Charles Haden, US 4th District Circuit Court

"When valley fills are permitted in intermittent and perennial streams they destroy those stream segments...If there are fish, they cannot migrate. If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated...No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than obliteration."

In class we've been discussing how our guerrilla gardening efforts might constitute a response to the coal industry's destruction of Appalachia. Obviously, we can't go reclaim a leveled mountain, but we can sow seeds in distal affinity with the flora that's being lost beneath the bulldozers and draglines! We can reclaim little areas, little plots in our own habitat in response (in memoriam and solidarity with) to the destruction of other habitats. According to the Surface Mining and Reclamation Control Act of 1977, coal companies are supposed to restore mining sites to their "approximate original contour" (AOC) when they're finished. Anyone who's ever played in a sandbox will understand the difficulty of building (or re-building) a mountain. You can only pile sand so high before it all starts to slide down the sides. In other words, you CAN'T rebuild a mountain. Coal operators know this, too. So with the help of their handmaidens in congress, they added a provision into the law that basically allows them to run an end-around the AOC stipulation. Coal companies can obtain an "AOC variance" if they can prove that the mined land will be put to a "higher and better use." At first, this higher use was envisioned as commercial, industrial, or residential, but over time (with a serious lack of businesses and individuals rushing to stake their claims on these newly formed toxic plateaus) higher use has degenerated into simply...pasture. Recap: You can obtain an AOC variance if you promise to turn this ecologically fragile, unique and diverse forested mountain into...yep...a rubble-strewn pasture. Brilliant! This makes perfect sense. Appalachia is in desperate need of toxic, topsoil-less, rubble-strewn pasture land.

Today we decided to adopt AOC, put it through some rapid, ameliorative semantic change, and use it to identify our local reclamation efforts. So "approximate original contour" becomes "Active Organic Cultivators." We will not be applying for AOC variances.