Nine Days Left to Stop Mountaintop Removal for Good

The deadline to submit comments on the federal government's plan to end the Nationwide Permit 21, which allows Mountaintop Removal coal mining, ends Oct. 26.

The feds are finally allowing us to submit comments by email, so don't miss this critical and probably last opportunity to save the Appalachian Mountains.

Written comments can be submitted at www.regulations.gov. Be sure to connect them to docket number COE-2009-0032. Or you can mail them to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Attn: CECW-Co (Desiree Hann), 441 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20314-1000.

For details about what's at stake, and what's being done, see this piece at The Nation:

When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn't have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family's ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.

For the past few years, ever since a massive twenty-story dragline landed on a ridge near their home, the Webbs had endured twice-daily, bone-rattling explosions and the quasi-apocalyptic storms of coal dust and fly rock that blanketed their home and garden. Lindytown's creeks and mountain hollows no longer exist, and a once-thriving community has been reduced to a ghost town. "It's unreal. It's like we're living in a war zone," Lora Webb told a local newspaper last fall.

SNIP

Along with encouraging investment in the region for green jobs and renewable energy sources, the Alliance for Appalachia plans to mount an even more aggressive citizens' lobby campaign to pass the Clean Water Protection Act, which would in effect end mountaintop removal by halting the creation of valley fills and polluted waterways from mine waste.

"In order to counter the Goliath-like, multimillion-dollar coal industry lobby, the Alliance for Appalachia has organized monthly citizen lobby weeks," says Stephanie Pistello. "As a result, the Clean Water Protection Act has a record 157 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House, and for the first time in history, we have legislation before the Senate, the Appalachia Restoration Act, which has eight co-sponsors."

"The EPA has the authority to veto the permits," Jackson reminded NPR listeners in September. "The permits themselves are issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers. So EPA plays sort of an oversight role there." By the end of November, after receiving the Army Corps revisions of the permits, Jackson and the EPA should let the coalfield residents--and the nation--know how far that oversight extends.

Read the whole thing.