The Horrors of Hobet Coal Mine

            Hello!  If you are reading this, hopefully you are interested in learning more about the environmentally-damaging impacts of mountaintop removal!

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            This past semester, I enrolled in an Introduction of Appalachian Studies class.  I had no idea what to expect of it, but was pleasantly surprised at what I learned.  A reoccurring, important theme of the class (and in Appalachia) is coal.  My interest in the subject peaked when we talked extensively about coal mining. 

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            Coal mining is not an environmentally-friendly way of fueling our energy needs.  As an environmental science major, I am very passionate about the environment and its preservation.  I hope to go to law school to become an environmental lawyer after I finish my undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech.  With that being said, I personally am very against mountaintop removal.  Mountaintop removal is a type of surface coal mining in which coal seams are extracted from a mountain (usually at the summit) via removal of the land above the seams.  This type of coal mining is very intensive on the surrounding land and water.  

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           Mountaintop removal severely impacts nearby ecosystems, both terrestrial and aquatic.  Mountaintop mining directly causes deforestation, loss of biodiversity, loss of topographic succession, habitat fragmentation, degradation of healthy headwaters, and contamination of downstream surface waters, just to name a few.  The mining techniques employed in Hobet Coal Mine in Boone County, West Virginia are, unfortunately, a perfect example of mountaintop removal.

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            To complete this project, I employed several different resources.  I read through several scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, and chose three that really stuck out to me.  These articles are: “The Overlooked Terrestrial Impacts of Mountaintop Mining” by James Wickham, Petra Bohall Wood, Matthew C. Nicholson, William Jenkins, Daniel Druckenbrod, Glenn W. Suter, Michael P. Stager, Christine Mazzarella, Walter Galloway, and John Amos; “The Effects of Mountaintop Mines and Valley Fills on Aquatic Ecosystems of the Central Appalachian Coalfields” by the United States Environmental Protection Agency; and “”Mountaintop Mining, West Virginia” by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Rebecca Lindsey.  I also read an investigative article titled “How Big Coal summoned Wall Street and faced a whirlwind” by Reuter’s journalist Patrick Rucker.  I also watched a documentary entitled “The Last Mountain” that was directed by Bill Haney.