"Who knows what will be left of it when they are finished."

From The mountain that lost its top:

The act of destroying a million-year-old mountain has several distinct stages. First it is earmarked for removal and the hardwood forest cover, containing over 500 species of tree per acre in this region, is bulldozed away. The trees are typically burnt rather than logged, because mining companies are not in the lumber business. Then topsoil is scraped away and high explosives laid in the sandstone. Thousands of blasts go off across the region every day, blowing up what the mining industry calls "overburden".

The rubble is then tipped into the valleys – more than 7,000 have already been filled – and more than 700 miles of rivers and streams have disappeared under rubble and thousands more soiled with toxic waste.

The process has accelerated wildly under George Bush. His pro-business-at-any-price credo led to the tossing out of strict federal restrictions against dumping mining rubble within 250 feet of a mountain stream. The toxic spoil laden with heavy metals, which results from blowing up mountains, was renamed "fill", enabling the mining companies to use the cheapest method possible of disposing of it. Once the rock is blown up and the coal separated out, the flattened mountaintops can only support a thin cover of grass. Tens of thousands of acres of mountain have been transformed in this way in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.