Eastern Kentucky is a long way from Britain. What do we care if 
another million acres of the Appalachian mountain range are lost to 
strip mining? If the habitat of the flying squirrel and the cerulean 
warbler is blown up and bulldozed? If one of the oldest temperate 
forests in the world with some 80 species of trees is destroyed by 
the greed of a few coal companies? Why should it matter to us?

I'll tell you why. First, because this story exposes the pathological 
destructiveness of the Republican political and religious elite. Not 
content with the ruin it has caused in Iraq, George W Bush's 
administration lays waste the great American wilderness in a way that 
tests your faith in the reason of man.

Second, this campaign against nature is being plotted, sanctioned and 
carried out by men - it is exclusively men - who are on their knees 
in little, white churches every Sunday praying to a god whom they 
believe created this earth. The same people who reject Darwin and 
promote the idea that life on earth is too complex and varied to have 
been created by evolution, a theory known as intelligent design, are 
the ones who show such contempt for God's creation.

And let's not forget the last crucial point. With the United States 
accounting for 30 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions, much of it 
from heavily polluting, coal-burning power stations, we may all to 
some extent consider ourselves downwind of what's going on in the 
coal industry of Kentucky and parts of West Virginia.

In Britain, we are not exposed to the horrors of 'mountaintop 
removal', but owing to a new book by Erik Reece, Lost Mountain: A 
year in the Vanishing Wilderness, which I happened on in a New York 
bookshop, I learned that it has nothing to do with coal mining in the 
traditional sense. Mountaintop removal is just that. You blow up the 
top of the mountain with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel 
fuel, the same combination used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma 
City bombing, and bulldoze the millions of tons of debris into the 
valleys and streams below. A slender seam of coal is then exposed, at 
which point a fearsome machine called a dragline is deployed to strip 
out the coal.

The result is that local water supplies are polluted with mercury and 
the chemicals used in the mining process; the uninterrupted habitat 
of many rare creatures and plants is destroyed; and the landscape is 
ruined forever. The scars that you are now able to see on satellite 
pictures will be there until the end of time.

In the American media, you will find little mention of this shocking 
state of affairs. Indeed, people generally know more about the 
burning of Amazon rainforests than they do about the devastation 
wrought by their own people in their own country.

It is true that a grim picture of strip mining did appear as the 
background of a recent film called North Country, the story of a 
woman, played by Charlize Theron, fighting for her rights as a 
mine-worker. To a European eye, this minor heroic tale is all very 
well, but why didn't it occur to director Niki Caro that the demonic 
mess created by strip mining was more than incidental? But perhaps 
that is where America is - individual rights come way ahead of the 
trashing of nature in the public's concerns.

In 1968, Bobby Kennedy visited the mountains of Kentucky and West 
Virginia with the message that strip mining was a way of putting 
miners out of work. His son, environmental campaigner Robert F 
Kennedy Jr, has written an excellent account of the rape of 
Appalachia in Crimes Against Nature, which reveals that mountaintop 
removal was encouraged by George W. Bush after the Republicans 
received $20m from the coal industry.

In 2000, a lobbyist named J Steven Griles was appointed to Bush's 
team and swiftly managed, among other things, to get the 'waste' 
created by mountaintop removal reclassified as 'fill', thus bypassing 
the Clean Water Act that was impeding the coal companies. He spent 
four years in the administration, during which he was paid 
'severance' at the rate of $250,000 per annum from his lobbying firm. 
He then returned to the private sector without having suffered a loss 
of income.

Leaving this shady arrangement aside, it is difficult not to gasp at 
an administration which clutches the Bible to its chest and mouths 
those first verses from Genesis: 'And God said, "Let us make man in 
our image ... and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, 
and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the 
earth.'

That may appeal to a Texan oil man and cattle rancher but the 
inconsistency between the professed beliefs of the Christian right on 
'intelligent design' and the conduct of environmental policy under 
Bush is staggering. If the flying squirrel, the copperhead snake and 
cerulean warbler, the sugar maples, the black gum and hickory trees 
of the forest of the Appalachians were, indeed, all designed by God, 
why destroy them so wantonly?

This is partly explained by a certain cultural entitlement to 
inconsistency which permits some Americans to complain about 
secondary smoke while climbing aboard their sports utility vehicles 
and, as Condoleezza Rice did last week, to list the human-rights 
violations in Iran while ignoring Guantanano. Yet this is not the 
whole story. A supreme right accorded by American individualism is to 
make a profit and, somewhere in the psyche of the quail-shooting 
conservative, decked out in his impeccable weekend hunting gear, is 
the idea that to assert dominion over the earth you must destroy.

It is all rather depressing, but let me make clear that there are 
good Americans out there, whose voices are only just being heard 
above the whir of the Republican money-counting machines - people 
such as Erik Reece and Robert Kennedy Jr and many unknown 
environmental campaigners. They deserve our support during this 
Appalachian spring, however distant.

Henry Porter writes for The Observer (London), where this article ran 
originally.