12th Annual Category Winner – Our Ecological Footprint. A lone cemetery is now and island in the sky. Many individual graves in West Virginia have been pushed down the mountain along with the overburden. The cemetery now sits alone on a knoll amidst the destruction of open mines and a couple of catchment basins with thin liners.
A typical aerial view while flying over the West Virginia mountains. The top soil gets pushed down into the valleys, covering streams, then the land is blasted over and over to get to the coal seams. The remaining coal industry “top soil” that they are supposed to replace gets sprayed with Hydro-Seed and is more reminiscent to Rocky Mountain talus slopes and scree fields.
Mountaintop Removal coal extraction leads to poisoned water and high cancer rates in some of these rural communities. Photograph Copyright Lynn Willis, All Rights Reserved.