The following email letter was received by Vivian Stockman, Coordinator for the Blackwater Campaign.

Dear Vivian,

Thank you for giving us an opportunity to help with the Blackwater Canyon -- we received the message today from Margaret Janes. I will forward this message to others in our area of the Eastern Panhandle. I, too, have a love and a history with Blackwater Canyon and the Falls area. Ever since I was a little girl going to my grandparents home in Sutton WV (Braxton County). My Dad always stopped there with my mother and me to enjoy the beauty and have some lunch. That was back in the 60s clear up until I was 17.

I enjoyed so much there for so many years freely, it is only right that I and others give something back for such a treasure in our state. I will get to work right away!

Our organization has been here in the Eastern Panhandle for about eight years. I have heard a great deal about the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy from a Mr. John Christensen. We have a Web site started, as of Dec. 25th 1998. I am working on our project about Back Creek in Berkeley County WV, the Back Creek 2000 Water Quality Initiative. If you care to, you can check out our web page at <http://www.blue-heron.org/>

Please keep us posted on this action, I will also be sure to tell my parents and family still living in Braxton County.

Sincerely,

(The following letter appeared in the Beckley Register-Herald on Dec. 17, 1998, and is reprinted here with permission from the writer)

Editor

I recently took an educational tour of West Virginia along with 20 other Kellogg National Leadership Fellows.

We met with Representative Nick Rahall, D – WV, who revealed that it was none other than he who inserted the "mountaintop removal" language into the 1977 legislation that tried, but miserably failed, to reign in the renegade strip mining industry.

Tangible proof of that stunning reality came as soon as the next morning when we stopped at the Mountaintop Removal Agricultural Project in Mingo County.

I’d heard about this public relations stunt for years, and truly expected to see acres of lush apple trees and productive grape vines sprouting out of rich, imported topsoil – cost be damned. Imagine my surprise when our bus lumbered onto a 500-acre site that sported a couple of dozen spindly specimens and a few boxes of half-dead ginseng surrounded by 495 acres of pure unadulterated carnage. [Only in West Virginia could the coal companies get away with this sort of "public relations!" Ed..]

The next day, state papers reported Gov. Cecil Underwood’s forced resignation of Division of Forestry Director Bill Maxey for Maxey’s refusal to take back his statement that the greatest threat to the timber industry in West Virginia was strip mining. Hats off to you, Maxey, and good luck finding a new job in West Virginia. You’ll need it.

The papers also ran a two-page spread with splendid color and a headline an inch deep stating, "Responsible Mountain top Mining. It’s good for West Virginia, and it’s the right thing to do."

The ad was paid for by Arch Coal with the profits of coal mined from beneath the feet of a million West Virginians who desperately want to believe, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that turning mountains into molehills makes environmental and economic sense.

In truth, mountain top removal reclamation is the equivalent of offering a wet T-shirt to a woman who’s just had a mastectomy.

Dr. Bob Henry Baber

Lorain, Ohio

(Dr. Baber ran in the Democratic Primary for governor in 1996. He is a native of Greenbrier County)