BOB WHITE, W.Va. -- With a boost from President Bush, central Appalachia's mountaintop coal miners are finally embracing the future again, flagging more of this state's ancient summits for blasting and more of its hollows for burying than in many years.

The industry hasn't yet reversed more than a decade of sliding output, job losses and environmental lawsuits. But its backers are at least feeling confidence, which could translate into votes for the president this fall across the region.

But some conservationists and hill dwellers say the energy-hungry Bush administration encourages miners to pulverize the landscape faster than ever.

In recent months, Maria Gunnoe has watched in fury as mining equipment chewed at the heights of Island Creek Mountain behind her family homestead in this coal outpost in southern West Virginia's Boone County. I've trudged these mountains ever since I was a child," said Gunnoe. "When you go back here to this strip, the mountain is just gone."

West Virginia -- Appalachia's mining leader and the No. 2 state after Wyoming -- approved 20,579 acres for future strip mining last year. That triples the previous year and christens the most new acreage for stripping since 1989, according to state data supplied under an open records request. Federal regulators approved four times more mining fill to be dumped in the valleys.

The industry is eager to stir from its doldrums. For the year ending last September, coal output from strip sites sunk by 15 percent across mountaintop-mining country: West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Last year, mining authorities say that some forces finally turned in the industry's favor: a perkier economy with stronger energy demand, as well as spiking prices for competing natural gas.

And President Bush. "With the Bush administration, the floodgates have been opened," says environmentalist Cindy Rank.

Gunnoe and her brothers used to romp across wooded hillsides behind her two-bedroom house. Her family picked forest herbs for medicines. Now, a 300-foot-high pile of waste earth plugs the valley like a giant cork. Green water collects in two settling ponds.

From there, the creek rattles down the hollow between banks smothered in tons of rock, mud and upended timber left by a flood last summer. It crashed down from the denuded mountaintop, washed away the bridge to Gunnoe's garage, and trapped her inside the house with her two children. A wiry woman from a three-generation mining family, Gunnoe says she could do little but kneel and pray. The waters finally subsided near her porch.

State environmental officials blame the flood on logging. However, federal regulators say the mine's waste site was redesigned in 2002 in a way that raises the risk of minor flooding, even though it reduces chances for a flood. Officials at mine operator Jupiter Coal Co. did not return phone calls.

Miners tend to embrace Bush -- a business-minded Republican and former oilman -- as a far more sympathetic friend of the industry than President Clinton.

For decades, miners have been blasting and scraping away the summits and flanks of tmountains to reach the precious coal below. While still dominated by shaft mining, the central Appalachian industry has turned increasingly to stripping, as air pollution rules put a premium on the low-sulfur, cleaner-burning coal near the mountaintops.

Over the past five years, environmentalists have elevated Appalachia's strip mines into a national battleground because, unlike other forms of mining, these operations often lop off entire mountaintops. Mining companies often gain waivers from rebuilding the slopes. Even when they do reshape the hills, they dump tons of leftover earth into neighboring creeks and valleys.

"You can't lay it all at the feet of President Bush," says Earthjustice lobbyist Joan Mulhern. "The harm has been going on for a long time. But what's different about this administration is the speed at which they are willing to eviscerate environmental protections that stand between the coal companies and the ... mountains."

Environmentalists and some mountain people lament the changes in topography, the loss of creeks buried under mining fill, the shifts in wildlife habitat. They rail against dust, floods, and blasting with its vibration and flying boulders. Many demand stricter limits on the valley fills.

But for the industry and its backers, mountaintop mines bring desperately needed local jobs and high-quality homegrown fuel to a nation that still derives half its electricity from coal. Since coming to power, the Bush administration has cultivated the coal industry and recruited its players. The Interior Department's inspector general is investigating whether its deputy director, former coal lobbyist Steven Griles, improperly handled matters involving former energy clients.

The Bush team has taken some concrete steps that spur strip mine investment through regulatory help. For one thing, it has reshaped rules to shore up the legal foundation of mountaintop mining, repeatedly challenged in lawsuits. It has moved to water down a buffer-zone rule protecting streams. It has also changed the definition of "fill" to more clearly allow valley dumping of this extra rock and dirt.

White House environmental adviser James Connaughton says the regulations were "clarified and tightened." He said regulators can now "issue permits that have strict performance requirements and are enforceable in a more timely manner."

Bush's regulators have also made a start at simplifying the mine-permitting process that the industry views as a galling octopus of state and federal agencies. It can take a dolly to cart around the application papers needed for a single permit.

Adding confusion, much of the region was subject to federal court bans or the threat of such bans on most new valley fill permits beginning in the late 1990s. Finally in January 2003, the last one was struck down on appeal, coinciding with the industry's rush for permits in West Virginia.

But even in Appalachia, much land isn't promising for mining. Only 5 percent of the mountaintop mining region has ever been mined by any method. Federal regulators project a maximum of 7 percent affected by mountaintop mining during the 20 years ending in 2012. Geologic and economic forces act as brakes too: thinning reserves and booming competition from coal mined in such places as Wyoming and abroad in Colombia.

Also, despite all his support for mining, Bush and his regulators have taken some measures to safeguard the environment too -- albeit under pressure from federal courts. In their first year, Bush's regulators gave the industry permission to cover 15 percent less valley acreage with fill than in the final Clinton year, federal data show.