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The Bush administration recently proposed rolling back a critical environmental law in order to legalize the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.  In this practice, coal companies use dynamite to literally blow the tops off mountains.  They then dump the thousands of tons of waste that results into nearby valleys, burying streams and obliterating aquatic life.  In West Virginia and Kentucky, mountaintop removal has buried more than 1,200 miles of streams and has devastated generations-old communities. 

This January, the Bush administration published a draft rewrite of the “buffer zone rule,” a key provision of the nation’s surface mining law that was put into place during the Regan administration.  The buffer zone rule prevents coal mining activities from disturbing land within 100 feet of streams, but the Bush administration’s new proposal would eliminate this prohibition.  Instead, the administration would allow coal companies to dump mountaintop removal waste directly into streams.  Please take action to stop the administration!  Send a letter to the Office of Surface Mining telling them to preserve the buffer zone rule.  The deadline for comments is April 7, 2004.