The
industry is still wrecking the Appalachians as it withers.
Coal’s death throes are
drawing closer, especially in Appalachia.
Nearly three-quarters of the coal extracted from West
Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky these days is being mined at a loss.
The number of coal companies declaring bankruptcy or edging toward it is
mounting.
That’s good for people and the planet. Burning coal fuels
climate change, causes cancer, and spreads asthma. And yanking coal out of the
groundwrecks the places where it’s found.
You might figure that low prices and declining demand would make mountaintop removal mining — one of the worst crimes against nature and humanity big business has ever
committed — less of a threat to surrounding communities.
That would be nice. As it turns out, the people who live on the
frontlines aren’t catching a break yet.
If you’re unfamiliar with the mechanics, picture this: Thick
forests of trees growing on peaks get mowed down. Explosives decapitate
mountains. A jumbled heap of crushed rocks and dirt laced with the remains of
dead animals and plants choke valleys. Entire ecosystems, villages, and
graveyards vanish. Rivers and streams are poisoned or smothered.
The non-profit group Appalachian Voices reached that conclusion
by scouring Google Earth Engine’s highly specialized maps in
an innovative new study. Why did people on the ground need fancy imaging
systems to sharpen their focus on what’s going on in places like Inman, Virginia?
“Only from the air can you fully grasp the magnitude of the
devastation,” wrote University of Kentucky professor Erik Reece of
what he’s witnessed on flights above the Appalachians. “The desolation
stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way
across southern West Virginia.”
I half-dreaded, half-hoped to at least glimpse these wastelands
during a recent family road trip around West Virginia’s New River Gorge.
Most of the massacred mountains are far from public roadways.
Even when we veered off beaten paths, we saw lots of hawks, wild rhododendron,
and waterfalls, but no manmade plateaus. So I bought a copy of Coal
Country at a Charleston bookstore.
It’s a collection of haunting essays about mountaintop removal
mining by Reece and other outraged Appalachian activists. Companies like Arch
Coal and Alpha Natural Resources were pulling big profits in 2009, when
the book came out, which the industry used to justify this assault on
mountains.
What a difference six years make. Arch lost $113 million between January and March. Its
shares sell for about a buck, down from their $75 peak. And the company might
not manage to repay the $5 billion it owes creditors, the Moody’s rating agency suggests.
It takes huge machines for Arch and its competitors to decimate
mountains, carve out the coal, and render the land uninhabitable. Those 80-ton
bulldozers are pricey. Companies, therefore, usually borrow to pay for their
mountaintop removal mining operations.
Having found government unwilling to end this scourge, environmentalists are pressing big banks to stop
financing it. So far, Barclays Bank, Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS,
BNP Paribas, Société Générale, and PNC Bank have all sworn offmountaintop removal mining.
Coal powered the industrial revolution and kept the lights on
for billions of people over the past century. As it collapses, remember that
the industry’s pain can’t
compare with the suffering it brought to the people and creatures who make
their homes in the world’s most ancient mountains.
“When I was a kid, down at the bottom of the mountain, I could
get crawdads, pick them up out of the water with my toes,” the late activist Larry Gibson wrote in Coal Country about his
West Virginia homestead. “Now, nothing lives on the land. What they’ve done is
irreversible. You can’t bring it back.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article brought back a lot of memories for me of the time I spent in West Virginia as staff director for the Citizens Coal Council. I left in 1999 as mountain-top removal began to become the method of choice for Appalachian mining and took the same kind of plane ride that Ms. Schwartz-Greco took. I also knew Larry Gibson and didn't know he had died. I walked his property with him, even saw a black bear. It's beautiful country and worth fighting for, even dying for. - W. Collette
Columnist
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national
editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.
