strip-mined

When Congress passed SMCRA, the lawmakers required coal operators to put strip-mined land back the way they found it.

(Corporations-by their nature as independent, potentially immortal entities-are not strip-mined by the government whenever one of their proprietors dies.) But they did not mistake those benefits for a grant of special privilege, since any business that wants to can incorporate.

The location and several additional square miles of adjacent land had been cleared and strip-mined. The original habitat has been destroyed (Fig.

TECO, the coalmining arm of Tampa Electric Company, has literally strip-mined the life out of the mountains surrounding Jenkins.

Skyline has strip-mined a massive area close to the watershed and has left behind red-stained acid streams.

Coal companies have strip-mined 500 square miles of West Virginia since 1981, and the pace has increased rapidly.

What first appears to be virgin wilderness is in effect a contemporary wasteland of crisscrossing barbed-wire fences and strip-mined valleys--a postindustrial graveyard.

And it's cheaper than what's being done today to reclaim most strip-mined lands.

The current federal policies, while benefiting the few at the expense of the taxpayer, have left a huge percentage of America's public lands strip-mined, blighted by clearcuts, crowded by condominiums--and utterly out of public control.

Americans are learning, to their dismay, that success in the new global environment means a radically reduced standard of living as our industrial and hi-tech sectors are shamelessly strip-mined by our rootless, amoral ruling elite.