Everytime you plug in your computer or turn on a light switch, wash and dry your clothes or cook your food, you are contributing to our mountains being beheaded and our streams being poisoned.

What, me? I'm doing no such thing! I'm just drying a load of underwear. What do you want me to do? Hang them outside?

Not a bad idea! At least it's a start but not the entire answer.

So how can you say I'm beheading mountains or poisoning streams?

Anyone in much of Appalachia could answer that question much better than I. I don't have to breathe dust and truck fumes or drink dirty water everyday like they do.

They live in the hollows (or hollers as they often call them) of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Their hollows have allowed generations and generations of people from pioneer days to live sustainably on little plots of land they share with a river or stream, railroad tracks and a road. Often they would earn good money in the coal mines, as well.

Now they still have coal in their neighborhoods, but now it is mined differently, in a way that doesn't require as much human labor. Coal miners don't go hundreds of feet underground to chip away at King Coal. Now there are huge machines that behead mountains getting the coal from the top of the mountain instead from its insides.

And you can see the effects from the air up to 35,000 feet in the air!

What you should be seeing are beautiful ripples of rich shades of green, the millions of thriving trees that coat the mountains from the sweet valleys below up to the very top of each mountain. West Virginia's "Mountain Mama" has been raped, and her children are damn mad about it.

When "Mountain Mama" is raped, her milk (fish-filled brooks, streams and creeks) become undrinkable, her children become cancerous and her land in which her children live becomes worthless.

When coal companies decide that it is time to take a new mountain so they can sell their coal to coal-fired power plants, they first of all clear cut all the trees covering the mountains. Most often, the trees are simply pushed into the valleys or burned. Seldom is the wood harvested for paper or firewood.

This uglifying procedure is followed by continuous blasting to get to a coal seam in the mountain. (Some mountains may have up to five or more seams in them, meaning more and more blasting in order to reach each seam.)

Then with their huge dragline excavator the coal is ripped from the mountain further and further inside the mountain until the coal is depleted. The stuff that is not needed (rock and dirt) is simply pushed into the surrounding valleys, where it is called valley fill. This fill is high in heavy metal. Thus, soon the clean streams become poisoned, and if the folks below the mountain can't afford to buy bottled water, they are sentenced to drink polluted water as long as they live there.

And if this wasn't enough, there is more problems to contend with. The coal that is ripped from the mountain is washed before loading into trucks who take it to the trains to serve big industry's boilers and many electric power plants.

The run off from the washing process is collected in what are called surry ponds. Residents below them dread heavy rains because a large percentage of such ponds have either collapsed after such downpours or the full ponds overflow and the sludge spills out into the communities below them.

So when you hear from Hillary Clinton that she's for clean coal, she's lying. There is no clean coal! Even if someday industry can sequester all the CO2 from coal-fired power plants, can cut completely all the nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, the mercury and other pollutants from the burning of coal, the production of this fossil fuel is anything but clean. Only about 5 percent of the coal used in this country is ripped from mountain tops, but up to 30 percent of the coal mined from West Virginia comes from Mountain Top Removal, or the beheading of beautiful mountains that can never be replaced just so more of us can dry our hair, wash our clothes, run our electronics and heat our homes.

We as citizens face a dilemma. We are addicted to our electricity, most of which is produced at coal-fired power plants across our nation. We are afraid of nuclear power, and rightfully so. Conservation and the rapid development of alternative fuels will help tremendously so we can save what's left of our ancient Appalachian Mountains that are plagued because they harbor coal in their veins.

The Appalachian Mountains contain more than coal. They also contain among the most diverse animals, little critters, fauna and other forms of life of anywhere on this planet. But because of our hunger for coal, we are destroying much of our fellow creatures and resources for energy that is burned and gone forever, with only the pollutants remaining to eventually kill the rest of us.

So if you get a chance, stand up for the mountaineers, humans and other species, in Appalachia. Write your congressmen. Demand that they support the Clean Water Protection Act  (HR 2169) that would help stop Mountain Top Removal for good. Our grandchildren have a right to enjoy the Appalachian Mountains like we have.