SEND YOUR NRDC Biogems letter to stop coal companies from using mountain streams as waste dumps.
I urge you to support the bipartisan Appalachia Restoration Act (S. 696), which would prohibit the dumping of mountaintop mining waste into streams and rivers.
America's Appalachian Mountains are under siege. Mountaintop removal mining ravages the landscape, harms communities, destroys irreplaceable natural resources and threatens the region's unique heritage. This destructive strip mining practice has blasted hundreds of mountain tops to rubble, wiped out forests and the wildlife that depend on them and buried countless streams.
Coal companies should no longer be allowed to blow up mountains, turn streams into waste dumps and clear-cut some of the most biologically diverse forests in the world. Nor should they be allowed to destroy the quality of life for those who call Appalachia home. It is time for our nation to invest in clean, renewable energy sources that will safely and efficiently fuel our future.
Also, the idea that somehow it's cheaper to despoil the environment than not can no longer be supported by any rational argument. It may be cheaper for the coal company producers, of course(!), but it never has been and never will be for the larger society. The larger society incurs many external costs from direct human health consequences to less direct savaging and depreciation of natural capital and its non-substitutable contributions to the human economy. With these factors calculated into the cost of coal, despoiling the environment, that is, the primary economy of the planet, would never pencil out. Beyond that, it's simply an assault on the collective human spirit and that of individual nearby residents and visitors. It's an appalling way to conduct business that has been justified far too long with the convoluted logic of fear and economic nonsense.Again, I urge you to support the Appalachia Restoration Act and put an end to mountaintop removal mining.