Another Dubious Distinction For West Virginia: One of the 15 Most Toxic Places On Earth

In his book, Combating Mountaintop Removal, author Bryan T. McNeal asserts that, though West Virginia is one of the states of the Union, the politics and much of the living conditions are the same as those in underdeveloped and what was once called “third world” countries.

From my perspective, this is an accurate assessment. There is widespread and deep poverty. A few years ago among the gifts that you could buy for folks in underdeveloped parts of the world through Heifer International were textbooks for West Virginia schoolchildren. Typically in the underdeveloped world such as a banana republic, politicians see themselves as merely the servants to dominant industries, a case in point that McNeal documents as business-as-usual for West Virginia, too.

Now another third world distinction can be added to West Virginia. Along with Chernobyl, the pollution choked cities of industrial China, and the waste-filled tributaries of the Ganges, the Appalachians of West Virginia have been declared one of the 15 most toxic places to live by the Mother Nature Network. Plain and simple it is mountaintop removal that places the Mountain State in the same company as the deforested mountains of Haiti and Dzerzhinsk, Russia, where 300,000 tons of chemical waste were improperly dumped from 1930 through 1998. The environmental news website had this to say about West Virginia:

Mountaintop removal mining is one of the world's most environmentally destructive practices, and it is most associated with coal mining in West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. Whole mountaintops are removed to get to the coal, which increases erosion and runoff thick with pollutants, poisoning streams and rivers throughout the region.

The science behind West Virginia’s inclusion on this dubious list is pretty clear. Even still, as a West Virginian, this is not a list I enjoy being on.