Biased Task Force Chairman ?

Professor Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University and chairman of the Governor’s Task Force on Mountaintop Removal claims in a Gazette article to want "...to make a thorough, thoughtful and fair study" of mountain top removal, yet in his first public comment on the first public hearing on mountain top removal he calls many people who testified "professional testifiers."

Professor Gilley figures it’s okay to speak for a coal company, it’s ok to speak if you are a "professional" environmentalist (whatever that is), it’s okay to speak if you are a miner and it’s okay to speak if you live at the edge of a mountain top removal disaster. But it is not okay to speak if you are something he calls a "professional testifier" many of whom were "proudly pointing to their past appearances before various public groups on this and other topics." How can he prejudge people who are concerned about things in their communities and who speak out about their concerns? Why does he find it odd that people are proud of the stands they have taken for things they care about? What in the world is wrong with being active in your community and being proud of it? Gilley makes it sound like a crime or deviant behavior.

Name calling is a time-honored method of discrediting opponents. I guess we are just lucky he didn't call us communists. He has already made it clear that if people are not in one of his approved four groups that they are wasting his time, they will not be listened too!! What kind of chairman is it that writes off speakers at public hearings? How can he be fair? Is it thoughtful when he publicly calls people names who have spoken to the task force on mountain top removal?

I proudly count myself in the group he wants to degrade with name-calling. I am not a coal company executive nor lobbyist, not a paid environmentalist, nor a miner and I don't live right on the edge of a mountain top removal project. But I know that the coal companies will take the tops off every mountain that has coal in it, anywhere they can. They will not stop with what they have removed so far--they will destroy every coal bearing mountain in sight if they own it. Nothing is holy to them but money.

Evidence of coal company’s attitudes is an editorial that appeared in the Coal Bell, a publication of the strip-mining industry in West Virginia. The editorial, by Fred F. Holroyd, said, "It seems to me that if a property owner wants to flatten a useless mountain top he should not be prevented from doing so. If an environmentalist or state agency wants to preserve a mountaintop they should buy it." Earlier in the editorial he refers to our mountains as "...worthless pieces of dirt, good for absolutely nothing, save for snakes and scrub pines."

The leaders of the strip-mining industry saw nothing wrong with calling our mountains "worthless pieces of dirt" and "useless." In this view only those with money have the power to decide what happens to a mountain. If you aren’t rich you have no say, no vote. To them, if you own a mountain you can do anything you want to it. It is kind of like saying you can abuse your children since they are yours Ben Greene, the president of the strip mining organization that published that editorial is on Prof. Gilley’s task force.

At the governor’s cue the coal industry calls people "environmental extremists" if they see mountaintop removal as a plague on our state. Is it extreme to say that they would take the top off of Spruce Knob? The Coal Bell editorial says they can do it if they own it. Look next door in Kentucky--the coal industry is trying right now to get a permit to take the top off of the highest mountain in Kentucky!

Gilley calls us "professional testifiers" and his friend, the governor, and coal company lobbyists call us "environmental extremists." It is ironic that professor Gilley probably includes Norm Steenstra as a "professional environmentalist" and the governor calls him an "environmental extremist" -- they got their signals crossed, I guess.

The coal company lobbyists are the real professional testifiers. They are paid to say what they say. Coal companies have always been the real environmental extremists. Most people would agree that it is more extreme to want to remove the top of a mountain than to want it left as it is. Is it not more extreme to remove a mountaintop and dump it in a hollow than it is to want the mountain left alone? Is it not pretty extreme to blow people’s houses off the foundations and hurl boulders in their yards? Is it not pretty extreme to make dust so thick that these folks can’t see their neighbors’ houses and their children can’t breath? Is it not extreme to decapitate the Appalachian mountains?!

It is clear to me that the coal company lobbyists are the paid professional testifiers and the coal companies are the environmental extremists.