in the mountains around Judy Bonds' home in Whitesville, West Virginia.
There as elsewhere in the Appalachian coal country that stretches through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, coal is produced by what's self-descriptively known as mountaintop-removal mining.
Mining companies clear forests from mountaintops, dynamite the peaks, excavate buried coal, and dump the waste into nearby valleys. It's cheaper and more efficient than old-fashioned mining, but the effects of mountaintop removal -- or MTR -- are devastating.
In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also dangerous to people who live in the region.
"There is no place on earth like this place, and it's being destroyed," says Bonds, the outreach coordinator for Coal River Mountain Watch, an anti-MTR activist group. "They call West Virginia 'almost heaven,' and it is, until the coal industry bombs your home."
Activists have fought a losing legal battle against MTR. First they claimed the practice violated Clean Water Act rules against dumping waste in waterways. But in 2002, the Bush administration rewrote or "clarified" the rule, so that MTR debris wouldn't be classified as waste.
MTR opponents then turned to the stream buffer-zone rule, a Reagan-era regulation for streamside mines. They say the rule forbids any mining within 100 feet of a stream, which would effectively end MTR. Mining companies, on the other hand, say the rule only requires that mining be done as cleanly as possible.
That's the interpretation favored by a new rule issued August 24 by the Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining. The regulation is currently scheduled to take effect after a 60-day public-comment period ending October 23. As written, it will make life even harder for MTR opponents.
"The law's intent was never to stop (MTR) from happening, but to mitigate its impact on water quality," says National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich. Under this and other regulations, environmentally destructive mountaintop-mining operations are supposedly not allowed.
"If you're intending to place your dirt and rock directly into a stream, you have to get a permit. You have to show that you won't harm downstream water-quality standards. You have to show that the plan is the most environmentally protective," he says.
But activists say regulators ignore the requirements.
"There's a huge disconnect between the Bush administration's own scientific studies concluding that the environmental damage caused by mountaintop-removal mining is widespread and irreversible" on the one hand and the granting of mining permits on the other, says Joan Mulhern, senior legislative counsel for environmental group Earthjustice.
To begin a mountaintop-removal operation, crews clear trees from the site. Then they dynamite to shake the peaks loose, and excavate the coal with a 2,000-ton, 20-story-high machine called a dragline. They bulldoze the debris, dumping it into nearby valleys.
The practice is relatively new, dating from the mid-1980s, and it's already responsible for about half of all Appalachian coal mining. It's cheaper than old-fashioned techniques, and safer in the short run because miners don't have to tunnel underground. It also lets mining companies reach more coal than they could by digging shafts.
The environmental impacts, however, are far greater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, MTR destroyed more than 1,200 miles of Appalachia's streams and 7 percent of its forests between 1985 and 2001. Approximately 800 square miles of mountains were leveled.
According to the EPA, waste from MTR will bury another 1,000 miles of streams in the next decade. Mulhern says the effects are also felt downstream.
"Headwater streams are where life is born, creating the nutrients and energy that flow downstream," she says. "All that is lost when you fill the headwaters and replace them with storm drains."
The EPA estimates that at least 2,300 square miles of forest -- an area the size of Delaware -- will be lost by 2010. In the past, cleared mountaintops have been vegetatively reclaimed by grass and shrubs rather than the region's characteristic hardwood forests.
"Appalachia is America's own little miniature rain forest," says Bonds. "It's the world's most diverse temperate hardwood forest. The Appalachian forests are the carbon sinks and lungs of the East Coast."
According to a rough estimate by West Virginia University bio-geochemist William Peterjohn, the deforestation could add as much as 138 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- and that's not even counting the even-larger CO2 emissions from burning the coal.
But opponents say the damage from MTR is more than environmental: It's human.
So far, no one's published epidemiological research into the effects of pollution generated by waste dumping and explosive residues, but anecdotal evidence like that collected by Erik Reece in his book Death of a Mountain links MTR waste to cancer and other serious health problems.
"When the explosives go off, you can smell and see the pollution coming down, the ammonium nitrate," says Bonds, whose father and grandfather worked in West Virginia coal mines. "When you see on CNN the drama of a miner trapped underground, you don't see the slow poisoning of the people who live here."
The New York Times (subscription required) reported last month that the rule now under consideration is unlikely to change substantially. But the Office of Surface Mining (.pdf) says that's not so, and opponents are taking the comment period seriously. They've requested a 90-day extension as well as a public hearing. They're also asking people to call their senators and representatives on September 20 to ask them to stop the rule.
Other legislation that would strengthen the Clean Water Act's original prohibition on dumping waste in streams has stalled in Congress.
"There needs to be pressure on Congress to take this up and have a hearing on it," says Mulhern. "At least we should make a conscious decision about whether we as a country want to have this unique and important area of the country blown up as a coal sacrifice zone."
Even better, Bonds says, would be to reduce our reliance on coal.
"We have to change our ways of producing energy and where we get our energy from," she says. "It's time for us to face the fact that coal is a filthy and finite resource. Why would we destroy our very earth and air and water, that we need and our children need, for short-term gain?"
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