The Expanding Range of Mountaintop Removal Literature: Two New Books

A review essay by Kevin O'Donnell, East Tennessee State University.

This essay appears in Journal of Appalachian Studies 15, 1&2 (Spring & Fall 2009): p213-18.

Jeff Biggers.

Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland.

Nation Books, 2010. 320 pages.

Hardcover: $26.95

ISBN: 1568584210

Silas House and Jason Howard.

Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal.

University of Kentucky Press, 2009. 320 pages.

Hardcover: $27.95

ISBN: 0813125464

* * *

The language of coal is contested. In public spaces throughout Appalachia, battle lines are being drawn over words.

Consider, for example, what you'll see if you drive along Interstate 77 into West Virginia. Whether you approach that state from Ohio, in the north, or from Virginia, in the south, you are greeted along I-77 at the border with billboards declaring:

Yes, COAL.

Clean, carbon-neutral coal.

You've probably seen these signs, part of a widespread advertisement campaign initiated in 2009 by Walker Equipment Company, a dealer in Caterpillar D9 bulldozers and other mining equipment. And, like most readers of this journal, you probably already know the truth: There is truly no such thing as "clean coal."

Coal proponents often use the deliberately-misleading phrase "clean coal" to describe carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a prospective technology that they hope may one day reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that coal-fired power plants emit into the atmosphere. (As the term suggests, the hope is to capture and "sequester"--or store in the ground--CO2 that would otherwise be released as a greenhouse gas.) Under even the most optimistic scenarios, however, CCS is projected to be enormously expensive. And even if the technical challenges of storing CO2 can be addressed--and that's a huge "if"-- the technology will actually reduce the energy derived from coal burning by 30% or more, leading to a net increase in the amount of coal that must be burned.

Meanwhile--as readers of this journal also already know--regardless of how coal is burned, its mining is, and will remain, a dirty and destructive business, particularly in Appalachia. In January 2010, Science magazine published a peer-reviewed study which synthesizes existing research on affects of Appalachian mountaintop-removal coal mining (MTR). In the wake of the article's publication, the lead author on the study, Margaret Palmer, took the unusual step of giving interviews to the press about the study's policy implications. Palmer, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences, told the Washington Post,

The science is so overwhelming that the only conclusion that one can reach is that mountaintop mining needs to be stopped. (Jan 8, 2010)

In other words, the phrase "clean coal" is nonsense. The phrase belongs on the end of a shovel, so to speak. Yet there it is, prominently displayed, in the open air, in some of Appalachia's most public spaces, marking West Virginia's borders.

The effect of the clean coal billboard campaign is pernicious. To people who know that "clean coal" is a nonsense term, the signs deliver a strong secondary message. That message: Watch yourself. Know, as you enter the State of West Virginia, that the language you use is being contested. Know that the people you talk to here, perhaps even your friends and neighbors, may already have been persuaded to use language that is a lie.

* * *

Look at Wise County, Virginia on Google Earth, the free, web-based software system that allows you to view composite satellite imagery and aerial photographs of Earth. (Or go to youtube and type in "Virtual Flyover of Mountaintop Removal Sites in Wise Co., VA". There you'll see a 1-minute and 24-second video posted by Appalachian Voices, which compiles Google Earth imagery of Wise County in video form.) You'll see what used to be hidden from interstate travellers through the region: that more than one third of Wise County's surface area has been disrupted by MTR. The entire county is on the verge of becoming an ecological no-man's-land, a national sacrifice zone. A once-beautiful, ecologically rich, mountainous Appalachian county is being reduced, through the relentless use of large quantities of ammonium nitrate / fuel oil explosives (ANFO), into unstable plateaus of crushed rock.

Larry Bush is a former coal miner and government mine inspector, and a resident of the town of Appalachia, in Wise County. Bush is also an anti-mountaintop removal activist, the current chairman of SAMS-- Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, a group of mostly local people, many of them miners and ex-miners, which formed in Wise County to oppose a practice whose worst consequences they are experiencing, up close and personal. In an interview published recently, Larry Bush talks about the effect of the "clean coal" public relations campaign has had on some of his neighbors:

For anyone to get out there and tell you--like these commercials you see, talking about "clean coal"--why, there's no such thing. Once they put it out there, it's subliminal. After a while people say, "Well, maybe it is clean." We're so gullible, it's a damn shame. (250)

The interview is a revelation, even for readers who may already be well-versed in the literature of mountaintop removal. Bush talks about harrassment he receives in his community from other miners. And he talks about the ethical quandaries and psychological stresses that MTR miners themselves face:

"Nobody in my family or my wife's family has ever worked any kind of strip mines," Bush says. "They'd quit work altogether before they'd work on one of these jobs. There are a couple guys in our organization [that is, in SAMS] who actually have quit because they couldn't stand doing that kind of destruction." (254)

The Bush interview appears in a book, published by University of Kentucky Press in 2009, that represents a new development in the already substantial, and rapidly growing, body of MTR literature. Something's Rising, by Silas House and Jason Howard, is a collection of profiles of anti-MTR activists, artists, musicians and writers, some of whom will be well-known to readers of this journal (including Jean Ritchie, Denise Giardina, Judy Bonds, and Jack Spadaro), and other figures who are perhaps lesser-known but who are no less fascinating, such as Larry Bush himself. The book is written in the tradition of Studs Terkel's Division Street: America (1967) or Working (1974). Like Terkel, House and Howard let the audio recorders roll, and let their subjects speak for themselves. The book includes eleven profiles. Each is, typically, about twenty pages and each includes a narrative introduction, describing the person and the interview situation, plus edited interview materials, and then ten or more pages of relatively unedited transcripts of the interviewee just talking.

