When you're talking about mountaintop removal, you're talking about moving millions of cubic yards of earth. How much is one million cubic yards?
Try this exercise: Go to the mall and buy 12 million yardsticks. Glue the ends together to form 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-3-foot cubes. Using a football field as your grid, arrange the cubes in layers (120 long by 53 wide.) When done, your stack of cubes should be 474 feet high or as tall as a 40-story building.
When you talk about mountaintop removal, you are likely referring to a southern West Virginia coal mining technique. In north-central West Virginia, however, we have been flattening hilltops for decades to create developable land.
By my estimate, during the past three decades alone, some 30 million cubic yards of earth has been moved to build shopping malls, motels, new roads, airport expansions, a new school, a championship golf course, new housing developments, the FBI fingerprint center and various other large sites. And this is just in Harrison County.
One airport expansion alone required 10 million cubic yards of excavation. The Eastpointe-Newpointe shopping area runs a close second if it is not, in fact, a larger project.
You won't need to wear out your pencil by adding up a list of small developments to arrive at 30 million. In fact, you don't even need to include the excavation required to build Corridor D (U.S. 50) and I-79. (That's probably 30 million cubic yards if not more.)
Robert C. Byrd High School's site required about 320,000 cubic yards of excavation. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The land was previously an underground coal mine. Then it was surface-mined and abandoned. Then it was reclaimed under the Abandoned Mine Land program. And, finally, that same dirt was moved a third time to build the school location.
People don't associate mountaintop removal with commercial site development. A perfect example of this is our new hospital site. Two-million cubic yards of earth were moved to flatten a hilltop for the new United Hospital Center.
This is not mountaintop removal -- the destruction of our beautiful hills. No, the hospital site is a beacon of progress. Healing the sick, tending to the injured and comforting the dying represent mankind's greatest act -- humanity. The modern hospital can achieve these goals far better than the old one can. The new hospital salves our eco-vanity in a humbling way.
I wanted to attend the UHC groundbreaking. I wanted to hear important dignitaries tell us that the hospital's good for the community far outweighed any harm to the environment. As I had a previous engagement, I missed all that speechifying.
A few days later, though, I did run into Alvin, the famous singing chipmunk. He told me that he had attended the groundbreaking to protest mountaintop removal. Still in shock, Alvin said, "The groundbreaking itself was a non-event. Then things got pretty dicey when the bulldozers moved in. My friends are still looking for places to live."
The Morgantown area has seen its share of mountaintop removal in the past three decades. It surely rivals that of the Clarksburg-Bridgeport area.
My best estimate of disturbed development land in the I-79 corridor from Clarksburg to Morgantown, and during the past three decades, is 50,000 acres or about 80 square miles. For the great bulk of this area, we have traded grassland and forest for rooftops and pavement.
I would think that even a weekend environmentalist would jump all over the disappearance of this carbon-consuming resource. Apparently, they are too busy potty-mouthing Brazil for wrecking the rain forest to notice what has happened here.
West Virginia is a great place to grow apples. Florida is a great place to grow oranges. That line of thinking has permeated the debate on mountaintop removal. In the northern part of the state, mountaintop removal is an economic development asset. In the southern part of the state, mountaintop removal is the rape of our most cherished asset.
The sound bite of our time has become "Mountaintop coal mine bad. Mountaintop hospital good."
Pray tell. Is the debate about mountaintop removal really that simplistic?
Humans don't live in isolation, nor do they live in regions. Humans live as a collective, and, collectively, we alter the landscape to suit our desires. We move mountains because we want to. We move mountains because we can.
