7. Vernon Haltom and Junior Walk — Coal River Mountain Watch

Many assaults on the environment happen slowly and continually, almost invisibly to us: starting a car engine, buying meat at the grocery store, throwing away a plastic straw.

Mountaintop removal is different. It is sudden and violent and intentionally, unmistakably destructive. Coal companies will blow off the tops of mountains with explosives in order to more easily and cheaply access the coal seams underneath vast swaths of forest, streams, and wildlife habitat. They destroy massive areas of wild land to produce a dirty energy that heavily pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Their use of explosives also allows them to employ many fewer miners.

Mountaintop removal was one of the big environmental stories in the media in the last couple decades. There were massive protests and a lot of bad press for the coal companies.

Now coal production is down in the US, and dramatic and shocking stories about mountaintop removal have largely disappeared from the headlines, but mountaintop removal has not gone away. As the easier-to-access coal is mined, the amount of land that must be destroyed by mountain removal to produce the same amount of coal has increased.

One report that demonstrates this is from SkyTruth, an environmental advocacy group that uses satellite imagery and remote sensing data to study environmental damage. They published a study showing that the amount of land needed to produce a unit of coal in 2015 was three times more than it had been in 1998.

Vernon Haltom and Junior Walk haven’t forgotten what’s happening in West Virginia and Appalachia, because they live it every day. They both work for Coal River Mountain Watch, the organization previously directed by Judy Bonds, the renowned mountaintop removal activist from West Virginia, who was the daughter of a coal miner and died of cancer in 2011 at age 58.

Vernon and Junior’s stories are urgent environmental ones, but they are also stories about the media and how we forget and move on.

This episode of Chrysalis is the first in the Chrysalis Projects series, which highlights the work of community-based environmental projects.

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