We want to thank the wonderful folks of Rochester's Sierra Club chapter and Upstate New York's Animal Rights Association for co-sponsoring Julia Bonds' talk April 14. Bonds, a coal miner's daughter, is an advocate with Coal River Mountain Watch to end Mountain Top Removal coal mining in central Appalachia.

Scientists have discovered that Appalachia is home to one of the most bio-diverse forests on the planet and is a vital carbon-oxygen exchange point in North America (the "lungs of the East"). MTR is forever damaging this valuable forest and aggravating the global-warming crisis.

While Americans once enjoyed the Appalachian Mountains relatively undisturbed - beautiful, serene, home to clear-running streams, wild orchids, and abundant wildlife - that is no longer the case. To date, over 400 mountain peaks have been destroyed, and more blasting is scheduled, enough to cover an area the size of Delaware.

In the past 100 years, underground mining has extracted 16 billion tons of coal from West Virginia's mountains alone. MTR goes after thin veins left behind and, in the process, destroys animal habitat, knocks houses off their foundations, and is blamed for flooding that has killed residents of Appalachian communities. Today more money is brought into places like West Virginia from tourism (including outdoor sports) than by coal.

Ironically, MTR is despoiling the very environment that makes eco-tourism possible. In 2001 in Kentucky, an MTR coal sludge dam broke and polluted 100 miles of streams, killing 1.6 million fish and destroying the water supply for 27,000 people.

We can stop MTR with the Clean Water Protection Act, now in Congress with 75 co-sponsors. Representative Louise Slaughter is the only member of the Rochester delegation to support it so far. The act would strengthen the Clean Water Act of 1977 and stop MTR. We urge readers to ask their representative to support the Clean Water Protection Act.

These are America's mountains: our mountains, our atmosphere, our water. Let's preserve them for our benefit and the benefit of future generations.

Paul Ciavarri, VickPark B, Rochester; Katey Burke, Avery Street, Rochester (Ciavarri and Burke are co-chairs of the Save America's Mountains committee of Rochester.)