Obama, Clinton Don't Dare Challenge King Coal's Unspeakable Environmental Violence. London Independent, May 20, 2008. "The road slicing through the thickly forested hills of eastern Kentucky used to be called the Daniel Boone Parkway... named for the controversial American folk hero... That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices as 'one of the greatest human rights and environmental tragedies in America's recent history'. Daniel Boone's road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of the Kentucky coal industry's closest friends in Washington... It passes through a mountain range older than the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the Amazon basin in its biodiversity. But the canopy of trees which lines the parkway as it rises from the bluegrass horse country to the mountains is a trompe l'oeil... Behind those trees is evidence of unspeakable ecological violence. In a process known as mountaintop removal an upland moonscape is being created, which is incapable of regenerating trees. As far as the eye can see, the land is grey and pockmarked with huge black lakes, filled with toxic coal slurry. This has come about because of America's insatiable appetite for cheap coal to generate electricity, a process enthusiastically backed by the Bush administration as it tries to displace the consumption of imported oil. And the Democrats are little better. They control Kentucky and neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have dared to challenge 'King Coal' while campaigning."
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