Recently the Internet web site of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy received several letters asking us about our involvement in the federal court litigation relating to mountaintop removal mining and related valley fills. Coal field residents have a right to vent their frustration about the confusion surrounding the effects of the litigation. The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy endeavors to answer some writers’ questions and accusations.

But some questions and accusations have no answer because they are not based in reality. For example: "Why have you worked so hard to destroy Southern West Virginia?" is a false question. On the contrary, we contend that it is the coal companies and their political allies who are willing to destroy mountains, streams and sometimes whole towns in the coal fields. They are doing it for some of the oldest motives known: political power and greed.

For over 100 years the coal was mined without the gigantic destruction of the forests, the mountains and the streams that has been practiced only in the past fifteen years or so.

Coal operators have victimized southern West Virginia and its people for decades. The state environmental agencies are supposed to protect the people and their homelands. But too many of our elected politicians who run the agencies have permitted these out-of-state companies to operate with permissive permitting and almost no regulation. Now the companies no longer even try to write good permit applications. They know the agencies will go along with almost anything.

Why does this happen? And why has the court now decided that so much is too much? Some of us think this is happening because the coal companies manipulate the political system so that the companies control the politicians and the governmental agencies, rather than the agencies regulating the companies.

If the governmental agencies had required the coal companies to follow the law decades ago, the companies would have developed better mining practices, in compliance with the law. But by letting the coal companies make their own rules and do as they pleased, the agencies encouraged company lawlessness to the point that the court now says things cannot go on this way any longer.

This is the same political mentality that lets coal companies shirk tens of millions of dollars of their legal responsibilities to pay workers’ compensation premiums for their injured workers. The result is that honest businesses pay higher workers’ compensation rates and injured workers are sometimes not fully compensated for their injuries.

And this same political mentality lets overloaded eighty and ninety ton coal trucks destroy our roads without challenge.

This official attitude helps create the "who cares?" atmosphere for other enforcement agencies. The result is that the only guidelines developed are the ones agreed to by coal companies. And if the companies ignore these rules as well, well, that’s OK with these politically controlled agencies, too.

The court has now said enough is enough.

So it is the coal companies and the governmental agencies, not the Highlands Conservancy, that let this situation develop. But the coal industry’s propaganda that environmentalists, the court and newspapers are to blame for this situation is believed by some people.

The Highlands Conservancy has not made or changed any environmental laws. We only brought the outlaw environmental practices of industry and regulators to the court’s attention. The newspapers simply reported to the public what was happening.

An honest coal industry would place the blame for this economic disruption where it belongs: at it’s own doorstep, and at the feet of the politicians who let regulatory agencies look the other way while the coal industry is regulated only by itself. But now that they are caught, the companies and state politicians are desperately trying to focus the blame elsewhere.

And as long as they get by with this, they keep the public from focusing on one indisputable fact: mountaintop removal and valley fill mining has cost the coal fields many times more jobs than it provides. Ask any local union officer if he’d have more miners working with conventional mining, or with mountaintop removal.

Too, economic dislocations associated with the environmental lawsuit appear to be grossly exaggerated. For example, according to the West Virginia Bureau of Employment Programs, the unemployment rate for Logan County has been running about twice the state average for many years – long before the Haden decision. The same agency’s reports indicates that average annual income in Logan County has been below the state average, and far below the national average – again for several years or decades. And the provisional estimate is that the population of Logan County dropped almost five percent from 1990 to 1998, before the environmental lawsuit was even filed.

Miners in West Virginia and other states are being laid off for economic reasons, not environmental ones. The same technology that employs fewer and fewer miners to mine more and more coal here is at work elsewhere.

Australia, South Africa and other countries put coal into the world markets. Mines in Wyoming (including Arch Coal operations) are sending more and more coal east. The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy did not create that situation.

The good people of Logan and other coal counties where mountaintop removal mining is prevalent are being force fed a steady stream of coal generated political propaganda that "environmentalists" are destroying their economy. Why don’t they ask their politicians why those same counties have been at the bottom of the economic ladder for so many decades? Could it be because coal companies control their economy, their politics and, ultimately, their earthly destiny?

If Arch Coal or Massey Coal could mine and sell the coal and employ absolutely no one, they would do so. They spend thousands of dollars in advertising their propaganda about preserving jobs, all the while developing techniques to employ fewer and fewer miners, while mining more and more of the coal.

Some folks ask what they should be expected to do to resolve the situation of permits not being issued. That’s a fair question. My opinion is that the folks of the coal fields need to demand that the governor, the legislature and the environmental agencies make the coal companies actually follow the laws. Only then will the companies decide to be good, law abiding corporate citizens. Then permits can again be issued and miners can mine the coal.

But if the politicians are permitted to continue to just blame the "environmentalists" for pointing out that the agencies are not enforcing the law, and the coal field residents don’t demand more responsibility from government and from coal companies, then it will be a very long time until the situation gets better.

The problem has been in the making for many decades. It will take a major change in governmental and company attitudes for things to get better.

For decades coal companies let their miners be killed and maimed in unsafe conditions. The same companies underpaid the miners and cared nothing for their health care needs and their retirement security. It was only when miners and their neighbors got organized, formed the Union and demanded better treatment that anything better developed. It’s time again that miners, their union and their towns, counties and the whole region organized to demand that the agencies and the companies obey the laws so that courts will once again let permits be issued and so that miners can again be proud and productive workers.