Mountaintop Mining

A horrifying article that details, in excruciating detail, the horrors of mountaintop mining. It presents the awful floods in Appalachia and the corrupt manner in which the laws of the land were changed to allow this abomination. Money quote (although you really need to click through to see the pictures):

It is hard to overstate how destructive and enormous this practice is, how radically you alter the landscape when you dynamite and blast a hill into rubble and then dump it into the neighboring streambed. ...
Since the Clean Water Act regulated the extent to which it was legal to pollute streams and rivers, the law had to be changed to make it legal to destroy them forever by burying them with entire mountains — in gravel form — but the government agencies in charge of that sort of thing were happy to make the change. ...
After they’ve flattened the land, they are required by law to “reclaim” the land, but at best, “reclamation” means a micro-layer of just enough top soil to support some sparse grass (see how the rock still peaks through the green above?). And this means that where there once was lush vegetation and crooked streambeds soaking up rainfall, you now have rocky basins that channel it down into the floodplain where people live.

Stop the madness.