Mountains of debate

The president pledged to be green. But when environmental and business interests collide, it's usually business that cheers the administration.

BOB WHITE, W.Va. - The ancient, weedy path up the hollow from the Gunnoe place to the mountain follows Big Branch Creek through thick stands of joe-pye weed and goldenrod, past the sweet scent of ripened papaws.

It winds for a mile up the valley, through a hardwood forest of beechnut and elm and towering poplar, each as straight as an old Baptist preacher man. Abruptly the shady forest gives way to sunshine and an immense, terraced wall of dirt and rock.

Maria Gunnoe grinds out her Marlboro Light and huffs up the steep embankment, an enormous "V" plugging what used to be the valley and the creek that ran through it. It's called a valley fill, built with leftover earth blasted away as miners demolish Island Creek Mountain to reach the seams of coal within.

From high above, on what once was a forested peak, comes the grunt of diesel engines and the persistent beep-beep-beep of a bulldozer and front-end loader gnawing at the mountain.

"It's kind of like walking from one part of the world to the other in five seconds," Gunnoe said as she reaches the top, a flattened moonscape littered with rock and giant boulders blasted from the mountain.

"I wonder if Bush realizes the true definition of the flick of his ink pen. Does he really understand what it's doing?"

Since his first campaign in 2000, President Bush has pledged to improve the forests, air and water, and in some respects he has. He has allowed the 20-year restoration of the Florida Everglades to continue. His administration engineered a deal to buy gas and oil rights in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to prevent drilling off Florida's West coast.

He's called for tax incentives for alternative fuels, $45-million for cleaning contaminated sites in the Great Lakes and new pollution controls on previously exempt farm and construction vehicles.

But overall, the White House environmental record is one of making life easier for business. Since early 2001, the administration has sought dozens of rule changes aimed at easing regulations on polluters, streamlining the process for obtaining permits for mining and logging, and reducing opportunities for the public to contest them.

Along the way, the administration has salted environmental agencies with representatives of the industries they regulate. Lobbyists and former executives for mining, utility and timber interests now provide government oversight of streams, air and forests.

As industry leaders often perceived former President Clinton as actively obstructing their cause, they see Bush as actively helpful.

Nowhere are the administration's environmental policies more striking and emotionally charged than in the coal fields of Appalachia, where mountaintop removal mining has been leaving scars for years.

Bulldozers scrape the trees, brush and topsoil from a mountaintop, then miners blast away the underlying rock to reach the nearest coal seam. They harvest it and blast down to the next. The leftover rock and dirt are pushed into the nearest valley, leaving a flat or rolling landscape where peaks and valleys once stood.

Compared to traditional deep-shaft mining - slow, labor-intensive, and expensive - mountaintop mining is fast and efficient.

Environmentalists say the mining companies routinely violate the Clean Water Act by dumping mining waste into streams; they want federal regulators to enforce the act. Instead, the Bush administration proposed changes that would make it easier for the coal companies to get the permits.

Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, called the administration's approach "permeated with practicality." It's impossible to strip mine for coal without causing some environmental degradation, he said, and the administration recognizes that.

"Instead of these utopian, unachievable goals that read well in the newspapers, but then put people out of work, there's been an effort to put people to work, to let America provide the energy instead of some other country, while protecting the environment."

Larry Gibson's family dug for coal for 80 years on the family homestead on Kayford Mountain, 30 miles southeast of Charleston. His grandfather was a miner, as was his dad. "I think if they knew that coal would cause as much grief as it has, they would have shoved it back into that hole," said Gibson, 58.

Now strip mines surround the area. Kayford Mountain towers 300 to 400 feet above decapitated mountains that used to tower 300 feet over it. The old coal camps at the base of the mountain, home to thousands of miners during the heyday of deep-shaft mining, are all but deserted.

The damage from mountaintop mining and valley filling is wide-ranging, according to a draft of a four-year, multi-agency analysis.

In the decade before 2002, the report said, about 403,000 acres of forest in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee were lost to mountaintop mining. A similar amount is expected to be lost over the next decade.

More than 1,200 miles of streams have been buried by valley fills, hurting animal life and water quality, including the groundwater rural residents use for drinking.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has tried to make it easier to allow mountaintop removal mining:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started allowing coal companies that wanted to fill mountain streams with the rubble from strip mining to apply for a general permit, called a Nationwide Permit 21.

Such permits are meant only for projects that cause "minimal environmental impact" and require little environmental review or opportunity for public appeal.

"Citizens have no input - they don't even know about (the permit) until it's already been approved," said Gunnoe, a 36-year-old waiter who works with the environmental group Coal River Mountain Watch. "You're just wasting your time fighting it then."

Environmentalists sued. In July, a federal judge in Charleston found that filling valleys and streams with mine waste causes more than "minimal environmental impact" and violates the U.S. Clean Water Act.

The judge ordered the Corps of Engineers to stop issuing the permits in West Virginia. Instead, the coal companies must apply for a more complex permit that requires more rigorous environmental analysis.

The administration has appealed. The president's environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, this month announced the decision to the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce at The Greenbriar resort. "The president is committed to reliable, affordable, domestically available energy," he said, with the "backbone of that on coal."

In spring 2002, the EPA and Corps of Engineers issued a rule changing the designation of leftover dirt and rock from "waste" to "fill." Waste cannot be dumped into waterways; with the right permit, fill can.

In January, the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining proposed changing a provision that prevents damaging activity within 100 feet of a stream. The change would allow mining companies to dump waste rock into streams provided they try to minimize the damage. That proposed change has not been finalized.

In an interview Friday in Washington, Connaughton said the changes were designed to make the regulations more consistent and stronger. People who live near strip mines often are unhappy with them, he acknowledged, but it's no different from local conflicts around development of hospitals, shopping centers and roads.

Connaughton and other advocates say mountaintop mining leaves swaths of flat, developable land in areas of Appalachia that have too little of it. Mined sites have been used for golf courses, a fish hatchery, housing developments and prisons. "It changes the topography, but from an ecological perspective you still end up with good, valuable, well-sustained land."

That argument does not set well with those who live nearby, especially those downstream.

Four generations of Gunnoes were raised on the little farm at the base of Big Branch Creek in Bob White, a hamlet of about 150 homes about 45 miles southwest of Charleston.

Maria Gunnoe grew up here, too. Her father and grandfather were coal miners, and two brothers work in nearby deep-shaft mines. Now she's raising her 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son in the frame home her family built for her grandfather.

Except after a big rain or during the spring thaw, Big Branch Creek was slow-flowing. "It would take a week to float a cigarette butt from one end to the other," Gunnoe said.

That changed in 2001, after mountaintop removal mining began. Now the creek's natural headwaters are filled with rock, two sedimentation ponds with an odd green tint at the base of the valley fill.

The ponds, always full of runoff from the mine site, provide a steady supply of water to the creek even during the dry season. When it rains hard, Gunnoe said, her land floods, seven times since the mining began. The worst, in June 2003, filled the barn with rock and timber from the valley upstream and wiped out her septic system. A year later her land is still littered with debris, and her well still isn't right.

"It come down there so fast it took one of my dogs right out of his collar," Gunnoe said as she petted her surviving Rottweiler, Draco. "I had him tied up by the creek so he could get fresh water. Next morning, when I got up, there was a big trench right where he was."

From her front yard, Gunnoe can see two more strip mines on a ridge across town, and blasting from the sites rocks her house. Even if she wanted to move, she figures no one would want to buy her place.

"The mountains they're ripping apart are the mountains I've played in as a child," Gunnoe said. "I grew up here. I know what it has been, and I know what it is."

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