JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of mountaintop removal.

This week, I have been in Washington D.C. for the Week in Washington which is a week of lobbying at Congress for the Clean Water Protection Act [house version] and the Appalachia Restoration Action [senate version].  The legislation would essentially outlaw mountaintop removal.

Amidst all the congressional visits, we worked with some coalfield residents to deliver a message to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

It is time to abolish mountaintop removal mining, not regulate it.

That is the fervent message being spread from community to community, and state to state, now that scores of ANFO explosive-packing mountaintop removal permits stand at the doors of the Army Corps of Engineers, ready to be issued after the recent 4th Circuit Court ruling.

Three million pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives are being detonated daily in Appalachia.

"Give me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will rally about it the brave men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust, and set her free."

-- George Washington, 1779

Things never stop happening around coal and Appalachia.
Wise County Va, Coal River Mountain, Harriman Tn, Meigs Oh and many other places are where that the coal companies, the utility companies, bankers and politicians have determined to be environmental sacrifice zones.

Faced with an impending proposal to stripmine over 6,600 acres, local residents have come up with a better idea.

If Senator Barack Obama ever needs a living symbol of change we can believe in, and a hopeful way to transcend the dirty politics of our failed energy policies, he should go and see the future of renewable energy in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia.

Yes, renewable energy in Appalachia.

Appalachian Mountain defense and anti-coal direct action is definitely on the rise in Appalachia and the southeast.

"President Bush has signed a $162 billion war supplemental that will fund the wars in Iraq and Ahghanistan into 2009."

A report put out in October of 2005 by the Renewable Energy Policy Project, the Apollo Alliance and Policy Matters Ohio puts the $162 billion mentioned in the above headline into some perspective.

Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.

A man defending his home is worth 10 invaders.

There is no place like home.

Home is home, be it ever so humble. These phrases may have graced our ears 3,592 times, but ponderings on the meaning of home mean a little bit more to those of us in Appalachia these days.

Mountain Mondays will be a weekly celebration of our mountain home in Appalachia.

You see, in many ways, Appalachia isn't what it used to be. We have lost more than 1 million acres of land, along with 1000+ of miles of our once pristine streams, and 90% of our traditional coal jobs to mountaintop removal mining. This barbaric practice has reduced much of our home to rubble, and further damaged our perennially struggling local economies. The jobs are gone. The people are leaving. The water is toxic. And they are blowing up the mountains themselves.

But the face of Appalachian resistance to "Big Coal" is changing...

Glenn Hurowitz has a great piece on the Virginia Air Resources Board's imminent decision on  whether or not they will permit Dominion Power to build a dirty, coal-fired power plant.