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Miami professor, scientists say mountaintop mining is damaging

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By Staff Report 4:02 PM Thursday, January 7, 2010

OXFORD — A Miami professor is among a group of scientists from around the nation calling for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop mining permits because of environmental impact.

The group says there is extensive evidence of permanent environmental damage and health risks evident in peer-reviewed research of mountaintop mining in a Jan. 7 edition of the journal Science, according to a news release from Miami University.

The scientists, including Orie Loucks, professor emeritus of zoology at Miami University, say the United States should take a global leadership role on the issue as surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively in the next decade and is widespread in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia.   

In mountaintop mining, upper elevation forests are cleared and stripped of topsoil, and explosives are used to break up rocks in order to access coal buried below. Much of this rock is pushed into adjacent valleys where it buries and obliterates streams.

Research by Miami’s Loucks focused on the effects of mountaintop coal mining on forest productivity in the central Appalachian States.

“Many mid-sized watersheds in the region have had up to 20 percent of their timberland stripped off and the underlying rock blasted and pushed into nearby valleys,” Loucks said in a news release. “Mine reclamation practices generally have not included re-establishing a forest cover, resulting in a huge loss of income from the land as well as destabilizing stream flow, soil erosion and stream chemistry.”   

Loucks also notes that much of the coal being mined is burned in the Ohio Valley and the result is acid gas emissions that cause acidity in rainfall, which leaches essential bases such as calcium from the soil.

“It forces the ecosystem to be hit by an uppercut and a stomach punch at the same time,” Loucks said, adding that losses to the renewable resources economy are upwards of 80 percent.

“Our studies show that states in the Appalachian region implemented their own local reclamation standards under the 1977 mine reclamation law, even as the scale, technology and impacts of mountaintop mining escalated,” Loucks said. His students found the permitted forest and stream degradation to be unsustainable and may require reclamation throughout several centuries.   

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