While the book adopts the oral-history method popularized by Terkel, it does Terkel one better. Whereas the profiles in, say, Terkel's Division Street often feel unformed and open-ended and leave you wondering who these people are that you're meeting for the first time, House and Howard's profiles are at once more generous, and more sharpened. They're longer, more detailed, and authors provide more context for the interviewees' words than Terkel typically provides for his subjects.

I don't know which of the co-authors wrote which sections, but it's a good guess that House had a hand in the profile introductions, which typically describe the interviewees and interview settings with an anecdotal turn, and with a novelist's eye for detail. In blighted downtown Appalachia, for instance, where Larry Bush is interviewed, the authors describe a sight that appears in a downtown building's broken window: "an armless manequin of a little boy peers out, staring maliciously into the eyes of anyone passing on the sidewalk below" (248). House is a prolific writer and activist perhaps best know for his novels Clay's Quilt (2002) and Coal Tattoo (2005). He and co-author Howard are longtime friends, Kentucky natives, and collaborators in Public Outcry, the musical group devoted to protesting MTR.

The profiles in this book make for reading that is at the same disturbing, and oddly leisurely and engaging. They leave you with the sense of having visited and talked with the people portrayed. You come away with a deepened sense of outrage of the deprivations that are happening in Appalachia in the name of coal, yet also with a visceral sense of comfort that can only be derived from hearing the thoughts, and the rhythms of speech, of persons of decent, humane values. In that sense, each profile is a small island of sanity and values in a world that sometimes seems value-less and insane.

* * *

Jeff Biggers is an Appalachian "wannabe"--as he'll be the first to admit--a man from southern Illinois who sometimes gives the impression that he wishes he were born in Appalachia. He's probably best known to students of Appalachian studies as the author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America (2007). That book is popular history in the best sense: a linked series of readable, character-based, narrative chapters. Biggers also edited, with George Brosi, a volume of writings by Don West, the poet, activist and Highlander Center co-founder who, in his later years, served as a mentor of sorts for Biggers (No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, 2004).

Biggers is also, like House and Howard, a performer. He's earned earned a reputation, on the university guest-speaker circuit, as a dynamnic presenter and lecturer. If you get an opportunity to hear him speak, don't miss it. His lectures combine elements of story-telling and poetry and even, I would argue, stand-up comedy. He's also recently written an original play, "Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal," based on material from his most recent book. In spring of 2010, he took that play on the road with a theater/ activist group called The Coal Free Future Project.

As a journalist, Biggers has also recently become known among anti-MTR activists for his blog posts covering Appalachian environmental issues for the Huffington Post and Grist.org. In addition, he's recently written about these issues for Salon.com, The Nation magazine, the Washington Post and other journalistic venues. (To get a sense of the range of his recent journalistic writing, visit jeffrbiggers.com.)

In his new book, Biggers seems, at first, to leave Appalachia, to return to his southern Illinois roots. Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, tells the story of the region around Carbondale, in southern Illinois, an area of rolling hills near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The book provides a fascinating portrait of a backwoods region of America that I had never quite understood before--for that matter, a region that I'd never even thought much about, before reading this book. The book shows why the history of this out-of-the-way borderland is important, especially for readers who want to understand the politics of coal mining in Appalachia. Here Biggers places Appalachian mountaintop removal in two revealing contexts: In the context of the history of coal mining in America, and in the context of the sum of political forces that is the city of Chicago and, more broadly, the State of Illinois--"the land of Lincoln and Obama," as Biggers refers to it, throughout his book.

The coal deposits of southern Illinois were recognized early on as important "natural resource attributes," by Thomas Jefferson, and by the French from whom Jefferson would purchase the Mississippi Valley. Biggers narrates how the coal-rich southern part of the state became, in the nineteenth century, a vassal to the Illinois power center, Chicago. Like The United States of Appalachia, this book includes readable, narrative historical set pieces, with an emphasis on characters, and on surprising or unlikely-seeming historical facts. Did you know, for instance, that Illinois was, in effect, a slave state in the nineteenth century? In one chapter, Biggers tells how Illinois coal mine operators managed to finagle an exemption to the state's anti-slavery legal provisions, in order to secure African-American slave labor to work the coal mines, at one point nearly provoking a constitutional crisis.

Another chapter details the rise of some of America's most powerful coal concerns, most notably Peabody Coal (now Peabody Energy), formed in Illinois in the nineteenth century and now one of the largest energy companies in the world. Using southern Illinois as a kind of regional lens, Biggers reviews the labor history of coal mining, with an emphasis on the figure of Mother Jones (1837-1930), the storied labor leader and community organizer whose body is buried in Mount Olive, in south-central Illinois.

The regional lens provides in turn what is, for Biggers, also a personal framework for telling the story of coal. The Eagle Creek of the book's title is a tributary of the Saline River, in a region where Biggers' family roots extend back to the eighteenth century. The area, including the site of a Biggers' family ancestral home and farm, was strip-mined for coal, early in the last decade. The book begins with Biggers' gut-wrenching, personal account of himself and his mother watching this place strip-mined. That prologue, and the elements of personal memoir scattered throughout the book, add rich meaning to the book's historical narratives.

The book provides readers with a deep sense for why Biggers, the southern Illinois native, might have developed such a fascination with, and understanding for, Appalachia. The economic and cultural/colonial forces forces that continue to define and shape Appalachia are grounded in Illinois history. The last full chapter, indeed, provides a context and history for the phrase "clean coal" that has become such contested language in Appalachia today.

It turns out that the phrase has a long history as a deliberately deceptive marketing term in Illinois. It first appeared in the late 19th century in the advertisements of coal vendors in Chicago: "smoke-free clean coal." The term has been revived every twenty years or so, since then, as an industry marketing term. The lesson for anti-MTR activists and residents of Appalachia today: Keep shoveling.