NEWS

Judge: Bill won't shield coal from water quality suits- Charleston Gazette.

  • Water pollution isn't adequately regulated

    Why are West Virginia’s streams are so polluted that less than a quarter of them can support their designated uses — such as recreation, providing drinking water, or supporting aquatic life? The passage and implementation of Senate Bill 562 is yet another case of state regulators and lawmakers capitulating to a polluting industry rather than enforcing laws to protect the environment. Read more.

  • Absentee ownership holds hurts Appalachia

    No other single factor has done more to hold Appalachia back economically than the huge percentage of land in the region owned by absentee landholding companies. In 1974, Tom Miller, a reporter for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, wrote a striking series entitled, “Who Owns West Virginia?” Through painstaking research, Miller found that two-thirds of the state was owned by large, absentee land-holding companies. Read more.

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    See if an area near you is threatened by mountaintop removal mining. Read more.

Protecting the natural resources of Central Appalachia

Formerly the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, Appalachian Mountain
Advocates is a nonprofit environmental law and policy organization founded in 2001. We believe there is no more environmentally destructive practice than mountaintop removal mining occurring anywhere in the United States, and we will not rest until we have stopped it.

We have had unprecedented success in enforcing the Clean Water Act and other environmental statutes against coal mining operators. Our litigation has raised the costs of mountaintop removal mining, making less destructive forms of energy production more competitive. The legal theories that we have developed and implemented have fundamentally changed coal mining and environmental regulation in the region. Our work has been the catalyst for much of the grassroots opposition to mountaintop removal mining.