Amid all the justifiable rejoicing over the rescue of the nine miners who had been trapped underground in a Pennsylvania coal mine, it’s worth asking what they were doing underground to begin with. And the answer to that question involves two names that wouldn’t ordinarily come to mind when it comes to mining coal: Senator Lieberman of Connecticut and a 30-year-old rock star named Kevin Richardson, a member of a group called the Backstreet Boys.

There are two main kinds of mines, underground and surface. Surface mines — also known as strip mines or mountaintop mines — are increasingly common. As a safety Web site maintained by the New York State Department of Labor puts it, surface mining, “usually is less hazardous than underground mining.” In West Virginia, surface coal mines were responsible for about 37% of the state’s 175 million tons of coal produced in 2001. But surface coal mines were responsible for only about 23% of the 13 mining fatalities in the state that year and only 25% of the 1,167 coal-mine injuries that were reported to the state and were serious enough to mean time lost from work.*

Surface mining creates more waste material than underground mining, and this waste material needs to go somewhere. That is an opportunity for Mr. Lieberman to get involved. The Connecticut Democrat, chairman of the Clean Air, Wetlands and Climate Change Subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, just last month held a hearing of his subcommittee to declare, “if this type of mining must continue, the waste created by this practice and others must be disposed of in compliance with the Clean Water Act. That’s the law — and for years, it’s shameful that our own government wasn’t following it.”

The Bush administration had tried to change the federal rules to make it easier to use the waste to fill valleys. But Mr. Lieberman was having none of it. And neither was the star witness at his June hearing, Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys. Mr. Richardson didn’t just testify at the hearing — he followed up with a press conference with that other celebrity environmentalist, Robert F. Kennedy, which was sponsored by all the usual environmentalist advocacy groups, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council. These are the types that a Democratic presidential candidate needs to court to win his party’s nomination.

Maybe this is why a Democratic state like West Virginia gave its electoral votes to Governor Bush in the last election. Think of it — had the strip mining state** gone the other way, Al Gore and Mr. Lieberman would be running the country. Instead the senator from the Nutmeg state was presiding over a hearing at which a senior legislative counsel of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, Joan Mulhern, fretted in her testimony about the damage that surface coal mining would do to “forest birds” and “aquatic life.” She suggested an alternative: “underground mines generate much less waste rock and dirt than surface mines.”

The kind of mine the nine men in Pennsylvania were stuck in, of course, was a more dangerous underground mine, not a safer strip mine. It wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Lieberman put saving the environment over saving lives. He also voted for higher average fuel economy standards, which studies show mean smaller, lighter, more dangerous cars. Anyway, the next time the 2004 presidential candidate and the rock star hold a hearing on mining, his colleagues might press him to pay a little less attention to waste disposal, “forest birds” and “aquatic life” and a little more to the lives of the guys that the environmentalists seem to want to keep stuck in the shafts.

* www.state.wv.us/mhst/Stats.htm

**Its motto is “Mountaineers Are Always Free.”