Last call for all photographers! There’s only one month remaining till the close of the 8th annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Contest (AMPC).

Appalachian Voices is sponsoring one of the eight categories, called “Our Ecological Footprint,” which will document environmental impacts caused by human activities in Appalachia. There will be a $200 prize for the winning shot in this category.

Each photo costs $6.00 to enter and a portion of the proceeds from the competition are used to subsidize Student Outdoor Learning Expeditions (SOLE) at Appalachian State University. Students participating in SOLE trips spend extended time exploring rugged and remote destinations including New Zealand, Alaska, Fiji and Wales. To date, AMPC has contributed more than $10,000 to students participating in SOLE trips.

This is the final reminder- so don’t miss your chance to win part of $4,000 dollars in cash and prizes. Submissions are due Dec. 17, by 5:00 pm.

To see other categories and for more information, visit:
http://appvoices.org/calendar/ampc/

PNC Bank recently decided that funding mountaintop removal mining doesn’t go with their big green wall (the largest vertical green garden in North America). They recently joined a growing list of banks who have decided that it’s just not worth the public humiliation to bankroll the destruction of America’s oldest mountains for coal. Our friends at Rainforest Action Network have been actively engaged in a grassroots campaign to pressure banks from funding this destructive mining technique that has already destroyed over 500 mountains and over 2000 miles of streams.

An excerpt from PNC’s policy statement:

MTR is the subject of increasing regulatory and legislative scrutiny, with a focus on the permitting of MTR mines. While this extraction method is permitted, PNC will not provide funding to individual MTR projects, nor will PNC provide credit to coal producers whose primary extraction method is MTR.

RAN recently won a Benny Award from the Business Ethic Network for their Global Finance Campaign. Appalachian Voices won a award for playing a supporting role by providing them the data needed to identify their targets. GO TEAM!

Thirty-six organizations, including Appalachian Voices, have signed on to a letter supporting the addition of 404 species of aquatic wildlife to the endangered species act.

The letter, delivered to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was in support of a petition (pdf), submitted to Fish and Wildlife last spring by the Center for Biological Diversity and six other regional and national organizations, included aquatic, riparian and wetland species in the southeastern part of the country.

“Thanks to pollution, development, logging, poor agricultural practices, dams, mining, invasive species and other threats,” says the Center’s website, “extinction is looming for more than 28 percent of the region’s fishes, more than 48 percent of its crayfishes and more than 70 percent of its mussels.”

Twenty-nine percent of the petitioned species are threatened by coal mining and oil and gas development. The original petition (pdf) included a section on the affects of mountaintop removal (aka strip) mining on aquatic species (page 18-21).

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Election Brings Change, Opportunity for Those Working to End MTR

Last night saw the United States Congress go through its 3rd straight “change” election, this time in favor of the Republicans. As bad as last night was for many incumbent Democrats, most pundits and pollsters had seen it coming for a long time. Almost all of the folks who lost their races were predicted to lose, with Republicans perhaps very marginally over-preforming expectations. Many folks have asked what this means for Congressional efforts to stop the destructive practice of mountaintop removal, so I thought I’d put up a quick summary.

The Clean Water Protection Act will end the 111th Congress with at least 173 bipartisan cosponsors. In such a dramatic “change” election, we were bound to lose some of these members, we just weren’t sure how many. The good news is that most of our politically-savvy mountain loving friends in Congress were spared the worst of the disaster.

–House of Representatives–
Democrats took a beating in the House, as Republicans flipped more than 60 seats for a majority of what will likely be just over 240 seats. This is, in many ways, a correction for the past 2 cycles, when Democrats picked up hordes of Republican-leaning seats for fun. With 17 CWPA cosponsors already leaving for higher office or to retire, we stood to lose significant ground on election day, but held fairly steady. In all, we lost far fewer CWPA cosponsors than I had expected to lose.

Takeaways:

1. Our allies weren’t the ones who lost.
- Just about every potentially “pro-MTR” Democrat lost, including Rick Boucher (VA), Mike Oliverio (WV), Lincoln Davis (TN), Zack Space (OH), and Charlie Wilson (OH). There are literally no democrats left in central or northern Appalachia except for Nick Rahall and two young Democrats in western PA where they don’t do valleyfills. Rahall is now completely isolated among his party.
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