How One Last Spasm Of Coal Mining Wrecked WV Environment, Lives - But Hey, Short-Term Profits!

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Emily Bernhardt, a Duke University biologist, who spent years tracking the effects of the Hobet mine, told me: “The aquatic insects coming out of these streams are loaded with selenium, and then the spiders that are eating them become loaded with selenium, and it causes deformities in fish and birds.” The effects distorted the food chain. Normally, tiny insects hatched in the water would fly into the woods, sustaining toads, turtles and birds. But downstream, scientists discovered that some species had been replaced by flies usually found in wastewater treatment plants. By 2009, the damage was impossible to ignore. In a typical study, biologists tracking a migratory bird called the cerulean warbler found that its population had fallen by 82% in 40 years. The 2010 report in Science concluded that the impacts of mountaintop-removal mining on water, biodiversity and forest productivity were “pervasive and irreversible”. Mountaintop mines had buried more than 1,000 miles of streams across Appalachia, and, according to the EPA, altered 2,200 sq miles of land – an area bigger than Delaware.

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One afternoon, I hiked up through the woods behind the Caudills’ house to see the changes in the land. By law, mines are required to “remediate” their terrain, returning it to an approximation of its former condition. But, far from the public eye, the standards can be comically lax. After climbing through the trees for a while, I emerged into a sun-drenched bowl of stone and dirt, the size of a small stadium. In the centre was a human-made pond, ringed in rubber tubing, full of water that was murky and still. Above the pond, a gravel driveway connected it to a mesa left behind after a peak had been blasted away. Technically, the driveway was a “stream”. For most of human history, the area had been a dense forest. Now it was a strangely lunar place. Down the road, I stopped at another mesa that had once been a peak. Under the law, mining companies have to spread fertiliser and fast-growing plants, so tall grasses and broomsedge waved in the wind.

It looked less like an Appalachian mountain than a grassland in Mongolia. I mentioned that analogy to Bernhardt, and she said the likeness was more than just aesthetic. “You have these new flat Appalachian ‘plains’ that are covered in Asian grasses and Russian olive trees. The rock itself is so alkaline, there’s not many Appalachian species that can grow in it.” And they had begun to be populated by alien species – birds of the Great Plains that had moved into the remnants of old coalmines. “You create these unique and weird habitats,” she said.

The consequences of big-money mining were percolating through families and the broader culture, too, in ways that the country was only beginning to calculate. Jerry Thompson became a vice-president at a manufacturer of home-construction materials. “I’m a business guy. I understand profits, and I understand margins,” he told me. “But the destruction has been amazing to me. It has been so disruptive to so many people. Not just our family. There were families and there were homes and there were kids and there were lives being made. And it’s just all gone.” Thompson was well acquainted with the free-market arguments for expanding the mine; after all, nobody had physically coerced his family to sell. But in practice, he wondered, were they really free to make their own economic choices? “Do you want to raise your family in the middle of a mountaintop-removal site? Probably not,” Thompson said. “I guess you can say you had a choice. But did you?”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/wall-street-coal-country-hedge-funds-coal-mining-appalachia-west-virginia

[4Q2u2]

1. I am pretty sure

Most of that family voted Republican all those years and still do. Now they want to cry about their land that was ruined.