Nashville News Blog

A graphic video on mountaintop removal courtesy of the LEAF environmental group.

Environmentalists are back in Nashville this year promoting their legislation to ban coal companies from blowing the tops off Tennessee mountains. Their bill goes before the Senate Environment Committee this week. They think lawmakers should want to save the scenic beauty that underpins our gazillion-dollar tourism industry. What a bunch of dreamers!

Last year, National Coal Corp. threatened to shut down in Tennessee if mountaintop mining were banned. That would have ended 234 jobs, the sum total of the company's workforce. The whole legislature never even got the chance to vote. Five rural lawmakers on a House subcommittee killed the bill. They argued the coal company's property rights trumped the public interest in preventing ecological catastrophes.

It's all the more outrageous because the legislature, at the urging of Gov. Phil Bredesen, has invested more than $100 million to acquire and protect the land the coal company would destroy. It's mostly in the 74,000-acre Sundquist Wildlife Management Area in the northern Cumberland Plateau. The state bought surface and timber rights, but mineral rights belong to National Coal.

Bredesen himself admitted he was only vaguely aware of the bill to stop mountaintop removal--and that was after proponents gave hours of alarming presentations to House and Senate committees about the ravages of this method of mining. Coal companies blast up to 1,000 feet off the tops of mountains, dumping tons of rubble into hollows and creeks. Polluted water supplies, landslides and floods threaten communities in the valleys below.

This year, there's talk that the governor might actually pay attention to this bill and do something to help it. But even if he does, its chances don't seem good. Sad to say, your typical state lawmaker isn't much worried about saving Tennessee's natural beauty.