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Penned by "Mountain Justice", the title of this article brings about an image of a rabid runaway balding mountain—which is exactly what is happening in the Appalachian Mountains with strip mining. Extremely controversial with President Obama preparing to reverse the Bush administration policies for mountaintop coal mining, very few actually realize the facts about the area's mining operations which blasts the tops off mountains and them simply dumps the leftover rocks in valley, burying any streams that are in a nearby location.

Situations like this are causing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take a second look at the mountain areas of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, hoping to maintain the exquisite beauty of a forested range older than the Himalayas. Of course, that is before one enters the demolished area of Pine Mountain, Kentucky, with dark craters filled with huge black ponds filled with coal slurry—an area which continues onward to the Kentucky-Virginia line onto southern West Virginia.

In opposition, officials of the National Mining Association said that any action by the EPA would affect the 200 pending mining permits in the Appalachia area, causing it to seriously impact thousands of mining jobs in an area where jobs were scarce anyway. Their point is that this area produced about 10% of the entire nation's coal. Central Appalachia is second only to Wyoming's Powder River Basin with 70% of the coal coming from strip mining.

The two different types of mining consist of surface mining and underground mining, with surface mining removing soil and rock overlying the mineral deposits. The five types of surface mining are: strip mining, open-pit mining, mountaintop removal, dredging, and highwall mining—with mountaintop removal (MTR) considered by critics the most destructive form of coal mining using three million pounds of explosive on a daily basis.  This will remove from 600 to 800 feet of soil off the top of the mountains of the Appalachians, considered one of the most densely forested areas in the country.

What makes it devastating is that the soil removed from the original blast---referred to as "mountain waste" or "overburden"---is dumped by large trucks into nearby mountain streams. Then the rock, soil vegetation and trees that are located above the coal seams are also removed and dumped, but hollows or ravines within the nearby vicinity. In other words, a massive earth restructuring is done in order to reach 10% of the country's coal.

Economic "attempts" at replacing previously steep forested topography and pre-existing ecosystems of the earth consist of golf courses, prisons, industrial scrubber sludge disposal sites, explosive manufacturers, and solid waste landfills—all failing to replace the beauty of the land by a few massive corporations. Presently, nearby local communities are making attempts to survive near valley streams which contain high levels of mineral located in the water and a massive decrease in aquatic biodiversity.

serio\ ii8 s from occurring. Even today, Appalachian poverty has been brought to national attention through power of the media