Mountaintop removal mining in the Gauley River watershed has landed the Gauley on the annual list of endangered waterways published by the group American Rivers.
We’ve got a story on the Gazette’s Web site about this development, and you can read the American Rivers discussion of the threats to the Gauley here. The entire list of endangered rivers is here.
Among the recommendations from American Rivers is that EPA publish tougher national water quality guidance for selenium, something that we’ve reported before here appears likely to be coming soon. Interestingly, West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Erica Peterson reported this morning that U.S. EPA has filed specific objections to the Manchin administration’s continuing efforts to give coal operators more time to comply with the existing selenium standards.
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Tourism is WV largest source of revenue. Coal is not. What’s next for coal and MTR? Will they be allowed to destroy Snowshoe and the Blackwater Falls or just poison the rivers so that not even fishing is allowed. The Gauley River being endangered by MTR makes me ill. No one can live near these sites and for sure no tourist will want to drive down to see a MTR site. MTR site instead of soaring mountains is nothing anyone wants to see. When on earth will people see the long term ramifications to MTR? Or will we sit back and let them blow that state off the map to get at some coal.
I don’t understand how they can say the whole river is one of the nations most endangered when 20-mile creek flows into the river around 8 miles before the River ends (combining with the NEW to form the Kanawha). Peters Creek isn’t too far upstream from that point (perhaps another 12 or so miles upstream) so really, we’re talking the last 19-20 miles of the river. Not trying to make light of the situation, just to clarify that we’re talking one section of the River and not the whole thing.
Also, have they checked the selenium lvls in summersville lake? How do we know some of the contaminates are not leaching out of the ground that was flooded by the dam?
How are West Virginians supposed to make a living? Everything we try to do, environmentalists shoot down … all they want is Tourism evidently … which is seasonal … and most folks make very little money … most have no benefits. MTR? NOpe. Well how about Gas or oil? Nope. Wind? Nope, dangerous to the birdies. Logging? Nope. Deep mines? Well, ok, but your probably going to die either from an accident or a debilitating lung disease. Chemical plants? Nope.
Everywhere you turn, anything that is a viable industry in WV, enviros want to stop. It’s enough to depress a person.
Mike4352, Well said. If the river is endangered then shouldnt we stop all activities on it. The state should stop stocking fish at Summersville tailwaters. If this is continued, wouldnt it be a huge waste since the selenium will harm them. While were at it, wouldnt Summersville lake be endangered also. Well there goes tourism in summersville. Gauley season will be canceled this year because we dont need selenium on our roads from the water dripping off of their boats. As the member of a family with large land holdings on the middle gauley, the selenium issue sounds like a nice lawsuit against the rafting crews. My land was harmed by the selenium off of your boats, and selfs. Or could it be that American Rivers is only concerned with rivers they can float a boat down and make money in the process.
Just took a look at American Rivers website. What a sham. The Coal and Mud rivers didnt make the list. They have much more mining activity on them than the 2 major operations that are in the gauley watershed.
I think you are misunderstanding the intent of the list….increased awareness. The Coal was on the list in 1999 and 2000 (or maybe it was 2000 and 2001). The amount of mining has not decreased since then, nor has the river been improved.
The Gauley was likely added due to the Twentymile Creek mining and its decline in the past decade.
Selenium would not be a problem in Summersville Lake because there is not a huge volume of unweathered bedrock being exposed, smashed, and backfilled into a hollow. Elevated Selenium is only a phenomenon that occurs below huge mining operations or fly ash disposal sites. Any sample in Summersville lake for Selenium would likely be below detection limits.
Groups like American Rivers highlight big issues that involve water quality with these kinds of “top ten list” designations. Thus year they are picking up on the fact that MTR and oil and gas drilling are having significant negative offsite water quality effects on streams and rivers.
In the case of MTR, these effects add to the negatives from MTR that more and more people, inside and outside West Virginia, see as outweighing the benefits. (And, offsite water effects have given a new angle for people to challenge MTR, under various water protection laws.)
Scott14 and mike 4352, you are right, people raising “environmental” concerns can be as narrow-minded as anyone else. But, as I have written before, it’s completely unfair to lump all these people together, because they are very diverse, and usually concerned with local issues. For example, most of my water pollution clients were people who had worked or were working in coal mines, but that did not stop them from being deeply pissed off when a coal company poisoned their stream.
And yes, exaggeration is the hallmark of a lot of advocacy. But it’s not fair to fault people too much for being willing to exaggerate at times to protect themselves and the natural world. The polluters do their share of exaggeration, to be sure. And if it were not for the “push-back” from citizens against toxic emissions, etc., the levels of poison spewing into our world from various industries and indeed our entire technolgical society would be ten times what they are.
It can be annoying when national groups focus on West Virginia’s environmental problems, when we do have this beautiful state, with so much good in the natural world, and all negative messages seem to feed into false negative stereotypes about WV. What about the godawful toxic messes that humans have created in large parts of New Jersey, etc.?
“From those to whom much is given, much is required.” I don’t know exactly if or how that proverb applies here, but it might.
As Tom and Mayflyguy point out, American Rivers uses their annual endangered river list to bring attention to practices that threaten water quality on rivers. And it makes a difference. Years ago the Cheat was on the list for a couple of years, and that helped bring millions of dollars worth of reclamation money into the watershed.
Unless something has changed, I don’t think bulltown was correct about tourism being the number one source of income for the state. I believe coal still holds that title, with tourism second. But arguments about tourism being ‘only seasonal’ fall flat as well. Rafting and skiing may have their seasons, but those seasons cycle through every year, compared to mines that cease providing jobs as soon as they are mined out. There was a time when a single mine could support generations of miners, but today most mines only stay active for a few years, creating what amounts to a migrant miner workforce.
And while coal industry folks like to boast about all the associated service industry jobs they support, tourism can claim the same, with the added benefit of supporting communities that retirees and others with disposable income find attractive to live in or even move to. Compare Fayetteville to your typical southern coalfield town and the difference in amenities and quality of life is striking.
As Tom rightly points out, environmentalists come in many flavors, and it’s understandable that some might feel all they ever hear is ‘no’ from that quarter, but the true message is that our natural resources and diverse ecosystems provide far more value for far more years when nurtured rather than extracted. That may not be immediately obvious to a miner trying to keep his family fed, but given the perspective of time the truth becomes much more clear.
Thanks for those comments, Dave.
Of course, any accounting of what business sectors are the most important to the state would need to include some way of calculation both their benefits and their costs — how do we calculate the costs to 29 families who lost their fathers, husbands, brothers, etc.? — otherwise, activities such as coal that have both good and bad sides will not be added up properly in the mix.
Most fascinating to me is that whenever anyone tries to do such calculations about coal, they are immediately attacked by the industry’s front groups.
Ken.
Ken I am not a coal industry front man I am in fact one of the three largest whitewater outfitters in West Virginia and run the New and Gauley Rivers. I have no problem with the coal industry or mountain top removal nor do I think the Gauley River is in any way endangered. I also believe that coal and tourism can work hand in hand .Something we all need to remember is with out coal West Virginia’s economy would implode also without coal America would be even more dependent on foreign oil.
Rick
Rick Johnson: it’s good that you weighed in with an informed view of the Gauley River. This blog benefits from this kind of expertise.
Personally, although I understand the many benefits of coal (I have a coal furnace and I use lots of electricity), I would never say I have “no problem” with the coal industry when innocent miners are dying, and there are hundreds of miles of entirely toxic streams in Preston County, etc., etc. The coal industry, like all of us, has lots of problems, and we can make progress when we face them squarely and with eyes wide open. Agreed?
Rick,
The argument that coal is linked to imported oil is false. The two, coal and oil, are very separate energy sectors: oil. largely transportation and secondarily raw material for manufacturing; coal, largely electrical generation and secondarily fuel for industrial production. Back in the 1970′s, during the first oil shock, this was not the case and we did burn some oil for electricity. Today, Hawaii is the only state with significant electricity generated from oil. Coal supporters carelessly throw around the notion that less coal means more imported oil. Many, no doubt know better. If we are going to get anywhere with dialog, we have to have know the facts.
I have often thought America doesn’t need an energy policy, it needs an electricity policy and an oil policy.
If you really want to minimize imported oil, drive a fuel-efficient vehicle. We import something over 60% of our oil. Driving a 28 mpg car instead of a 14 mpg SUV or pickup will reduce consumption in half. In fact, it’s much more important to wean ourselves off of low-mileage vehicles than it is to move into very high mileage vehicles. For every driver downgrading to an SUV, it takes nearly three folks moving up to hybrids to cancel things out.
Thom,
A while back, you posted a poignant comment along the lines of West Virginia being neglected by national environmental groups; you compared the plight of West Virginians to the suffering of the Kurds.
It’s a comment that stuck with me. Your post above surprises me.
Red Desert — comparing national attention to coalfields environmental issues to the here-today gone-tomorrow attention that the “international community” has given to the Kurds, over generations, still resonates with me.
For example, national groups’ putting lots of energy into opposing MTR mining simply has to be motivated at least in part by their strategic desire to weaken the coal industry on every possible PR and political front, as they battle to stop atmospheric carbon emissions.
And it’s more than just environmental issues — over the decades, the lack of opportunity for and poverty of tens of thousands of Appalachian coalfields children comes onto national radar screens — and off again — with a depressing familiarity, usually in connection with political winds.
There are many other examples. Appalachian scholars have studied these cycles of national attention, which go back more than a hundred years.
I suppose I should mention that very often not much changes, as the attention waxes and wanes. Anyone speak Kurdish?
The Kurds have been victimized by the strategic aims of big powers, European and American mostly, since at least the collapse of the Ottomans. Sympathy for the Kurds or no, those aims trumped doing the right thing. I think of that film from the F-15 cockpit of Iraqi helicopters–exempted by Schwarzkopf from the restrictions of the no-fly zone–as they strafed the long, long convoy of Kurdish civilians fleeing north across a barren plane, black smoke billowing into the sky. The pilot radios requesting permission to intervene. Permission denied. Or of the Senate voting 97-0 to sanction Saddam after the gassing of Halabja–only to have Reagan’s State Dept intervene and kill the sanctions before they ever made it to conference.
Of course, the Kurds haven’t exactly helped themselves a lot either. Leaders of the two major parties–sort of mafias really–have sometimes spent as much time trying to kill each other as they have trying fight Saddam.
So national environmental groups are annoying. You can call me naive. I thought there was a tragedy in Appalachia, human and environmental; a shocking stain on the American idea. MTR was a story under the radar, a story that most Americans had NEVER heard of a decade ago. Sure part of that was because of the power of coal interests. But I figured, and I still figure, it was also the lack strong local communities that could represent the environmental and human rights interests of Appalachia. Not a lack of passion or commitment, but of resources. Like I’ve written before, this kind of thing could never happen in the American West. The environmental organizations are too well developed, the public is too engaged and protective and, not insignificantly, a lot of the land is in the public domain. And, I figured, Appalachia isn’t the grand, charismatic landscape of ANWR, the Grand Canyon, the Sierra or the Santa Barbara Channel that easily attracts support.
I figured, wrongly I now see, that raising awareness of the scale of strip mining in Appalachia and fighting MTR was a worthy thing to do.
What to tell those outsiders who have spent days working their local farmers’ markets to raise awareness, who have met with Congressional representatives to urge sponsorship of the Clean Water Protection Act, who have written literally hundreds of letters on the issue, who have paid their own way to Washington to lobby on behalf of the coal fields. Who knew they were part of a cynical operation by the national environmental groups to kill coal, what ever happens to Appalachia not part of the equation.
Parting words from a son of the Cumberland Plateau–no liberal or tree hugger he–but one who fled the narrow confines of those eastern mountains for the openness on the continent’s other side. Perhaps because our most valuable possession is memory, and–something to think about as your land is rent asunder–the only way to protect memory from violence is to turn your back and leave.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its beginning. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Great post, Red Desert. The open pit copper mines in the West, the arsenic leaching uranium mine tailings, and the huge coal strips of Wyoming are environmental disasters, too.
I said national environmental groups’ rhetoric about WV CAN be annoying in reinforcing negative stereotypes. The same rhetoric is somehow more understandable when it’s homegrown. I have had many people in DC ask me how I can stand living in WV, wondering if there are any mountains left?
Indeed, are there any mountains left in WV?
