The New York Times has an editorial denouncing the practice of "mountaintop mining," which it frets would have "downstream impact on fish, salamanders and other aquatic life." Says the Times: "the coal companies need to develop ways to mine this coal without blasting the tops off mountains and fouling the waters below."
The way to do that is with a traditional, old-fashioned mine, which may be friendlier to salamanders but is a lot more dangerous to human miners, a species that the Times rather astonishingly manages to write the entire editorial without even a nod toward the safety of. More on the tradeoffs between safety of humans and salamanders in mining here. Nothing against salamanders, and, like many things, it isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, but if it were up to me I'd be willing to expose the salamanders to some risk to save some human miners.
