Living on Earth: GELLERMAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Bruce Gellerman. Valley fill is the debris that’s dumped into rivers and streams from a method of extracting coal called “mountaintop removal”. It’s done largely in Kentucky and West Virginia, and it’s at the center of an intense political, legal, and scientific debate. When the EPA recently announced it was going to review two mountain top removal permits, environmental groups cheered. Then, the very next day, when the agency issued a …