EARTH - A Turning Point for Mountaintop Removal Coal?

I first wrote about mountaintop removal mining - the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to excavate coal - about four years ago, and the shock of the reporting is still with me. On one of my first visits to a mountaintop site in West Virginia, I stood on the edge of a vast area under excavation. A mountainside had been rendered like a side of beef. You could spy thin, darker layers of coal amid the thicker shale. Trucks crawled over the makeshift roads, carting boulders to dump in a nearby valley. Suddenly, a huge demolition blast went off; the earth shook under my feet. As a companion and I walked away, noxious-smelling yellow smoke enveloped us. In short: you can't truly understand the total war-like devastation that this does to mountains without being there. And for years, Appalachian communities and environmental groups have waged legal warfare to try to stop the coal companies, with only spotty success.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2012/11/30/a-turning-point-for-mountaintop-removal-coal/