A Bush administration plan that would have quietly opened national forests to strip mining - scheduled to become final shortly after election day - was thwarted in October when environmentalists succeeded in bringing the plan to public attention.
A draft of the Interior Department regulation was printed in The Federal Register in July 1991, but the plan received scant public notice until late September, when The New York Times -swayed by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and other environmental groups - published a front-page article on the proposal. The furor raised in the wake of the Times article helped persuade Congress to impose a yearlong moratorium on the plan, which was seen by many as a bonanza for the coal industry.
In 1977, Congress passed legislation protecting public lands from strip mining, with an exception for companies that held a "valid existing right" to the coal prior to the law's passage - the definition of which has been battled in court ever since. The new Interior regulation - which would have opened up to mining as much as 40 million acres of parks, preserves, and protected lands - granted mineral rights to anyone who had made a "good faith" effort to obtain a permit prior to the 1977 law's passage. The government would have had to pay those companies to relinquish their rights to the coal.
Although the coal reserves beneath the public lands are thought to be worth only $11 million, the government would have had to pay hundreds of millions to prevent mining in national parks. Many of the coal companies with mineral rights had no intention to mine in the parks because of the negative publicity that could follow, David Alberswerth, director of the public lands and energy division of the NWF, told Sojourners. But by threatening to strip mine the forest, they could force the government to buy them out. The policy, Alberswerth said, "invites coal companies to hold the government hostage for money."
The 1977 law, whose terms will still need to be legally defined, was also intended to protect private property from being mined. Decades ago, mineral rights were severed from the right to surface estates, a legal situation that especially affects the poor in the Appalachian states. In the next year, Alberswerth said, attention will need to turn to protecting land owners from mining companies asserting their right to destroy homes and property.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners. Brigitte Kerpsack assisted with research.
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