In Monday's New York Times, an excellent opinion piece lays out the "civil war" in Appalachia over coal and specifically mountaintop removal. The guts of the issue is here: Appalachia is engaged in a civil war of sorts over coal, with miners and their families pitted against environmental activists. The central issue is mountaintop removal, a radical form of strip mining that has left over 2,000 miles of streams buried and over 500 mountains destroyed. According to several recent studies, people living near surface mining sites have a 50 percent greater risk of fatal cancer and a 42 percent greater risk of birth defects than the general population. Despite the evidence, the coal industry and...
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