Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

In parts of Appalachia, it's getting harder to Find the River, and it's going to get harder still, thanks to a parting gift from the Bush administration. A proposed change to mountaintop coal mining rules to allow dumping of rubble in streams has received a lot of coverage in the last few weeks, and now it's a done deal. Tuesday, the EPA announced it had agreed to the change. This comes in spite of the agency's own acknowledgement, in a study released last summer, that waste from mountaintop coal mining was "strongly related to downstream biological impairment."

I'm not going to add much to the stream of ink, or electrons, already unleashed about this. But I found one graf from this Washington Post article quite revealing about the thinking behind these decisions:

Coal industry and administration officials said many of the streams that will be covered in mine waste are small or ephemeral. "You're not talking about big, ecologically valuable areas," the senior Bush official said. "This will not be a negative environmental impact."

So if a piece of water ain't big...if you can't see rafts of waterfowl in a given spot...if you can't drop your line in and pull out a mess of eater catfish...it's nothing much.

The locals have more sense:

Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy said some of the waterways that have been lost are significant even if they are not major rivers.

"With this rule change, the outgoing Bush administration is poised to eliminate forever more of our headwater streams -- the very lifeblood of our mountains and the source of healthy water resources that future generations will depend upon[.]"

Perhaps an Obama EPA could mandate a short course in stream ecology for all officials involved with water management. Better yet, seek applicants who have fished brook trout. Those folks would know that headwaters aren't just significant, but sacred.