Mountaintop Removal Linked to Health Hazards Again

It’s been pretty well established that mountaintop removal is bad for the health of the folks who live around the mines. Mountaintop mining kicks up a lot of dust, and many of the ailments that afflict those who live close to the mines is directly related to inhaling coal dust or silica associated with the mines.

            Well, it turns out that recent research indicates that the ultrafine dust from the mines can make people sick, too. This is dust so small that you cannot see it. It is so small that it can pass through the incredibly small holes in the cell walls of living tissue. Once the dust enters the cell through the cell wall, inflammation occurs, and inflammation can lead to a number of ailments.

            Lab research backs this up. In one case, rats exposed to dust composed of titanium oxide, the white pigment in paint, suffered no ill effect. If the titanium oxide dust was very, very small, the rats died.

This mine can make you very sick.

If these particles are so small they can pass through the pores of cells, they are too small to be stopped by dust masks or other prophylactic devices. On the other hand, getting rid of these ultrafine dust particles in Appalachia is pretty simple. End mountaintop removal.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia: Calculating the Psychological Costs of Mountaintop Removal

When I ran across this study this morning, I thought, “Well, duh. You needed a scientific study to find this out?” Michael Hendryx, who is at the School of Public Health at Indiana University but spearheaded research into the health effects that mountaintop removal while he was at West Virginia University, and Kestral A. Innes-Wimsatt, a researcher at WVU, looked into the prevalence of depression among those who live among the holocaust of mountaintop mining. Big surprise, removing the mountains for the coal inside leaves folks depressed.

            Overall, around seven percent of the U.S. population suffers some form of depression. Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt found that around 10 percent of residents in the coalfields of Appalachia suffer from depression and that around 17 percent of folks who live around mountaintop mines have some form of depression. Even after adjusting for other factors that might affect a person’s susceptibility to depression, such as race and poverty, Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt still found that mountaintop removal coal mining affected the mental well being of the people who live around the mines. From their research the authors conclude:

The odds of a score indicative of risk for major depression were 40% higher in MTR areas compared to non- mining areas after statistical adjustment for other risks. After control for covariates, the risk of major depression was statistically elevated only in the MTR areas and not in the areas where other forms of mining were practiced, compared to the non-mining referent.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia was published in the online peer-reviewed journal Ecopsychology.  Explaining their findings, the authors suggest that the mountaintop removal depression might be due to solistalgia, a condition of distress during periods of environmental change. This distress is most acute for people who feel particular connections to their environments, as many folks in Appalachia, who can trace their ancestors back for generations, feel.

            Some of the factors associated with depression, such as obesity, binge drinking, smoking, and poverty were adjusted for in this research. In the real world it is difficult to actually separate all this from mountaintop removal. As mountaintop removal reduces the amount of jobs and the economic well being of a community, people feel abandoned by friends and family as they move away. They also feel trapped into an economic system that offers them little chance for secure employment. All of these things depress people, and all of them are caused by mountaintop removal. What I’m suggesting here is that the scientific controls that Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt imposed on their research, which researchers have to do to maintain scientific integrity, actually winds up underestimating the amount of mental distress caused by the mountaintop mines.

A cemetery left amid the destruction of mountaintop removal. Would you feel good living around this?

            

Good News For the Mountains: The EPA Can Revoke the Spruce Mine Permit

This is some great news! The U.S. District Court of Appeals has ruled that the EPA can withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the mountaintop removal Spruce Mine No. 1. If there were to be any mine to get the thumbs down from the EPA, it should be this one, which would have been the largest such operation ever in West Virginia.

            More and more scientific evidence has been gathered showing a link between mountaintop removal and cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. And today the National Commission on the Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining, an independent group of physicians and scientists, has published a report that summarizes the findings of studies on the health effects of mountaintop removal and calls for congressional action that would place a moratorium on all mountaintop mining “until such time as health studies have been conducted that provide a clearer understanding of the associations between adverse health impacts, notably adverse reproductive outcomes, and MTR mining.” The paper, The Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining and sponsored by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, recommends that the funding for further health studies should come from the corporations that have profited from mountaintop mining.