CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Three Virginia sites are among 10 in the South that the Southern Environmental Law Center regards as most endangered.

The list released Monday is the first by the SELC, but deputy director Jeff Gleason said the center plans to take an annual accounting of places it deems at risk in its six-state region.

“We increasingly see a number of special areas in our region that are at risk,” he said, adding, “People are not aware of what’s at stake.”

Included are the Clinch and Powell rivers in southwest Virginia, which the SELC said could be harmed by mountaintop mining to supply coal to the Dominion Virginia Power plant under construction in Wise County. Also on the list are a possible widening of Interstate 81 and exploration of oil and gas drilling off Virginia’s coast.

Gleason said the South is a testing ground for the nation’s most compelling environmental issues, including global warming, energy, land conservation, drought and biological diversity.

If the South were a country its carbon dioxide output would rank seventh in the world, he said. Its emissions are exceeded only by the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, India and Germany.

The most pressing threats in the region, Gleason said, come from proposals for development in the Georgia Salt Marshes, timber cutting in the old-growth Globe Forest in North Carolina and construction of a coal-fired power plant on the Great Pee Dee River in South Carolina.

Other endangered areas, according to the SELC, are the Pamlico River in North Carolina, Johns Island in South Carolina, Weeks Bay in Alabama and the Cherokee National Forest in northeast Tennessee.

Decisions affecting the sites in the next 12 months will be critical, he said.

“Our region will either protect — or lose — areas of our native forest, coastline and rural countryside,” Gleason said.

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On the Web:

www.southernenvironment.org/about/top—10—2009