Moving Mountains Just Got Harder

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Moving mountains may not sound so bad until, that is, you realize you have to put them somewhere. So say detractors of mountaintop removal, a commonly practiced technique for mining coal in the Appalachian Mountains.

Between 1985 and 2001, a federal study estimated that more than 1,200 miles of streams in the Appalachians were buried or severely impacted as a result of mountain top removal, and environmentalists have long decried the Army Corps of Engineers for okaying ditches that have been constructed to replace the waterways—an ecological tradeoff on par with ordering free-range Cornish game hen and getting chicken McNuggets.

On Friday, a District Court Judge in West Virginia agreed, rescinding permits at four state mines, and by ruling that the Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental impact assessments fail to meet the requirements of Clean Water Act. The judge called [PDF] portions of the Corps’ assessments “no more than lip service,” pointing out that despite the Corps’ claim that ditches could be connected and made to perform the same function as destroyed streams, the Corps’ own witnesses did “not know of any successful stream creation projects in the Appalachian region.”

Environmental attorney Steve Roady, with Earthjustice, sees the court’s decision as a major victory.

“The federal government has been illegally issuing such permits…The Corps has had every opportunity to prove its claim that mountaintop removal mining can be done without destroying entire watersheds and landscapes.”

And until it does, the court’s ruling could impact as many as 60 new coal mines pending permits in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

—Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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