By Clyde Edgerton | June/July 2009 | 

Don't Blow It

The ugly story of mountaintop mining

I want to hear reasons for remov-ng the tops of mountains about as much as I want to hear reasons for removing my mama’s head. But reasons for mountaintop removal coal mining are out there, stated by coal company executives, lobbyists, politicians, preachers, dynamite executives, and some union members. You can hear them all across West Virginia, Kentucky, and increasingly down into Tennessee and Virginia. What you’ll hear is “jobs, the economy, energy, clean coal.” Words like that.

Now. You want to see what mountaintop removal looks like?

Get a strong telescope and look at the moon’s surface.

The last time I saw something like that was in 1970 when I was flying combat missions over Laos. Our aircraft were dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on four intersections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The bombed intersections were called Boxes A, B, C, and D. The idea was to remove jungle foliage so we could see, and then bomb, enemy trucks. Want to know what those boxes looked like?

Check out pictures of Appalachian mountains with their tops removed at ohvec.org.

Reasons for not removing mountaintops are presented, not only with facts and statistics, but with moving human stories in Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky), by Silas House and Jason Howard, a book of transformative clarity and passion. I was astonished not only by this book’s message, but also by the creativity and elegance of its composition. The authors have arranged a presentation of sorts by many people, but it reads like a single powerful and clear river, flowing.

The business of coal mining atrocities is not well known. You’ve heard of the Exxon Valdez oil spill—a spill of more than eleven million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska in 1989. Chances are you’ve not heard of the Martin County Sludge Spill of 2000. That’s when a Massey Energy impoundment (a valley with a dam) in Kentucky broke loose and sent 306 million gallons of poisonous coal sludge into surrounding rivers and valleys.

Reading this book could not only change your life by increasing the chances for saving millions of acres of the Appalachian South destined for merciless obliteration (the EPA estimates that 2,200 square miles of Appalachian forests will be cleared for mountaintop removal mining by 2012), but also by giving you insight into the soul of the people of Appalachia. The words of this book (all spoken by natives of Appalachia) clearly spring from an unspeakably beautiful land. People from other parts of our country can write and talk well—and with certain distinctions. But they can’t talk like these people—and especially at this time in their drive toward a necessary justice.

I’ve been lucky to spend a good part of the past seven summers in Ashe County, North Carolina, which is just out of coal country, but well within the culture that encapsulates all of Appalachia. And I was recently living in a mountain cabin with my family and needed to put the electric service in my name. The mountain woman at the electric company on the other end of the phone line took my Social Security number, home address, and other information. Just as I was about to hang up, she said, “Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Would you go outside and get a meter reading so we won’t have to send a truck up there? Save us a little money.”

Finding myself gleefully refreshed, I complied. That my conversation would not be apt to happen outside Appalachia tells you something about how its culture is unique—and speaks to what the rest of us have lost. There’s a feeling of trust and transcendent simplicity all through Appalachia—a feeling of home, of peace—a feeling that’s been preserved in part because mountains can keep communities and institutions and companies and sources of power from getting so big.

Haven’t we had enough of the power that comes from big coal companies, big tobacco companies, big health companies, big banks, big insurance companies? I think of watching my father, a tobacco farmer, slowly die from emphysema, a victim in part of the power of North Carolina tobacco companies to criminally cover up for so long the news of the destructive evil of tobacco—to criminally hide from him in his younger days the fact that smoking could kill him. So much of what is part of us as a nation has gotten too big and powerful for the good of many citizens.