December 8, 2008
By Tom Zeller Jr.
Executives from the bank were given a personal view of mountaintop mining near Kayford, W. Va. (Photo: Associated Press)The Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation's most powerful environmental groups, has managed to persuade Bank of America, one of the nation's leading financial institutions, to take a measured stand against certain surface mining practices.
From an announcement released Wednesday by the bank:
Bank of America is particularly concerned about surface mining conducted through mountain top removal in locations such as central Appalachia. We therefore will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal. While we acknowledge that surface mining is economically efficient and creates jobs, it can be conducted in a way that minimizes environmental impacts in certain geographies.
At the N.R.D.C.'s Switchboard blog, Rob Perks, director of the organization's Center for Advocacy Campaigns in Washington, said the group managed to persuade Bank of America executives to visit several mountaintop mine sites in Appalachia — including Kayford Mountain, which has been laid low by mountaintop mining methods.
"NRDC decided we could be more useful engaging BofA in a different way," Mr. Parks wrote. "By talking to the bank's executives directly and explaining the great opportunity available to them as responsible corporate citizens to help end this travesty."
The Toronto Star examined the practice of mountaintop mining — and the controversy surrounding it — earlier this year:
Instead of extracting coal the old-fashioned way, by burrowing, the mountain is extracted from the coal – blown up sequentially to reveal each black seam. Everything left over – trees, soil, plants and rock – is considered "overburden." It's dumped into the valleys below, filling them up.
Some say as many as 470 mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia have been flattened this way. For the industry, it's a financial jackpot – fast, cheap and thorough. But for the mountains, and the communities nestled between them, it's war.
For their part, mining interests have long argued that mountaintop mining and its ancillary effects on the landscape, water flows and other areas of the environment are wildly overblown.
Earlier this year, in an op-ed published in The Tampa Tribune, Bill K. Caylor, the president of the Kentucky Coal Association, said of mountaintop mining practices: "Drinking water sources are not being polluted. Appalachian communities are not destroyed. E.P.A. did not rewrite rules to pollute more streams."
He continued:
[A]s all the activists who so eloquently and passionately speak of the ills of coal and mountaintop mining get up in the morning, drink their hot coffee, eat some toast, blow dry their hair while watching the morning news, attend their meetings in a room with lights and warm heat and write to their representatives on laptops and computers while calling others on their charged cellphones, please remember who provides the electricity. It is provided by coal.
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