Not easy to mitigate environmental damage | Science
From a Science policy forum, "Mountaintop Mining Consequences" (sub), that is gaining a lot of attention.
There has been a global, 30-year increase in surface mining, which is now the dominant driver of land-use change in the central Appalachian ecoregion of the United States. ...
The U.S. Clean Water Act and its implementing regulations state that burying streams with materials discharged from mining should be avoided. Mitigation must render nonsignificant the impacts that mining activities have on the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act imposes requirements to minimize impacts on the land and on natural channels, such as requiring that water discharged from mines will not degrade stream water quality below established standards. ...
Current mitigation strategies are meant to compensate for lost stream habitat and functions but do not; water-quality degradation caused by mining activities is neither prevented nor corrected during reclamation or mitigation.
Chris Mooney's "When Scientists Speak Out" discusses the communications outreach that accompanied the report. (Hat tip: P+T.)
Co-authors of the Science study Margaret Parker, Michael Hendryx, and William Schlesinger speak at the National Press Club in a news report on YouTube.
