"They don't realize that that's where they get their electricity from"

This is a place where "moving mountains" is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountains off their pedestals to get the kind of coal that Washington needs.

It happened here, on a ridgeline called Sugar Tree Mountain, where locals once hunted for squirrels and puckery-sour grapes. Then the top was scraped off to expose the black seams in its innards, leaving a rock-strewn plateau.

"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."

Though this isolated mine is more than 400 miles from Washington, the two places share a powerful connection: coal. The D.C. region, with its need for electricity skyrocketing, has been burning steadily more coal, buying almost a third of its supply from this part of Appalachia.

And that, analysts and environmentalists said, means that Washington's air conditioners and iPods have helped drive the region's "mountaintop" mining.

That's right, let's emphasize and slightly modify that last comment: all of our air conditioners, iPods, and other electricity-sucking appliances are directly causing vast environmental destruction in Appalachia -- West Virginia, Southwestern Virginia, etc.  Here's what allows you to flick on that switch:

Elsewhere, neighbors complain about flash floods bursting out of denuded mine sites and about explosions that can disrupt the water flowing from wells. "It starts off looking like orange juice, and then it starts looking like chili, and then you don't have none," said Barbara Chafin of Mingo County, W.Va.

Biologists say the effects can fall even harder on the environment, suffocating the life in Appalachian streams.

"It destroys the streams. I mean, it eradicates them. It's dead. It's gone," said Margaret Palmer, head of the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

Why do we let the coal companies do this to the environment?  Why don't we take drastic efforts to conserve energy and develop alternatives to mountaintop removal coal-fired power?  In large part, it's because people simply don't think about where they get their power from.  And, to the extent that the think they know, it's from the insidious and misleading ads paid for primarily by Dominion Power -- ads which claim that Dominion is encouraging energy conservation (when in fact the company's efforts in this area are a pathetic joke) and even wind power (ditto to the last parenthetical comment).  

At some point, however, lack of knowledge about this situation becomes willful ignorance.  I mean, it's not like it's a big secret or anything.  Still, Dominion and the coal companies count on our ignorance, on our lack of action, and on our silence to keep their businesses humming along their merry, mountaintop-removing ways.  The last few lines of the Washington Post article pretty much sums it all up:

As he drove away, the coal truck driver noted that Gibson was accompanied by another car, belonging to a Post photographer, with Maryland license plates.

The driver parted with a reminder that the mines and the Washington area are connected.

"They don't realize that that's where they get their electricity from," the driver said over the radio. "God gave us coal to mine, then, didn't He?"

Well, it's time we all start realizing that we're connected, that no man (or woman) is an island, and that every action we take (or fail to take) has repercussions.  Oh yeah, and as the police officer says, ignorance is no excuse.

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