Surface mining allows cattle to graze on land previously unusable say proponents

POUND, Va. – Danny Cantrell’s cattle graze on a green pasture above his Wise County home, with a panoramic view of tree-covered mountains.

Until a few years ago, the 60 acres of steep land was worthless, even for timber, he said. Then surface mining opened it up, flattening the land and giving his cattle room to graze.

“I couldn’t do anything with it until it was mountain-topped [removed],” Cantrell said, looking over his herds of cattle and goats. “I had the choice whether to have it put back flat or to the original contour, so I took the flat land.”

Wise County officials say flat land is key to economic development, providing a place for shopping centers, medical facilities and industries other than coal.

Cantrell, a past president of the Coalfield Beef Cattle and Land Use Association, said most of the association’s 100-plus members run cattle on former surface mines.

In Wise and Dickenson counties alone, cattle now graze on 7,000 acres that previously were unusable.

“I hunted this same property when I was a boy, and I’m telling you, you had to crawl around because it was so rough, and it was just useless,” said Melvin Belcher, who has about 150 head of cattle on surface-mined land. “This property would support three or four cows before it was strip mined, and poorly at that, but now it’s a farm.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture records reveal a dramatic increase in land available to farmers in the region in the past five years. From 2002-2007, the available farmland in Wise County increased 16 percent, with livestock sales of nearly $1 million in 2007 – the most recent year for which data are available. Dickenson County shows a 22 percent increase in farmland and 2007 livestock sales of close to $500,000.

The increases are attributed to mountaintop mining, a form of surface mining that involves blasting away the ridgelines and pushing excess dirt and rock into adjacent valleys to extract coal.

The practice has become a topic of national debate, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency preparing to change the permitting process and a growing number of environmental groups decrying it as too destructive – to the environment, the landscape and the communities of the Appalachian region.

But coalfield residents recognize its value as an efficient mining technique that spurs jobs, tax revenues and a path to a more diverse economy.

“Any cattle producer, probably, in Wise County has got basically some surface-mined land that they use because that’s basically all we’ve got to use,” Cantrell said. “I don’t see how we could do anything better with some of this mountain land than mountaintop it, myself.”

Cantrell believes most of his neighbors agree.

“I don’t think too many folks in our counties are against it,” he said. “I think it’s a bunch of folks outside our counties looking in.”

One issue raised by opponents who live in the region is that mountaintop mining creates dust, but Cantrell, who farms in addition to running a local drive-in restaurant, said the dust around his home was temporary and bearable.

“If it wasn’t for mountaintop removal [mining] in our county, we wouldn’t have shopping centers or hospitals or schools built on it, and you can see how we use it for farming purposes, too, so it’s nothing but beneficial to us,” he said. “We’ve farmed my entire life, and most of it’s on the hillsides and some river bottoms, but when we had the opportunity to have the property level to where we can farm with machines, it makes our job a whole lot easier.”

A job and a home

In all six of Appalachia’s coal-producing states, the average mining wage is significantly higher than the average industrial wage, according to the National Mining Association.

In West Virginia, for example, the average miner earns more than $74,000 a year, while the average industrial worker earns just over $35,000, according to the association. In Virginia and Tennessee, the average mining job pays just less than $60,000; in Kentucky, the average is $68,000.

“Several of my men down here are putting their children through college,” Arlie Collier Jr., superintendent of the Hawk’s Nest Surface Mine in Buchanan County, said when asked what it means to have one of these jobs.

But for native Appalachians, the importance of a job goes beyond making a living: It’s a chance to remain in their beloved mountains.

“Half the population left,” recalls Starling Fleming, one of hundreds who left his native Dickenson County in search of work because, when he graduated from high school in 1961, there were no jobs.

“Home is here,” Fleming said, trying to find the words for what happens to a rural mountain culture when its people scatter to the cities. “Anytime when you’ve been raised and have roots, it’s home, and it’s hard to leave here and have to travel 10 or 12 hours to come back home and see your parents.”

No matter the years, he said, for those who left, the mountains maintained their pull.

For Fleming, it was 15 years before he returned to Southwest Virginia to stay. He found work as an equipment operator at a coal-preparation plant and then at a surface mine.

“Strip mining opened up jobs in this county,” Fleming said, “and probably, if the environmentalists have their way, a lot of the young kids who are graduating high school will have to leave again.”

Some years later, he was laid off from the mine, but by then there was enough mined land available for him to get into the cattle business. Now, he said, he runs cattle on 377 acres, all of which he bought or rented after it was stripped.

“If you can get over it with a tractor, you can improve anything,” he said. “Anything you can get over with a piece of equipment, you can grow something, you can find a place to grow something or build a house. ... It’s progress any way you look at it.”

Everywhere a mine site

In Wise County, it’s hard to throw a rock without hitting something built on a former surface mine site. They often sit along the four-lanes, sculpted benches of flat land holding shopping centers, industrial sites, medical and other facilities.

The county’s Lonesome Pine Regional Airport sits on a flattened mountaintop, alongside two new high-tech employers and a 195-acre industrial park, where an energy research center is under construction.

Every major institution in the county – from the University of Virginia’s College at Wise to the Red Onion State Prison – owes some piece of its existence to surface mining.

“We have a lot of housing developments that have taken place on surface mines; some of them are the better-to-do places too, and some of them would not have been possible if the land had not been flattened out,” said Robby Robbins, immediate past chairman of the Wise County Board of Supervisors. “We have shopping centers located in Wise County that would not be in Wise County if the area had not been surface mined.”

Bill Bledsoe, executive director of the Virginia Mining Association, lists 150 commercial, industrial and public-use sites on Southwest Virginia’s former surface mines. That’s only a partial list.

