U.S.: Activists Drape 25-Foot Banner On EPA Building, Call on EPA to Stop Mountaintop Removal Mining

June 29th, 2009

more photos available soon at risingtidenorthamerica.org!

BOSTON, MA – Activists with Rising Tide draped a 25-foot banner reading, “Mountain Top Removal Kills Communities: EPA No New Permits. MountainJustice.org” on 1 North Congress St., at the intersection of New Chardon Street and Congress Street,
at the downtown offices of the Environmental Protection Agency this
morning. The group is urging the agency to block over 150 pending
permits for mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, Kentucky,
and Virginia.1

“Mountaintop removal is destroying our nation’s most diverse forests
and historic communities,” said Alex Johnston, a Rising Tide activist.
“President Obama and the EPA need to take immediate action to stop the
bulldozers from destroying America’s oldest mountains and Appalachians
homes.”

This act of peaceful protest comes just days after top NASA climate
scientist, James Hansen, actress Darryl Hannah, and 29 others were
arrested as they protested mountaintop removal mining in southern West
Virginia.2 On June 18, 14 concerned citizens entered onto Massey
Energy’s mountaintop removal mine site near Twilight, WV. Four of them
scaled a 150-foot dragline and unfurled a 15×150 foot banner that said,
“Stop Mountaintop Removal Mining”, while nine others deployed a 20×40
foot banner on the ground at the site which read,”Stop Mountaintop
Removal: Clean Energy Now.”

On the campaign trail, Obama spoke out against mountain top removal,
saying “We’re tearing up the Appalachian Mountains because of our
dependence on fossil fuels,” and “We have to find more environmentally
sound ways of mining coal, than simply blowing the tops off
mountains.”3 Despite these campaign statements, the Obama
administration and the EPA have continued to allow mining corporations
to continue dumping mining waste into streams and encroach on stream
buffers, while offering only weak promises of protection from the
“worst impacts” of mountaintop removal operations.

“It’s way past time for civil disobedience to stop mountaintop
removal and move quickly toward clean, renewable energy sources,” said
Judy Bonds, Goldman Environmental Prize winner and co-director of Coal
River Mountain Watch of West Virginia. “For over a century, Appalachian
communities have been crushed, flooded, and poisoned as a result of the
country’s dangerous and outdated reliance on coal. How could the
country care so little about our American mountains, our culture and
our lives?”

Every day, mountaintop removal mines use more explosive power than
the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Mining companies are
clear-cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most
biologically diverse forests. They’re burying biologically crucial
headwaters streams with blasting debris, releasing toxic levels of
heavy metals into the remaining streams and groundwater and poisoning
essential drinking water. According to the EPA, this destructive
practice has damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 miles of streams and
threatens to destroy 1.4 million acres of forest by 2020.

1 http://www.mountainjustice.org/events.php?id=154

2 http://www.mountainaction.org

3 http://washingtonindependent.com/43861/epa-mining-decisions-favor-coal-industry

4 http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/40129