Mountain Blog

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Big stories the mainstream news media ignored, blacked out, or underreported over the past year, according to Project Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State University:

Every year project researchers scour the media looking for news that never really made the news, publishing the results in a book, this year titled Censored 2006. Of course, as Project Censored staffers painstakingly explain every year, their "censored" stories aren't literally censored, per se. Most can be found on the Internet, if you know where to look. And some have even received some ink in the mainstream press. "Censorship," explains project director Peter Phillips, "is any interference with the free flow of information in society." The stories highlighted by Project Censored simply haven't received the kind of attention they warrant, and therefore haven't made it into the greater public consciousness.

Number 10 on the list:

10. Mountaintop removal threatens ecosystem and economy

On Aug. 15 environmental activists created a human blockade by locking themselves to drilling equipment, obstructing the National Coal Corp.'s access to a strip mine in the Appalachian mountains 40 miles north of Knoxville. It was just the latest in a protracted campaign that environmentalists say has national implications but that's been ignored by the media outside the immediate area.

Under contention is a technique wherein entire mountaintops are removed using explosives to access the coal underneath – a practice that is nothing short of devastating for the local ecosystem, but which could become much more widespread.

As it stands, 93 new coal plants are in the works nationwide, according to Project Censored's findings. "Areas incredibly rich in biodiversity are being turned into the biological equivalent of parking lots," wrote John Conner of the Katúah branch of Earth First! – which has been throwing all its energies into direct action campaigns to block the project – in Censored 2006. "It is the final solution for 200-million-year-old mountains."

Source: "See You in the Mountains: Katúah Earth First! Confronts Mountaintop Removal," John Conner, Earth First!, November-December, 2004.

posted by Dave Peyton @ 9:59 PM