Feds Choose Trees Over Jobs in Mining Towns

Derek Zoolander, Shetland ponies and everyone who really, REALLY hates having access to silly modern technologies like affordable electricity will be pleased to know that the federal government is continuing to do everything it can to destroy our country's biggest source of energy — and while it's at it, slash a few thousand jobs from Appalachian towns.

After a dozen years of debating the fate of mountaintop mining (which accounts for about 10 percent of our country's coal output) through the case of a specific site called Spruce 1, the federal government will announce its decision about the project's fate late this year. If the E.P.A. and environmental groups like the Sierra Club have their way, the mine will be closed or "severely curtailed." This decision is expected to be highly influential to the future expansion — or extinction — of mining operations across the U.S.

Before you discount me as another raging hyper-conservative who gets her kicks off air pollution and dead canaries, let me assure you, for the record, that I'm more apt to hug a tree than attach explosives to it. However, I'm also a big proponent of the idea that basic human rights are more valuable than trees and streams. Pulling a mine permit in an Appalachian town centered on the industry would, as one mine manager puts it, "have devastating effects on struggling communities." Think about it: take a mine away from a town built around mining, and every father in town loses his job — plus the full range of benefits, from health care to pensions, that come with a miner's paycheck. Soon everyone in the already-poor town struggles more than ever — machine manufacturers have no one to sell their products to, restaurants lose customers, the son of the miner who argued "I have three kids I want to send to college" in defense of the Spruce 1 project drops out of high school because really, what's the point? Like it or not, the coal mining industry in West Virginia alone produces 63,000 much-needed jobs while generating $25.5 billion annually. Coal is the backbone of many small town economies, a crucial element that environmental elitists seem intent on breaking.

West Virginian Sierra Club president and Spruce 1-hater Bill Price says that the mining industry can't responsibly conduct mountaintop mining operations "without extreme impacts on the environment and the communities nearby." I agree with him on the environmental front, but for better or for worse, I argue that the industry can't stop their operations in the interest of the "the communities nearby." We might poison a few fish, and the view may not be pretty when half the mountaintop is gone, but until you find me a solution that includes replacing jobs lost by a population already being economically underserved by a government that swears they were "created equal," I'm going to pick the people every time.

The mining industry is not always glamorous, and if there was another way we could stop "blowing up mountains to keep the lights on," we would — the reality, however, is that renewable energy sources are promising, but hardly developed enough to take over the full responsibility of keeping our nation powered. That day will come, but until then, we have to ask ourselves this honest question: for now, do we choose trees or people?

Photo credit: Jen SFO-BCN