Another excellent resource coming from the iLoveMountains.org folks proves what they've been saying all along--it ain't happening. Their project, called Reclamation FAIL, compiles information from NRDC about how just a small fraction of 500 Appalachian ridges leveled thus have been reclaimed. According to their study of 410 of those ridges:
- 366 (89.3%) had no form of verifiable post-mining economic reclamation excluding forestry and pasture
- 26 (6.3% of total) yield some form of verifiable post-mining economic development
- Only about 4% of mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia, where the vast majority of this mining is occurring, had any post-mining economic activity.
- Virginia had the highest proportion of economic activity on its reclaimed mountaintop removal sites at 20%.
- Tennessee, which has relatively little mountaintop removal compared to the other three states, had no economic activity on the 6 sites examined in that state.
- Overall, economic activity occurs on just 6% to 11% of all reclaimed mountaintop removal sites surveyed as part of this analysis.
Read more at The Huffington Post
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