Mountaintop Removal and the Continuation of Evil

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are out of office, but much of the damage that they and their administration accomplished continues. One of the most insidious eleventh hour rule changes made by the last administration was a change to the part of the Clean Water Act that allows mountaintop removal coal mining companies to dump their wastes anywhere that they please.

            Before the Bush change, mountaintop removal mines had to maintain buffer zones of 100 feet between streams and the material that they dumped as waste from their mines. With the change of just a few words, the Bush administration changed the idea of a stream from that of a natural area to that of a construction site and the waste from the mine to being construction material. The mine companies could then dump their waste and bury streams any which way they wanted.

            Obama and his administration want to change the wording of the regulation to resemble its original intent. It seems, however, that this small step in the right direction is being impeded by House GOP members who are, in a fairly obvious tactic of harassing the Interior Department and the administration, subpoenaing documents in relation to the planned changes to the regulation.

            Edmund Burke, the British statesman who developed the philosophical underpinnings of modern conservatism, said “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” When I think about mountaintop removal and run across an incident like this subpoena—only one of the ways that the GOP is guaranteeing that this most horrible and destructive mining practice continues—I can’t help but sometimes despair that Burke was a blind optimist who had no experience of the corruption of greed and money.