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The story of mountaintop mining - why it happens, and what its consequences are - is still new to most Americans. They have no idea that their country's physical legacy - the purple mountain majesties that are America - is being destroyed at the rate of several ridgetops a week, by three million pounds of explosives every day.

Mining is a dangerous profession. There's no way to make a mine completely safe: These are the words owners have always used to excuse needless deaths and the words miners use to prepare for them.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.

I have a huge fan following in Bellary, and when they met me, they told me about their problems. I have seen mining done without proper safety measures and not taking environmental protection into account.

Economic development is what's going to make mountaintop removal palatable.

We don't want to leave the coal in the ground, and that necessarily is going to involve better technology with regard to clean uses of coal.

Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission.

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue.