Like “Climate Change” – the two words are very ordinary, but then also impossibly scary. Without emotion or “color” – they are simple and simply unbelievable. Mountaintop removal is so uncomfortable that it is sometimes shortened to MTR, like a company or the initials of a President. That is a mistake. We should always lumber through the entire phrase, mountaintop removal.

In fact, “Mountaintop Removal” – let’s put it in caps from now on. It is our banner. The phrase was first mouthed, listened to and insistently repeated by the ordinary people who witnessed the abomination. They stared and they covered their children’s eyes and they said these words.

Mountaintop Removal is created from the simple fact of the matter. It is the observation by the people who live in the valleys below the explosions, gigantic bulldozers, conveyor belts zig-zagging down the valleys, lakes of slurry laced with carcinogenic chemicals… The victims wrote the words and it stuck. Most language doesn’t come this way anymore. It doesn’t come unedited this way, straight from people. Corporate marketing creates most of our words for us, so that we’ll use their words to buy things.

Mountaintop Removal is ungreenwashable. All the cancerous deaths, poisoned streams, CO-2 emisions from the dirty coal, shit-colored tap-water – all that devastation is felt within the irreducible two words. The word is an honest, obscene monument. It is how the summits of rock live on in our memory. The heights that the coal companies thought would vanish and not be missed – the high places are refusing to fall into the railroad cars. They rise in the blue sky because they are surrounded by people from the mountains who love the mountains and believe in them as the horizon of life, like the memory of the shape and feel of the face of a dead mother.

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