West Virginia

My Dad is from West Virgninia. Actually the above photo is a view of the New River Valley from Hawks Nest and my great grandparents were married at Hawks Nest. It's within 5 miles where Dad grew up. The view of the mountains in the back ground is similar to that of which greeted us while driving down Interstate 77 into Charleston WV. You'd come around a corner where I-77 and I-64 come together and there would be a wall of green. Now it looks like this....






This isn't the exact mountain in Charleston, it's actually the largest strip mine in West Virginia, 12,000 acres. But this is exactly what they're doing to the mountains. I'm not a hippie, tree hugger or would I even call myself an environmentalist but, how can anyone not look at this and see the wrong. In this mine the tree line you see blocks the view of the mine from below, the one in Charleston is clearly visible from the bottom. It looks like the trees are gone from top to bottom. They do "reclaim" the land. Smooth it out, plant grass, but guess what, the top soil is gone, which means no trees can grow. I caught a PBS show about Appalachia and it talked about strip mining and showed before, during and after photos which you can see at this link .
There's a wildlife conservation center near Zanesville Ohio called The Wilds which makes use of 10,000 acres that had been mined by the power company. The land is so stripped Olive trees are the only thing besides grass that will grow and they've had the land since 1984! Not to mention all the wildlife lost to strip mining. If there's no trees there's no birds or animals.
It's a sad rape of the land.
My husband is also from West Virginia, in the area where a mines sludge pond over flowed on a mountain top and dumped 300 gallon of sludge into rivers through out the region. Not to mention schools are built over old mines, near sludge ponds. Kids do disaster drills for spillage much like our schools do for fire or tornado. The Rhodell disaster was terrible. It's just something you can't get away from.