Appeal filed over Blair Mountain strip mining in W.Va.

A coalition of historic preservation, labor history and environmental protection groups filed a legal appeal Thursday morning, continuing their fight to restore the Blair Mountain Battlefield to the National Register of Historic Places.

The groups include: the Sierra Club, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Friends of Blair Mountain, West Virginia Labor History Association and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Arch Coal wants to strip mine the spot, never mind the historical legacy, wild nature and more. Read this to get the whole picture, then get mad.

The idiots who don’t believe global warming, or climate change, or any other slice of science

My friend conservation columnist Ted Williams offers this insightful look at the deniers. Whatta crew.

Let the coal burn! And China and India are doing just that

Amazing the amount of press time/coverage a lousy rock, aka “coal,” gets around the world. And never mind the carbon dioxide emitted whenever a supply of those rocks are burned – for heat, for electricity, for steam, etc. What would the Molly Maguires think today? Read here to learn about the role of coal in China and India. Not good.

Coal reality: Time to face facts

And one of those facts we need to stop ignoring is this: It is past time – way past time – for us to stop burning the dirty rock called coal. We are both ruining our planet’s atmosphere and ruining the landscape called America by mining and then burning coal. The West Virginia Gazette offers this editorial.

Even in coal country, the coal industry fights on

It still amazes me, more than a little, that I lived two decades in a region of Pennsylvania where the raping of natural land was rampant in the heyday of underground mining for anthracite coal. There was no land ethic, only the scouring of untold thousands and thousands of acres of Appalachian hardwood forest. Well spring forward to today, and the raping of land in northeastern Pennsylvania continues in the form of sprawl and road-building. In Kentucky and other points South, the Big Coal fights safety and public-health regulations. Read about it here.

The EPA and stopping the Spruce (rape-the-Earth) mine

Good editorial here on the EPA’s recent decision to rescind the permit for a mountaintop removal coal mine in West Virginia that would have continued the criminal-like burying of natural streams with the mining rubble.

Here are some views of what coal mining is doing to the land

I saw a lot bad stuff while living on the edge of the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania. But take a look at these pix and then get mad over what the dirty filthy industry has done, and is doing, to the American landscape.

Coal and our climate: Changes happening now

Forget all that balderdash about their being such a thing as “clean coal.” There isno such thing. The rock is dirty and its burning is changing Earth’s climate right now. The weird heat wave of March here in northern New England is proof enough. Read more here.

Concealed weapons against conservation

Not only are many Republicans in Congress fans of the gun-rights nuts, like the NRA, they also continue bowing to the corporate polluters who bankroll their election campaigns. Here’s an op-ed overview of the pro-pollution lawmakers’ attempts at using the rider process to gut conservation and environmental laws, stuff like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more. What a bunch of clowns.

Not safe to have children in mountain homeland

And that would be Kentucky, where mountaintops are dynamited to get at coal.

http://www.kentucky.com/2011/07/03/1798418/not-safe-to-have-children-in-mountain.html