From Ananda Hirsch
Sierra ClubProgram Assistant
Environmental Quality Program

Dear Water Activists,

On January 7, 2004, the Bush administration announced its plan to eliminate
a 20-year-old policy that says land within 100 feet of a stream cannot be
disturbed by mining activity unless a company can prove that the work will
not affect the stream's water quality and quantity.  The policy, known as
the "buffer zone" rule is a long-standing environmental safeguard which has
helped protect coalfield communities and the environment for the past two
decades.  The proposed change is another gift from the Bush administration
to companies engaged in mountaintop removal mining and will make it even
easier for mining companies to destroy streams.
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Below is an editorial from the NY Times on the subject.

Decapitating Appalachia
Published: January 13, 2004

Environmental protection under the Bush administration often seems to refer
to the political environment and not the stewardship of the nation's
precious resources.

In the latest attack on existing safeguards, the Interior Department is
quietly gutting yet another legal safeguard against the wholesale pollution
and burial of streams in Appalachia by the strip-mining industry.

In 2002, the administration essentially repealed a longstanding provision of
the
Clean Water Act prohibiting the dumping of mining wastes in streams. Now,
under
what is advertised as a "clarification" of the law governing surface mining,
the
administration is eliminating a ban dating from the Reagan era against
mining
activity within 100 feet of a stream.

Taken together, these two rollbacks can only encourage and accelerate the
horrific process called mountaintop removal, which has already buried about
1,200
miles of Appalachia's vital streams under mammoth piles of bulldozed waste.
This
serial decapitation of the coal-rich hills has long been a matter of furious
conflict between the mining industry and the residents and environmentalists
defending the life and beauty of the Appalachian hollows. Hundreds of square
miles of mountaintops have been dynamited away, and dozens of communities
bought
out and buried.

The new regulation changes a standing prohibition against mining within 100
feet
of a stream if it will degrade water quality. In the future, mining
companies
will be required to respect the buffer zone merely "to the extent
practicable."
This is an open invitation to industry to ignore a rule that, as a practical
matter, has been routinely abused as regulators looked the other way.

Anyone who has visited the ravaged heart of Appalachia can see that hundreds
of
streams have been snuffed from the landscape, not merely degraded.
Industry's
ballyhooed reclamation projects stand out as Potemkin oases along the
scarred
horizon. Meanwhile, a federal study uncovered by a Freedom of Information
Act
initiative warns of more devastation to come. It may be a coincidence that
the
new rule comes as Republican fund-raisers are priming the campaign donation
pump.
But the "clarification" brazenly certifies the protection of Big Coal at the
expense of the environment.

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