The Bush administration is moving to revamp a rule protecting streams that Appalachian environmentalists view as their best weapon for fighting the strip-mining technique of mountaintop removal. Over the past six years, environmental groups have used the rule, which restricts mining within feet of a stream, to block or slow the issuing of state permits for mountaintop removal. Strip mining involves dynamiting away mountaintops to expose seams of low-sulfur coal, then dumping the leftover rubble into nearby valleys and streams. Some of those valley fills, as they are known, are hundreds of feet deep and several miles long, making them among the largest man-made earthen structures in the East.

He looks out over his land: 43 acres, surrounded on three sides by Perry State Forest, with a small creek running through it. If they ruin all that, how am I going to live? Residents of rural Perry County, about an hour southeast of Columbus, say life there is peaceful in large part because of their neighbor: the 4,acre Perry State Forest. But they worry the forest and their livelihoods may soon be disturbed.

Category By country. Surface mining , including strip mining , open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining , is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit the overburden are removed, in contrast to underground mining , in which the overlying rock is left in place, and the mineral is removed through shafts or tunnels. Surface mining began in the midth century [2] [ dubious — discuss ] and is practiced throughout the world, although the majority of surface coal mining occurs in North America. In most forms of surface mining, heavy equipment, such as earthmovers , first remove the overburden. Next, large machines, such as dragline excavators or bucket wheel excavators , extract the mineral.

This post is by activist Jeff Lucas. Roughly 1 mile north of Rocky Branch is the Cottage Grove strip mine. Peabody has been applying for permits to expand this mine for over a year.