Environmental Wasteland in Gore's Backyard

by Alexander Cockburn

Yet now, to the rage of many of his fellow Tennesseans, Gore preserves a sphinx-like public silence as the park teeters on the verge of becoming an environmental wasteland, with acid-laced streams deadly to the trout which draw anglers from across the country and the neighboring hillsides hideously scarred.

The threat comes in the form of strip mining for high sulfur coal, the very kind that Gore most deplored when extracted in countries far away, like China. Adjacent to the southern border of the Falls Creek Falls state park are 120,000 acres owned by the Huber Land Company, which is in the process of clear-cutting the deciduous timber -- maple, beech, oak -- and which has leased the mining rights, now in the hands of Skyline Coal, which plans to gouge the coal out of the hillside in thousand-acre scoops, a hundred feet deep.

You don't have to go far to see what lies in store for the watershed if Skyline Coal gets its way. For nine years the company has stripping the same coal seam the other side of the watershed . Local critics have pointed to acid and kindred toxic run-off into streams. Homeowners show cracked foundations they say are consequent on the company's blasting. Deer hunters and mushroom gatherers have joined in lamenting the destruction of habitat.

Tennessee is unique among the fifty states by dint of being the only one where the federal government has the primary responsibility for permitting strip mines, a regulatory function it assumed when it decreed a decade ago that the state of Tennessee was incompetent to handle this function. But these days the roles are strangely reversed. The feds, including Tennessee's most prominent native son, Al Gore, are conniving at the most abusive of all forms of strip mining. Meanwhile the state's governor, a conservative Republican named Don Sundquist, is foremost among the state park's defenders and has lashed out furiously at the federal Office of Surface Mining, one of the prime villains in this story.

In 1995 a group of Tennessee working people in the area, many of them blue-collar and remote from any knee-jerk designation as "green zealots," formed Save Our Cumberland Mountains. Foremost in their concerns was the sudden downswing of the local economy, based on garment factories, which has been ravaged by the North American Free Trade Agreement, hotly supported by Gore. NAFTA hastened the flight of these garment firms to Mexico. For economic salvation the residents look to the tourist industry, itself heavily dependent on the Falls Creek Falls state park.

The group petitioned the Office of Surface Mining to declare the 80,000 acre watershed feeding the park unsuitable for strip mining using a 1976 conservation law for this purpose. On the face of it the group had a seemingly copybook case but, in May of 1998 the Office of Surface Mining issued a draft environmental impact statement where it refused to ban strip mining and said it would consider the matter only in the same incremental portions as Skyline Coal was proposing to extract. In other words this is to be a piecemeal surrender to strip mining, far harder and more expensive to combat that any one overall decision. Nor will there be any review of the cumulative effects of the strip mining.

Historically, the Office of Surface Mining has always been an accomplice of the coal companies. But there were those on the greener side of the political fence who raised a cheer when a new chief was installed, in the form of Kathy Karpan. She's a political protege of Al Gore and has hopes of one day becoming Secretary of the Interior.

Those looking for clues to Al Gore's stance on the burning environmental issue in Tennessee today are finding them in not only the refusal of the vice president to make any public utterance on the matter, but also in the string of pro-coal rulings issued by Karpan. The most recent and perhaps most egregious of these has been Karpan's go-ahead to Skyline Coal to strip-mine a site within 200 feet of the disputed watershed and traversed by another famous Tennessee historical and cultural monument, the Trail of Tears, along which the U.S. Army drove the Cherokee 160 years ago.

How come Gore, no fool, is making so many enemies in his own state on an issue where the rights and wrongs are so self-evident? Here comes the final pointer to his political character. Like Bruce Babbitt, Karpan's boss at the Interior Department, Gore is terrified of the corporate "takings" argument. Inhibition of Skyline Coal's "right" to strip-mine would constitute a "takings", i.e., an affront to the sacred rights of property, before which all other rights -- to breath clean air, drink clean water, enjoy public assets, must bow down in homage. Gore duly bows in homage, an so right now things right now look very bad for Tennessee's finest park and for the 5,000 people who live around it.