Actress Ashley Judd has added her voice against the mountain-top mining. She is calling for the end of this practice. She joins more than 500 people who gathered outside the Kentucky state capitol on Tuesday. The rally was conducted as a support for the legislation that will end the practice of blasting away the top of the mountains in order to get coal.

The practice of removing the mountain top is also called as the mountaintop mining or valley fills. This is considered as a form of surface mining and this include extreme topographic change to the summit ridge of the targeted mountain. This kind of practice is often associated with the coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. The typical operation will involve the removal of around 1,000 vertical feet of overburden in order to expose the underlying coal seams.

This practice is controversial due to its destructive nature and often the subject of protests coming from local residents and environmentalists. Ashley Judd recently surveyed and visited mountain removal sites last December and September and the actress was not prepared with what she saw. The actress described the barren moonscapes and the ‘nothingness’ on the areas where the Appalachian peaks once rose skyward. The Democratic senator from Lexington Kathy Stein is sponsoring the legislation that will effectively bar the coal companies from filling the valleys with soil and rock form the mountain tops.

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