Office Of Surface Mining
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM or OSMRE) is a branch of the United States Department of the Interior. It is the federal agency entrusted with the implementation and enforcement of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA), which attached a per-ton fee to all extracted coal in order to fund an interest-accruing trust to be used for reclamation of abandoned mine lands, as well as established a set environmental standards that mines must follow while operating, and achieve when reclaiming mined land, in order to minimize environmental impact. OSM has about 500 employees, who work in either the national office in Washington, DC or of the many regional and field offices(OSM's Three Regions).
OSM has three main functions:
- Regulating active mines
- Reclaiming lands damaged by surface mining and abandoned mines
- Providing resources for technical assistance, training, and technology development
Read more about Office Of Surface Mining: Regulating Active Mines, Reclaiming Abandoned Mine Lands
Famous quotes containing the words office of, office, surface and/or mining:
“Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“All beauties contain, like all possible phenomena, something eternal and something transitory,—something absolute and something particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the common surface of different sorts of beauty. The particular element of each beauty comes from the emotions, and as we each have our own particular emotions, so we have our beauty.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)