ing the s required operators to ‘‘restore’’ landscapes once coal seams
were depleted, but legislators did not intend replication of original mor-
phology and ground cover. Instead they insisted that mined landscapes be
returned to some economically useful form, and this usually meant near-
flat, grassy (i.e., treeless), would-be beef pastures.^4 What is called ‘‘restora-
tion ecology’’ bears little or no resemblance, in any of its forms, to preser-
vation, anyway. And so the literal leveling of the South was under way.
Now, after four decades of eastern strip-mining and ‘‘restoration,’’ coal
operators have engineered ever-larger machines and a new (during the
s) method called ‘‘mountaintop removal.’’ Actually, miners now refer
to mountaintops as ‘‘overlays,’’ since peaks and ridges cover seams of low-
sulfur coal; so ‘‘overlay removal’’ is the interchangeable term. The removal
procedure begins with blowing up mountaintops; then teams of tower-
ing machines, each twenty stories high, manipulate monster drag-lines to
dump millions of tons of rubble into valleys, most with streams. People
living below such overlays are typically bought out, their villages to become
‘‘valley fill.’’ The Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits for filling
watersheds in coal country, concedes that about , miles of Appalachian
streams have disappeared as a result of landscape leveling. The conces-
sion may be too modest, and destructive flooding in southern West Virginia
during the spring of suggested to many a causative relationship with
wholesale obliteration of forests. In and again during the floods of
, the chief judge of the federal district court of southern West Virginia
condemned government permits for valley filling as an ‘‘obvious perversity’’
of the Clean Water Act. The judge’s first ruling was overturned on appeal,
and King Coal marched on, imperiously confident in a cozy consensus with
the rest of the federal judiciary, not to mention the entire executive branch.^5
Now consider the coastal South. Here a much older and pervasive per-
versity of several clean water acts is evident everywhere, from Chesapeake
Bay and the Delmarva Peninsula to Key West to Padre Island.^6 Mile after
mile, as any beachgoer or gliding pelican has observed, any patch of land,
dry or soggy, not already built upon is for sale and development. Since
World War II, but explosively since the s, the eastern riviera has risen,
quite literally (even as parts of the mountains have fallen). Most of this low
landscape consisted of wetlands of one sort or another: floodplain pine
barrens, pocosins, tidal marshes, and estuarial swamps. Ocean and Gulf
beaches themselves are deserts, of course, delicate, shifting, and wind-
blown. Yet ironically, even as wetlands’ ecological functions and beaches’
impermanence became generally understood—during the s—Ameri-