But it wasn’t always that way.

Wise County Administrator Shannon Scott said that in the 1960s, there was so little flat land that Wise County went in with Lee and Scott counties to develop an industrial park in Duffield, in hopes that Wise County job seekers could drive into Scott County to work rather than leave altogether.

“There was no place to put an industry in Wise County,” he said. “There was no place level enough to set a building.”

Bledsoe remembers how desperate the county was for flat land – and how county officials, along with the public, welcomed mountaintop mining as a means of economic development.

The U.S. Congress even recognized its importance, Bledsoe said, when it crafted the 1977 law regulating surface mining – and included specific language that allowed mountains to be left flat for development.

“If you wanted to buy anything, you had to travel. If you wanted a job, you had to travel. Most children who graduated from high school or local colleges, they were going elsewhere,” Bledsoe said. “With the opportunities now with some of the technologies that we’re developing and certainly the commercial trade, there’s much more opportunity locally than there would’ve been had there not been mountaintop-removal mining.”

According to the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority, which uses coal severance tax revenue to fund economic development, the state’s coalfield region is doing better than the state and the nation in terms of employment. VCEDA credits the relative prosperity to a combination of coal and natural gas, with a growing high-technology industry and the construction of a coal-fired power plant.

Now, Bledsoe said, “We don’t have to drive to Kingsport when we want a pair of shoes. Or Bristol.”

Will the jobs stay?

With valley fill permits effectively frozen by the EPA, mining jobs already are being affected, said elected officials, coal companies and others in Southwest Virginia.

“It’s happening as we speak,” Robbins said. “There are companies right now that are waiting to get their permits renewed, and they’re not getting renewed.”

Collier said what happens is simple: When one project is done, if there’s not another permitted mine to go to, then the miners don’t have work. The longer permits are held up, the more that will happen.

At A&G Coal Corp., dozens of workers have been laid off – and, like several companies operating in Appalachia, the company blames environmentalists and the federal government.

“We continue to have a minority group of people against mining in this area who invite people from other states to protest our permits and fight us in the permitting process,” the company wrote in a memo, according to a local newspaper, the Coalfield Progress. “These people, along with several regulatory agencies have partially succeeded at this time in slowing down our permitting process.”

Speaking at an October public hearing on the elimination of the Nationwide 21 permit, a type issued for the fill associated with surface mines, Mark Wooten, vice president of engineering for A&G, suggested that the environmentalists stay out of Appalachia.

“We miners do not try to tell them how to stop their urban sprawl,” Wooten said. “We surely do not need their help to run our lives.”

Other aspects of the economy are also starting to feel a pinch, said Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association. Bostic echoes the words of industry suppliers throughout the region: The cloud of uncertainty that surrounds permitting these days has created an “extreme reluctance to invest” in Appalachia.

“I can’t sit here today and tell you how long it will take you to get a mining permit in West Virginia today,” he said. “From the smallest deep mining operation to the biggest mountaintop removal operation, I can’t tell you how long it will take to get a permit.”

Groups opposed to mining contend that there are other options for Appalachia’s economy. They point to green jobs that could come in the form of wind turbine manufacturing and home weatherization – as well as the tourism value of the region’s scenic mountains.

“We argue that protecting the mountains offers more jobs over the long term than blowing them up,” said Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

“I think if we look at the damage we’re doing to get that small amount of coal and you look at all of the costs we’re putting on the coal communities and state taxpayers to eke out that last little bit of coal, I think at some point you just have to start asking yourself whether or not there’s a better way to provide energy and to provide jobs.”

Hitt said the region’s long-term economic future would be best served not by reshaping the mountains, but by leaving them alone.

“North Carolina has been doing fairly well with their steep mountains as far as I can tell,” said Cindy Rank, mining committee chairwoman for the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy. “So has Colorado.”

Repairing scars

“Back in the old days, we used to think of the mined areas as kind of scars on the land … and we needed to heal those lands by establishing vegetation and kind of covering up the problems that had been caused, and today we think of it very differently,” said Carl Zipper, director of the Powell River Project, where Virginia Tech joins industry in studying ways to best reclaim the land.

“Today … we think of these lands as potentially very productive lands, and we want to be able to utilize these lands for economically and environmentally valued purposes,” Zipper said.

When the surface mining law took effect in 1977, the biggest concerns were soil instability and erosion, Zipper said. Now, instead of being compacted, surface-mined land is planted in native hardwoods, using a process developed at Powell River.

Amy Gail Fannon, extension agent for agriculture and natural resources in Wise County, said regrowing a forest is nothing new. It happened after the old-growth timber was cut in the 1920s; the second-growth forest was cut decades later, when the same areas were mined in the 1970s. In some cases, the forest that replaced that is ready to be cut again.

“These trees are all saw-timber size and could be harvested,” she said, standing among pines planted in 1980 and where hardwoods now have begun to take a foothold. “We can’t put back the exact same forest, but we can grow a forest.”

Given enough time, she said, even the soil will return.

When it does, it could help to produce another form of energy: biofuel.

“It’s just going to take time,” John Fike said while examining the switch grass, panic grass and miscanthus he is studying at Powell River. Fike is an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s crop and soil environmental science department.

If researchers can find a way to help these grasses grow well here, Fike said, they could be a benefit not only for energy but for carbon credits if they become valuable under a future carbon regulatory scheme.

“These, it’ll be 50 years [to reach saw-timber size],” Fannon said while inspecting a hillside where a mix of 5-year-old hardwood trees have shown healthy gains in size. “But we’re looking at the long term.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701