Conservation Alliance grantee Appalachian Voices reports that the EPA has decided to "hold for extended review" 79 applications from coal companies to dump the tops of mountains into nearby river valleys while extracting coal in Appalachia. Under the Bush Administration, these applications would have sailed through, but the decision to closely consider their environmental impacts shows that the Obama EPA intends to base permitting decisions on science. For those of you who haven't been following this issue, Mountaintop Removal Mining is perfectly named; it is a practice in which mining companies remove the tops of mountains to access the coal seams below. They then dump the debris into nearby river valleys, threatening the water supplies of local residents, not to mention destroying the streams.