Mountaintop removal foe running for U.S. Senate from West Virginia

A former Democratic congressman from West Virginia joined the race for U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd's seat this week to promote the cause of ending mountaintop removal coal mining.

"I'm not running to get votes for myself," Ken Hechler told the Charleston Gazette. "I'm running to give people an opportunity to cast their votes against mountaintop removal ... This is the only way I can get [the issue] on the ballot."

At 95, Hechler is even older than Byrd, who died last month at age 92. In recent years Hechler has been an outspoken advocate for ending mountaintop removal, which involves blasting off mountain peaks to get to the coal and dumping the waste into valley streams below.

Last June, Hechler was one of 29 people arrested during a protest outside of a Massey Energy mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia, along with NASA climate scientist James Hansen and actress Darryl Hannah.

A White House assistant to President Truman, Hechler represented West Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1959 to 1977. The only member of Congress to march with Dr. Martin Luther King at Selma, Ala., he was also an architect of the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969, which created the agency now known as the Mine Safety and Health Administration to protect mine workers from on-the-job hazards. He went on to serve as West Virginia's secretary of state from 1985 to 2001.

This week Democrat Carte Goodwin, a former assistant to West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D), was sworn in to take Byrd's seat temporarily, but he has said he will not run in the special election set for Nov. 2. The winner will serve the remainder of Byrd's term ending Jan. 3, 2010.

On the Democratic side, Manchin is vying for the seat, along with former state Delegate Sheirl Fletcher. So far 10 Republicans have filed for the race, in which Manchin is seen as the front-runner.

A conservative Democrat, Manchin is a strong supporter of West Virginia's mining industry. He has criticized the Obama administration for taking steps to address the impact mountaintop removal has on local water quality through the federal permitting process.

But Hechler told the paper he wouldn't be running against Manchin. "I'm just talking about one issue," he said, "which is mountaintop removal."

(Photo of Hechler from his website.)