Green Options

Characterizing it as “legally defective”, Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took dead aim at the last minute attempt by the Bush administration allowing mining operations to fill valley streams with waste rock from “mountaintop removal” methods if it proved “too expensive” to find an alternative.

Vinegar can clean windows, kill weeds, and even cure the common cold.  Now a team of scientists at the University of Leeds is studying how vinegar could clean up sites contaminated by chromium compounds discharged from old textile factories, smelters, and tanneries.  As a source of chromium contamination, coal mining could also benefit from a dose of vinegar - or would that really make a difference?

Two groups that oppose mountaintop removal coal mining have been told they are not welcome to hold their upcoming meetings at a former Boy Scout camp deep in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky — despite both having held events there without incident in the past.

Jim Scheff of Kentucky Heartwood said his group called last May to reserve Camp Blanton for a gathering called the Heartwood Forest Council, to be held Memorial Day weekend. Another group, Mountain Justice, booked the camp for the days leading up to the holiday weekend.

Both groups found out just two weeks ago that their reservations were suddenly canceled.

Board member and attorney for the trust that operates the camp, Sidney Douglass told the Lexington Herald-Tribune that several board members have ties to the coal industry and “board members didn’t want to get the camp involved in the kind of controversies that they’re involved in.”