I want to keep RoaneViews as local as possible but so much that goes on at the Federal level effects Roane County for a number of reasons. Simply put, we live "downstream" of a lot of East Tennessee. Destroy water quality 50 miles north of us and it washes right down into the drinking water of Harriman, flows over to Kingston, and eventually down to Rockwood.

Drink Hearty, Citizens, National Coal stockholders will enjoy their new yachts, which they'll keep in Miami or Arlington, and not Watts Barr Lake.

What? (Are you crazy?)

The Bush Administration serves huge corporations whenever it can, to the detriment of the environment and most people's quality of life. They are not about taking care of our Country so much as taking care of our corporations. Right now the large coal mining corporations are attacking the very sanctity of Tennessee's mountains, trying to get rules passes that would allow them to destroy them and dump them in our streams. In areas they have been allowed to do this, the results were disasters of every sort.

Now coal corporations want to mow down the mountains above the New River in East Tennessee and dump them in the water. The resulting devastation will flow right into the Big South Fork.

They have drilled cores all along the Cumberland plateau to map a coal seam that rings the western rim of the Tennessee Valley above Roane County. Allowed to proceed, Coal Corporations will destroy the vast unpolluted stream network that flows off the plateau and through my farm and into your glass.

Mining coal might just be the stupidest thing humans do.

Sit there and let it happen...or try to help.