As a foot note I will add that all the politicians in Pike County Ky. Are applauding the recent weakening of the rules regarding Mountain Top Removal and Hollow Fills. I assume this happened as a result of George Bush's midnight regulation push. He has left us to go along with his Iraq War legacy and the depression he helped instigate an environmental nightmare here in East Kentucky..

The high profile illegal hollow fills that were discovered up At Fishtrap Dam and other areas will fade into the dust bin of meaningless litigation. This has been a blow to the effort to save Appalachia and  I feel if the new administration does not get some of these regulations overturned we have lost all the mountains in the Corps of Engineer maintained Fishtrap Dam Reservoir area.

The so called reclamation has begun on the John Bevin's Branch has begun. The hollow is now filled and the stream that ran beside my property has now dried up. There is but a trickle left from a healthy small stream that ran parallel with my property. So much for the lie they tout down here that streams are not impacted by Mountain Top Removal.

Out west when you reclaim the land that was predominately flat to begin with you may be able to call it reclamation after you return it back to its original flat contour. If you replace the topsoil and spray some native grass seed back on it may look close to it original state. There is no way you can call it reclamation when you do not put a mountain back on its original contour and plant native trees back on it. When you just blast off the tops of the mountains and push the overburden over into pristine valleys and then spray a little weed mix on them you are left with a scab on the land  that will never heal.

Coal trucks run behind my home all day and all night long, sleep is impossible. The dust covers my home and furnishings and the blasting has ruined my interior. I drive on muddy roads in the winter through late spring and when the mud freezes it leaves a treacherous ice covered mess.  To live under such an assault with no way to address it makes the notion of law and freedom from oppression a joke. With the major concerns with the economy and foreign wars I fear MTR will become a peripheral or back burner issue with the new administration. As I have said before we are considered no more than a backwater, backward area of the country and the coal that comes out of these mountains is more important than the people that live here.

Maybe when its all flat land and more accessible we will get more attention.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

I was alerted to the Black Mesa situation yesterday by Coal River Mountain Watch, which is holding two press conferences in WV today to release results of a survey showing that the plan to put a major wind farm on top of Coal Mountain (along with a little bit of underground mining) would yield far more revenue and jobs long term than the already permitted mountaintop removal coal mine, which may commence at any time.

I was at a conference a few years ago where the new Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data was unveiled.  The keynote speaker noted that the most easily visible difference in the new data, compared to older data, was the missing mountain tops in Appalachia.  In other words, the most visible change to the earth's surface over the last few decades has been caused by MTR.  The
scale of the damage is astounding.

The smog around Shiprock, New Mexico is incredible.  There's no big city there; it all comes from the Four Corners Power Plant, which burns Black Mesa coal. So the Hopis and Navajos have been doubly screwed by coal...it's mined there and burned there.

I think Grijalva would be an excellent choice to lead DOI.  He understands (and actually cares about) the problems caused by unchecked resource extraction.  His votes as a congressman have been consistently pro-conservation.  He has been an
advocate for increased protections of and funding for public land (what a concept...public lands managed for the public, rather than corporations!).  He would be a vast improvement over the Watt-Norton-Kempthorne lineage, whose philosophy of plundering mountains, forests, deserts, and people has caused so much ruin.

A clarification on the above comment: The Four Corners Power Plant does not burn Black Mesa coal. Black Mesa is on the Hopi/Navajo reservation intersection in Arizona. (there's a twisted story behind the Hopi rez being surrounded by Navajo land, but we won't go into that.) The coal from the Black Mesa mine was going to go to feed the Mohave Generating Station before it got shut down. It now just feeds the Navajo Generating Station, I believe.
The Four Corners Power Plant is at a different place in the Navajo reservation, in New Mexico near the Four Corners. It produces a lot of smog, as does its fellow plant, the San Juan Generating station, located just a few miles away. The controversial Desert Rock proposed power plant would also be located in this region. This coal is a different coal from the Black Mesa coal, but still on Navajo land and still very controversial. There are many ways and places on the rez where energy and pollution are issues. Black Mesa is one; the Four Corners are another. I believe Raul Grijalva would be a progressive leader on both Black Mesa and Four Corners environmental issues.

Stephanie