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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: activism, Climate Change, coal, enviroment, Global Warming, mountain top removal
Then don’t do anything on the 31st. Otherwise, you should check out the national day of action aimed at pressuring Bank of America to stop helping companies who engage in mountain-top removal.
From the friendly folks at It’s Getting Hot in Here:
Between 2005 and 2007, Bank of America facilitated nearly $1 billion in loans to Massey Energy and Arch Coal, two of the largest companies responsible for the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining. This form of mining literally blasts the tops off of mountains to get at thin seems of coal that lay beneath. Mountaintop removal coal mining has permanently destroyed over 500 square miles of mountains and buried over 1,200 miles of streams in West Virginia alone.
Yikes. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only problem with this practice. The human costs of mountain-top removal are even worse than the "mountaincide" itself. For example:
Alongside this ecological devastation lies an even more ominous human dimension: an Eastern Kentucky University study found that children in Letcher County, Ky., suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath -- symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome -- that can all be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites into nearby streams. Long-term effects may include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract. […]
In West Virginia, 14 people drowned in the last three years because of floods and mudslides caused by mountaintop removal, and in Kentucky, 50 people have been killed and over 500 injured in the last five years by coal trucks, almost all of which were illegally overloaded.

"I told them it is an evil mountain, it is alive, and I will never go back there."
Yikes.