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Are you using mountaintop removal coal?
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Mountaintop Removal is a type of coal mining in which great quantities of explosives are used to blast the tops off of mountains to expose thin seams of coal. The resulting rubble buries adjacent rivers and valleys, permanently altering the landscape and natural environment. The waste products associated with this type of mining and subsequent coal refinement have poisoned local communities for decades.
| There is environmental genocide in our mountains. It is happening on a scale that is unfathomable, that is difficult to overstate and scary to try to portray... Is it not genocide when millions of acres of 280 million-year-old mountains in the most biodiverse ecosystem in North America - a forest that seeded our continent after that last ice age and contains genetic material that is beyond any value humans can ascribe it - is completely destroyed, and all the animals therein? If that isn't environmental genocide, then what is it? |  Ashley Judd |
 Woody Harrelson |
Mountaintop removal is the most devastating peacetime activity in human history. In fact, if the destruction to our nation's heritage were being perpetrated by a foreign power, it would be considered an act of war - because in a very real sense it is - a war against the Earth. Every week, mountaintop removal coal-mining detonates more explosive force on the mountains of Appalachia than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima - all to extract the coal that is warming the planet and poisoning the water, air and land. The artists on this musical compilation are dedicated, as I am, to ending this unsustainable, and ultimately suicidal practice and to promoting renewable energy alternatives and the green jobs they will create. Won’t you please join them? |
In West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and eastern Kentucky, coal companies blast as much as 600 feet off the top of the mountains, then dump the rock and debris into mountain streams.
Over 300,000 acres of the most beautiful and productive hardwood forests in America have already been turned into barren moonscapes.
Mountaintop removal mining increases flooding, contaminates drinking water supplies, cracks foundations of nearby homes, and showers towns with dust and noise from blasting.
To extract thin seams of coal in the Appalachian Mountains, multi-national energy companies literally blast and bulldoze the tops of mountains into adjacent hollows, burying the streams and creating huge valley fills, in order to expose the coal.
It is perhaps the most egregious and destructive form of resource extraction today.
For more information about mountaintop removal, see: