…never having to say you’re sorry

Lately it seems to me that being a coal producer means, well, see the title of this column. What it does mean is that if you find you have what the Brits might call a “bit of a sticky wicket”, you can simply redefine the issue.


Take the “controversial” practice of mountaintop removal (MTR), a phrase synonymous with strip mining. It was given this moniker because the strippers now concentrate on the tops of the mountains. I’m unsure if their previous focus was on the bottoms of the mountains, but be that as it may, MTR has been the phrase du jour.

Lately, MTR seems to have fallen from grace with the coal operators. Evokes an image that is too negative. So employing the Orwellian practice of newspeak, and the good, common sense native to public relations people the world over, coal producers are now using the term mountaintop development (MTD) to describe their destructive method of getting at the region’s coal.

The coal producers also use every opportunity to let you know that coal is the reason we have such “cheap” rates for electricity. But considering that fellow coal producer, Kentucky Electric Power, recently got a hefty increase in the rate it charges for this service, the two of them might have to get together to come up with a new definition for that word, as well.

But back to MTD, I’m unsure who inspired the use of that particular phrase. I know that one “supporter of coal”, our state senator, Ray Jones, voiced an opinion about MTR or MTD, depending on who you ask, around the time the circus in the form of the Corps of Engineers came to town last year to solicit comments on a proposed rule change to Nationwide Permit 21. Sen. Jones said that any mountaintop in this area that hasn’t been mined is worthless, so perhaps Sen. Jones should be given credit here.

As to that assertion, I’m sure the people at the Breaks Interstate Park would be surprised to find out that those peaks that draw so many visitors to this region are, in fact, good for nothing. But if Sen. Jones goes over and shows them how flattening, say, that part of the park that now contains the Towers, as seen from the overlook of the same name, so that it could be used for, say, parking, or a nice factory, they would gladly allow this. No one wants to be stuck with worthless land when ammonium nitrate and fuel oil would give it so much more value.

Barring this, we might have to concede that we are now living in an era that Joni Mitchell wrote about in her song, “Big Yellow Taxi” (Take away the trees, and put ‘em in a tree museum. Then you charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.)

Of course, to really make MTD meaningful, you might want to see some of those flattened mountaintops actually contain something. In Pike County, none do. No hospitals, no golf courses, no factories, just flattened land that allows rainfall to become a rushing torrent on its way to the river as it takes everything along with it in its haste to get to the sea.