Noise demo against imminent open cast coal mine 9th June

A new open-cast coal mine site is about to get under­way in beau­ti­ful Der­byshire, unless we stop it now.

Derbyshire open-cast - beforeDerbyshire open-cast - after?A new open-cast coal mine site is about to get under­way in beau­ti­ful Der­byshire, unless we stop it now. Help us send the mes­sage loud and clear to UK Coal to leave it in the ground!

Noise Demo at UK Coal, nr Don­cast­er
Mon­day 9th June
Meet 12 noon at Don­cast­er train sta­tion.
There will be lifts to UK Coal’s HQ — but bring trans­port if you can.

UK COAL, Har­worth Park, Blyth Road, Har­worth, Don­cast­er DN11 8DB

Bring: ban­ners, things to make noise with, food, peo­ple, tents, room to give peo­ple a lift.

For more info phone 07852 460871 or email derby@earthfirst.org.uk

Down­load leaflet (includes map of pro­posed open-cast) – please print and cir­cu­late

What’s going on?
Lodge House site, which is east of the vil­lage of the Der­byshire vil­lage of Smal­l­ey, is one of sev­en
sites that UK Coal is to open-cast. The area is rich with wildlife and backs onto Ship­ley Coun­try Park. It is about to be dev­as­tat­ed, despite objec­tions from local coun­cils, res­i­dents and local envi­ron­men­tal groups. The Sec­re­tary of State grant­ed plan­ning per­mis­sion in 2007 and work is to com­mence any day now.

More destruc­tion to come?
The 122 hectare site will have one mil­lion tonnes of coal ripped out over five years and ‘returned back to its nat­ur­al state’ accord­ing to UK Coal. How­ev­er, they will not be able to replace ancient edges and mature trees, and they will be able to expand beyond the 122 hectares with­out need­ing fur­ther per­mis­sion. Res­i­dents were exclud­ed from parts of the plan­ning meet­ing on grounds of com­mer­cial con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, which sug­gests that the plans may be big­ger than UK Coal is let­ting on.

A dirty fuel, a chang­ing cli­mate
Coal is not clean ener­gy, and with the new onslaught of pro­posed pow­er sta­tions, UK Coal are look­ing to cash in on cli­mate dev­as­ta­tion and destruc­tion unless we stop them. Burn­ing coal to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty is threat­en­ing the glob­al envi­ron­ment and all our futures..

To com­bat open-cast min­ing, a new action group “Leave it in the Ground” has formed, sup­port­ed by Earth First! and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal groups.

If you can’t make the demo then you could con­tact UK Coal direct­ly to let them know what you think: UK Coal Tel: 01302 751751 Fax: 01302 752420.

Links

Leave it in the Ground
Home­page: http://www.leaveitintheground.org.uk

Report on pre­vi­ous action http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/node/20727

For a bit of his­to­ry on protests against open cast min­ing see:
http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no7/23–32.html

More info on coal…
http://thecoalhole.org/