It ain’t the outsiders. West Virginia is not Kurdistan. From Robert Byrd to every citizen refusing to acknowledge the choice between cheap electricity and clean water or artificially low taxes and protected mountains, you’re the ones responsible for what’s happening there. In other words, in a choice between protecting self interest and protecting the land, self interest wins out.
Lots of politics behind that list. The Mon River was virtually dead in to 60′s. Now, they’re hosting fishing tournaments, triathlons (swimming), etc.
Red Desert,
Indeed, there are quite a few mountains left in West Virginia …
Tom Rodd has made the very accurate and reasoned point before that coal has provided a multitude of benefits for our broader society in America — electricity, steel, etc. The entire country has benefited.
But for most of the last 100 or more years, the burden of the negative impacts have hit far more heavily on the people here in the region than on the broader society — while it’s clear now that air pollution’s impacts on health and carbon pollution’s impacts on the climate are very real, broader societal impacts, for much of the last 100 years, these things were not as clearly understood. What was understood were the deaths of thousands of miners in fires, explosions, and roof falls, and thousands more from black lung disease. At the same time, the out-of-state owners of most of the coal benefited, while the out-of-state users of coal’s end products also benefited — all the while, kids in West Virginia hollows played in raw sewage while billions in natural resources were hauled away in so many hopper cars in the tracks a few feet away.
You’re analysis in your last comment ignores this, and is far too simplistic, as I’m sure that you know. Outside and inside forces were and continue to be at play in the situation West Virginians (and those in other coalfield communities) find themselves. It doesn’t help find a better path to try to make the narrative more simple than it really is.
Ken.
Great dialogue here.
Ken, I agree that scant attention is paid to the costs related to coal compared to the income, and Rick, as I embark on my 27th year working full or part time in the whitewater industry, I grant that from a whitewater perspective, neither the New nor the Gauley are currently threatened by coal operations.
The threats to the Gauley are downstream of the whitewater portion, and the New River Gorge continues to recover from the days a century ago when it was devastated by extractive practices that made several of the communities there ‘boast’ the worst living conditions in the country.
And while it’s true that if we were to suddenly stop mining all coal today, the economic impacts for the state would be severe, one also has to question the wisdom of sustaining an economy dominated by extraction of a resource that is not being replenished, and whose extraction practices only very rarely leave us with a long term benefit like an airport or golf course that serves us well after the coal is mined.
In the vast majority of cases a previously mined area has less use and value than it did before it was mined. In that sense, we’re using up the state rather than managing it wisely so future generations will benefit as much or more from living here than those of us here today do.
I honestly don’t know what will replace coal revenues WHEN they start to fade, as they inevitably must, whether due to external regulatory or demand shifts or simply depleting the remaining reserves that can be cost effectively mined.
Change is coming, and we can either wait for it to happen to us or actively chart its course. In a sparsely populated state with no large urban centers, I suspect our best option will be to foster numerous and diverse micro-industries rather than look to a single source to supplant coal.
But whatever our economic future, now is the time to gather our best minds to plan for it, rather than cling to coal like the mast of a sinking ship until there’s nothing left to hold our heads above water.
If I were to be picking a “Best of Coal Tattoo” list, I’d begin with Ken Ward’s 1:07 PM post, third paragraph. Ken’s channeling the historian John Alexander Williams, and making it real. Like Kobe.
My issue with MTR is that it does incredible damage, with little pay-off for West Virginians. It does not require the number of employees underground or other surface mines. It’s really good for the corporate bottom line, but it doesn’t go back in the local economy as much as a big Consol underground mine for example.
I’m all for mining coal, and I hope to see production rise, and that we see improved efforts in carbon sequestration or using the methane as a natural gas too.
MTR just leaves us mostly with valley fills and more flooding! I say end it! Then, those jobs will be absorbed into other mining, and the price of coal will go up because we’ve taken MTR out of the picture (supply and demand thing).
I don’t understand how they can say the whole river is one of the nations most endangered when 20-mile creek flows into the river around 8 miles before the River ends (combining with the NEW to form the Kanawha). Peters Creek isn’t too far upstream from that point (perhaps another 12 or so miles upstream) so really, we’re talking the last 19-20 miles of the river. Not trying to make light of the situation, just to clarify that we’re talking one section of the River and not the whole thing.