Human Rights Watch has issued a major new report, The Coal Mine Next Door: How the US Government's Deregulation of Mountaintop Removal Threatens Public Health. Coal River Mountain Watch provided input including a tour, interviews, and contacts for the lead researcher. You can read the report (with video) here, and a news report about the report, with a timeline, here. The timeline photos include a good deal of CRMW’s work, including Ed Wiley’s walk to Washington for Marsh Fork Elementary, Mountain Justice events, and sludge safety work (that’s my hand dipping sludge from the creek).
From the report’s summary:
"This report focuses on how Congress invoked the Congressional Review Act, a little-used law that gives it veto power over federal agency rules, to cancel the Stream Protection Rule, enacted after eight years of agency review, that required coal companies to monitor their impact on streams and restore them at the end of a mining project. The Trump administration subsequently canceled a half-completed federally-funded study the National Academy of Sciences was conducting on the potential health effects of surface mining in central Appalachia, even though dozens of scientific studies indicate that it poses serious threats to the health of nearby residents and destroys their environment. (Emphasis added) In doing so, the administration not only assured the continuation of a hazardous form of mining but also robbed the public of an important tool to assess its true cost."
Please chip in an automatic recurring gift of $10 per month here to support our efforts to bring the hazards of mountaintop removal back into the national spotlight. Thanks!
To end the public health threats from mountaintop removal, tell your US representative to support the ACHE Act.
The Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act will be introduced again in the new Congress, so please help make a buzz now. Whether your representative has served for a decade or is one of the newly elected crop, they need to hear from you.
Learn more about the ACHE Act and find contact information for your representative here, and follow the ACHE campaign on Facebook here and on Twitter here
Please support Coal River Mountain Watch without spending anything extra.
First, if you shop at mid-Atlantic Kroger stores, you can sign up here and select Coal River Mountain Watch as the group you want to support. Then just use your Kroger card as you normally do when you shop. We just received our quarterly notice: 36 households contributed over $270. That’s about $30 per household per year—a significant help for just a few minutes of signing up. Please enroll here today!
Second, *if* you shop through Amazon, you can support us by simply going through AmazonSmile here and select Coal River Mountain Watch. Amazon will donate one half of one percent of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases, so your holiday gift-giving gives a little more.
Whether it’s a one-time boost or a monthly sustaining gift, whether it’s $10, $100, $1,000, or some other amount, it’s very much needed and very much appreciated. You can target your gift to one of our projects:
If you’d rather donate by check, our address is
CRMW, P.O. Box 303, Naoma, WV 25140.
We can also accept donations of stock; just reply to get the details.
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Vernon Haltom
Executive Director
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