Environment Turn – Mining – Birth Defects

Environment Turn – Mining – Cancer

Mountaintop mining exacerbates the number of cancer cases

Environment Turn – Mining – Clearcut

Mountaintop removal mining clearcuts major forests

Huey 9 (Miranda, “Mountaintop Removal Mining” Greeniacs.com, 8 July 2009, http://www.greeniacs.com/GreeniacsArticles/Energy/Mountaintop-Removal-Mining.html) MLR
Due to the technology, power, and brute force of modern mountaintop removal mining, taking apart an entire mountain can happen as quickly as one year, yet leave lasting damage. First, any forests are clearcut, which eliminates the local wildlife and ecosystem. For more on clearcutting, check out this article. Next, explosives are used to blast up to 800 feet of mountaintop. Then, the remaining soil is shoveled and either trucked away or pushed into the mountain's valleys. After this, huge machines called draglines, which weigh up to 8 million pounds and as tall as 20 stories, dig deeply into the mountain for the coal. Although coal companies are required by law to restore the land as best they can to its original shape, many companies in fact do not actually follow through. Even when they do, the reclamation sites end up nothing like the original, since the soil often becomes acidic and infertile.

Clearcutting collapses biodiversity and exacerbates global warming

Huey 9 (Miranda, “Clearcutting” Greeniacs.com, 22 June 2009, http://www.greeniacs.com/GreeniacsArticles/Land/Clearcutting.html) MLR
Clearcutting has a major environmental impact on the water cycle. Since trees trap water and topsoil, cutting them down increases the risk of flooding. When it rains, the water and topsoil run over land down to rivers, turning them brown, creating areas of excess nutrients in the sea.1 One country that has been greatly affected by deforestation induced flooding is North Korea, where state policy for decades was to clearcut to convert forests into farmland. As major areas were cleared, rains destroyed roads, power lines, and agricultural fields. Even after they adopted a policy of reforestation in 1994, the floods have continued to devastate neighboring farmland and led to massive famines in the country.2 Another unfortunate victim of clearcutting has been the local wildlife living in the forest ecosystem.3 Clearcutting essentially demolishes entire habitats, and makes the habitats more vulnerable in the future to damage by insects, diseases, acid rain, and wind.4 In addition to wildlife victims, clearcutting can contribute to problems for ecosystems that depend on forests, like the streams and rivers which run through them. Clearcutting prevents trees from shading riverbanks, which raises the temperature of riverbanks and rivers, contributing to the extinction of some fish and amphibian species. Because the trees no longer hold down the soil, river banks increasingly erode as sediment into the water, creating excess nutrients which exacerbate the changes in the river and create problems miles away, in the sea.5 Clearcutting is also a major contributor to global warming.6 When a tree trunk gets cut down, the crown, wood debris, and vines are left in the forest to decompose, which releases carbon dioxide. To compound the problem, sawmills can only make use of 30-40% of the wood put into them, and the other 60-70% of the wood becomes sawdust and scrap, which again decomposes into carbon dioxide.7 Clearcutting releases even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than forest fires.8 To make matters worse, after clearing, the remaining scrub and brush are sometimes burnt in large burn piles, directly polluting the atmosphere with particulate matter.9

Turns warming—deforestation from MTM releases millions of tons of CO2

Kiem 7 – Wired Science reporter and freelance journalist (Brandon, “Blowing the Top Off Mountaintop Mining” Wired, September 10 2007, http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/09/mountaintop_mining?currentPage=all) MLR
To begin a mountaintop-removal operation, crews clear trees from the site. Then they dynamite to shake the peaks loose, and excavate the coal with a 2,000-ton, 20-story-high machine called a dragline. They bulldoze the debris, dumping it into nearby valleys. The practice is relatively new, dating from the mid-1980s, and it's already responsible for about half of all Appalachian coal mining. It's cheaper than old-fashioned techniques, and safer in the short run because miners don't have to tunnel underground. It also lets mining companies reach more coal than they could by digging shafts. The environmental impacts, however, are far greater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, MTR destroyed more than 1,200 miles of Appalachia's streams and 7 percent of its forests between 1985 and 2001. Approximately 800 square miles of mountains were leveled. According to the EPA, waste from MTR will bury another 1,000 miles of streams in the next decade. Mulhern says the effects are also felt downstream. "Headwater streams are where life is born, creating the nutrients and energy that flow downstream," she says. "All that is lost when you fill the headwaters and replace them with storm drains." The EPA estimates that at least 2,300 square miles of forest -- an area the size of Delaware -- will be lost by 2010. In the past, cleared mountaintops have been vegetatively reclaimed by grass and shrubs rather than the region's characteristic hardwood forests. "Appalachia is America's own little miniature rain forest," says Bonds. "It's the world's most diverse temperate hardwood forest. The Appalachian forests are the carbon sinks and lungs of the East Coast." According to a rough estimate by West Virginia University bio-geochemist William Peterjohn, the deforestation could add as much as 138 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- and that's not even counting the even-larger CO2 emissions from burning the coal.

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