I can feel the momentum shifting in the fight to end mountaintop removal coal mining.
Last week, bi-partisan legislation to help halt mountaintop mining was introduced in Congress. The Clean Water Protection Act (CWPA), a bill that would prevent coal companies from legally dumpining mining waste into valley streams, already has more than 150 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.
As noted by Grist, this important legislation marks a major milestone in the growing national movement to end an environmental atrocity:
The [CWPA] was introduced originally to challenge the outrageous executive rule change by the Bush administration to redefine "fill material" in the Clean Water Act, which has allowed coal companies to blast hundreds of mountains to bits, dump millions of tons of "excess spoil" into nearby valleys, and bury hundreds of miles of streams. An estimated 1,200 miles of waterways have been destroyed by this extreme mining process.
