Strip-mining foes and Tenn. agencies ask feds to apply Endangered Species Act to mining permits

Foes of strip mining for coal and some Tennessee regulators are invoking the federal Endangered Species Act in an effort to protect the Clinch River, which rises in the coal-laden hills of southwest Virginia and drains a wide swath of East Tennessee. Their petition also mentions the Powell River, a Clinch tributary at the edge of the Tennessee River watershed, and the northward-flowing Big South Fork of the Cumberland River in Tennessee and Kentucky. (Encarta map shows Clinch in yellow; Powell is blue line northwest of it)

Citing damage from mountaintop-removal strip mines, the environmentalists and the Tennessee officials are asking the U.S. Office of Surface Mining and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider the service's 1996 opinion that the act didn't stand in the way of strip-mine permits as long as mines obeyed laws.

"Current regulations, the petitioners say, are putting the most sensitive and biodiverse watersheds in two states -- some of the most biodiverse watersheds in the world -- at risk," The Roanoke Times reports. Virginia Tech wildlife professor Richard Neves told reporter Tim Thornton that the Clinch has "the highest concentration of endangered species of anywhere in the United States."

"There's evidence mounting to the harm to water quality and other resources from mountaintop removal," Cat McCue, communications manager for the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Thornton, who writes: "The SELC and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency are petitioning on behalf of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, the World Wildlife Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Parks Conservation Association." (Read more)

The groups want the service to "consider permit-by-permit studies of mining’s possible impacts on endangered species and their habitat," reports Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette. (Read more)