Let it Be Known
Activist spreads news of mountaintop-removal mining, a “sin”

By LYDIA DePILLIS
Contributing Writer

Corina Lang didn’t grow up in a state where mining companies blow the tops off mountains. But after seeing the results of a practice that has devastated rural Appalachia, she decided to help in the best way she could: getting in a truck and driving across the country to tell people about it.

Federal regulators effectively stopped mountaintop-removal mining — a technique in which huge machines strip up to 10 square miles of dirt off a mountain to get at the coal underneath — in 1977, with the Clean Water Act. But in 2002, the Bush Administration changed the rules: the Act’s definition of “waste” no longer includes the trees and rubble that pour into valleys as fill, contaminating groundwater in areas that often include houses and schools. The result, as scarred landscapes and ruined communities attest, has made for both a human and an environmental disaster.

Lang is matter of fact about the destruction, but she speaks with a quiet frustration. “It looks like something out of the Lorax,” Dr. Seuss’s parable of conservation, says Lang, her weathered face disbelieving. “This is never going to come back. Never.”

Although she’s helped out environmental causes around her home in southern Illinois, Lang — who has a degree in zoology and has worked as a substitute teacher, veterinary technician, horse stable manager, and wine steward — hasn’t always made environmental activism her life. She learned about mountaintop removal at a conference organized by Heartwood, a coalition of environmental organizations east of the Mississippi. In between jobs, she decided to take the news on the road and last week swung through Seattle in the middle of a five-week odyssey around the United States with her dog and a truck covered with her anti-mining message.

She’s been giving a few presentations on the issue and distributing literature and will slow down on the highway to give drivers a long look at the websites and facts lettered on her light brown truck. But most of her outreach is done person-to-person, at gas stations and campsites, farmers’ markets and street fairs — and sometimes, as with a recent stop at the Fremont Sunday market, people already knew about the problem. She asks passerby to write to their legislators — there’s already a bill in Congress that would put a stop to the practice — as well as Oprah, who featured the issue in O magazine and could, says Lang, give it even more prominence with a segment on her TV show.

Liberal Seattle might seem like an easy place to get sympathy for an environmental catastrophe. But you don’t have to be a Democrat to get mad about fewer jobs (most of mountaintop removal is done by machine), perpetual noise, polluted streams, and barren slopes.

“It doesn’t matter what your politics are. Most people think this is wrong,” says Lang. She’s gotten a little funding for her trip, and much of her support has come from churches in the southern states affected by the practice.

“Many people there have strong faith. They believe this is a sin against God.”