Environmental injustice kills white people, too
Mountaintop removal mining is poisoning West Virginians and destroying "almost heaven." ,
The reaction to my last piece on how black people are affected disproportionately by high levels of ambient fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5), the largest environmental cause of human mortality, was well-received in most quarters but when it was reposted on Reddit in the “Justice” subreddit a strange thing happened—a lot of mini-Tucker Carlsons suddenly jumped out of the woodwork to accuse me of being in the “wrong subreddit” (environmental justice is apparently not related to justice) and being a propagandist for Black Lives Matters. I am seriously too old to give a rat’s ass but in the spirit of reaching out to the willfully confused, I thought I would point out, again, that environmental injustice is not a matter of being black or white. There are plenty of white victims too. Here’s a case in point.
On April 22, 2021—Earth Day, ironically enough—the Department of Environmental Protection in my native state of West Virginia (black pop: 3%) approved a permit application from an out-of-state company called Republic Energy LLC for a metallurgical surface mine (which is a nicer way of saying strip mine or mountaintop removal) that will destroy, scar, deface 1,085 acres of forest three miles south of Clear Creek in Raleigh County over the next eight years and inflict incalculable health misery on surrounding communities because of dirty air, coal waste-contaminated well water, poisoned streams, possible radon and God-knows-what other contaminants.
The company says it plans to move 245 million cubic yards of earth to mine 11.2 million tons of coal. It claims that the project will provide jobs for about 100 “miners” which is a lie since there is no actual mining involved.
In this type of mining, the company literally uses dynamite to blow the top off of mountains to expose the coal seam, sets off more dynamite to break up the coal and rocks and then heavy equipment operators scoop it up and load it onto large trucks that haul it away. Once the seam is played out, the company “reclaims” the land by smoothing down the dingy dirt, planting a few mandated trees, and moving on to the next mountain to defile. A couple of hundred years from now, the scars will still be visible.
The people in surrounding communities, of course, will be long gone, an “excess” number of them before their normal time. There have been more than 20 peer-reviewed studies by researchers from more than a dozen universities that concluded that mountaintop removal coal mining contributes to significantly higher rates of birth defects, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases among individuals living in the region where it occurs.
One of the studies, conducted by Dr. Michael Hendryx of West Virginia University, found that cancer rates among residents near mountaintop removal mining sites are twice those of West Virginians in non-mining areas and nearly triple the national average. Another of the studies showed a link between mountain top removal and a higher incidence of birth defects. Here are some scary statistics I found on the Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) website, CRMW is a grassroots organization begun in 1998 in response to the fear and frustration of people living near or downstream from huge mountaintop removal sites:
people living near mountaintop mining have cancer rates of 14.4% compared to 9.4% for people elsewhere in Appalachia
the rate of children born with birth defects is 42% higher in mountaintop removal mining areas
the public health costs of pollution from coal operations in Appalachia amount to a staggering $75 billion a year
You will be shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that in 2017, the Trump administration abruptly canceled a review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine intended to better understand the health impacts of mountaintop removal and identify areas needing more study.
The good news is that Trump is no longer president and the study may be coming back. On March 21, Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth reintroduced H.R. 2073, the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act that Trump had killed, to halt all new mountaintop removal coal mining permits until federal officials can examine the practice’s health effects on surrounding communities. The legislation would task the Department of Health and Human Services with conducting the first-ever comprehensive federal study of the health dangers of the practice.
Bo Webb, a sixth-generation resident of the Coal River Valley and chairman of the ACHE campaign, had this to say:
“The suffering of those who reside in mountaintop removal communities of Appalachia is not a mystery. The elevated rates of cancer, birth defects and other negative health consequences in these communities is due to silica dust and other toxins generated from blasting mountains into ashes to extract small seams of coal. This may be an inconvenient truth to the profiteers of mountaintop removal, but it is a plain sad truth to the human suffering that comes with blowing up a mountain directly above the homes of the vulnerable. It is time to finally begin caring for the health of the people in these communities."
Even Joe “Coal Bowl” Manchin is down for this one so it might actually happen this time.
Dig Deeper
Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth)
Ecological Impacts of Mountaintop Removal (Appalachian Voices)
Mountaintop removal must end (ACHEact)
ACHE Act: A Way to End Mountaintop Removal Mining (EarthJustice)
We still blow up mountains to mine coal: Time to end the war on Appalachia (Salon)
DEP approves Raleigh County surface mine application despite health and environmental concerns (WVGazette-Mail)
One of the Country’s 10 Largest Coal Plants Just Got a Retirement Date. What About the Rest? (InsideClimateNews - Terrific piece by Dan Gearino in today’s edition.)
Thanks Jerry. Reposted to the Eastern Panhandle Green Coalition Facebook page.