Newsweek: The Voters of Appalachia... (Whitesville, Harman: credit, house, buy)
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Since I'm not from Appalachia per/se, I have no right to comment on the original author. By all rights I should keep my mouth shut.
However- this state, and Appalachia in general, has done NOTHING to improve herself over the years. NOTHING. The local politicos, past and present, should be run out of town on a rail as far as I'm concerned.
The backs of hard working folks were broken on coal and other dying industries while the connected gadfly's reaped rewards. Cigar smoke filled backrooms and laughter all the way to the bank.
It's not national politics that's the problem- it's local. Who's responsible for schools? Infrastructure? Economic planning?
Until you fix what's broke at home, it ain't gonna work and I don't care who sits in the oval office.
Kentucky and Tennessee are other states which had a strong coal mining background,yet they are thriving much more than WV (esp.Tennessee). I wonder if it's because WV has no major cities like Louisville, Nashville,etc.
Kentucky and Tennessee are other states which had a strong coal mining background,yet they are thriving much more than WV (esp.Tennessee). I wonder if it's because WV has no major cities like Louisville, Nashville,etc.
Because the cities that are doing well are outside of Appalachia....
Threerun: You are exactly right..it begins at the city...county level and works downward in layers...crooked judges, lawyers looking for the easy money...mine unions...teachers...everyone is connected almost by bloodline in Wv...and because its such a small state...the crooks can be seen easier...
For the people to lift themselves up, resources must exist...not only for the grifters but more or less for everyone...
Some views from the other side of the fence, ie, not coal.
First let me say that I live near coal producing counties. I see what happens. One friend was complaining about the devastation of MTR near her home and I told her, "Nobody cares." Which I do believe. She said, "Well, I do."
I have seen first hand the destruction of MTR and strip mining. As GWB might say "The uglification of WV." The ecological and negative economic impact on the people. And when the area's mined out..oh well, you'll just have to move to get another job in the coal industry. Who cares if your family has lived in the same community for 200 years.
I have seen the loss of jobs due to increasing mechanization. The overweight coal trucks going out of control and killing people. The miles and miles of cars filled to the brim with coal at the Bluefield Southern Norfolk hub, destined for some NE city.
Having said all that, mining is a proud profession. Miners tend to be generational and it takes a special person to perform such a dangerous job day after day.
But I feel that coal is not the savior of WV. Like I've said, I don't see the money although I'm sure Massey, Peabody and Consol do.
And it competes directly with tourism which is another leading industry that encourages small business growth. Who wants to see treeless, topless mountains? As Gail Norton said when she flew over WV, "Where are all the trees?"
I have friends and family in Boone County and I have driven many times through Whitesville referred to below. If you want to see the "benefits" of coal, take a trip there. Massey's HQ isn't far away. Wonder why they don't show footage of that dying town when they proclaim how wonderful coal is.
One of the greatest environmental and human rights catastrophes in American history is underway just southwest of our nation's capital. In the coalfields of Appalachia, individuals, families and entire communities are being driven off their land by flooding, landslides and blasting resulting from mountaintop removal coal mining.
Mountaintop removal is a relatively new type of coal mining that began in Appalachia in the 1970s as an extension of conventional strip mining techniques. Primarily, mountaintop removal is occurring in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.
Mountaintop removal involves clear cutting native hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams. While the environmental devastation caused by this practice is obvious, families and communities near these mining sites are forced to contend with continual blasting from mining operations that can take place up to 300 feet from their
homes and operate 24 hours a day. Families and communities near mining sites also suffer from airborne dust and debris, floods that have left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, and contamination of their drinking water supplies.
In central Appalachian counties, which are among the poorest in the nation, homes are frequently the only asset folks have. Mining operations have damaged hundreds of homes beyond repair and the value of homes near a mountaintop removal sites often decrease by as much as 90%. Worst of all, mountaintop removal is threatening not just the people, forest and mountaints of central Appalachia, but the very culture of the region. Coal companies frequently claim that mountaintop removal is beneficial for the people, economy and the environment, but the facts just don’t hold up.
West Virginia is ground zero when it comes to energy in this country. As environmental writer and thinker Bill McKibben said, the state "stands as the perfect example of the bankruptcy of our energy model."
The history of coal companies in Appalachia is a tragic one full of stolen land, broken promises, and lost lives -- not unlike the story of how this country was settled and its destiny manifested.The result has been an impoverished people, forced to work for coal companies, and as a result, "to poison their children in order to feed them," in the words of activist Judy Bonds of Coal
River Mountain Watch.
She is like the Erin Brockovich of Appalachia, only she would need someone punchier than Julia Roberts to play her in a movie. Bonds is short, gray haired and always on message. She grew up in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, a tenth generation mountaineer whose grandfather, father, cousins, ex-husband and brother worked in the mines.
"The more coal we mine, the poorer we get. We don't have good roads, good infrastructure, water and sewage -- we have nothing," said Bonds. "They treat us like a third-world country, and the rest of America turns their faces away. There is no prosperity here."
It is hard to argue with her. The town of Whitesville, where her organization is headquartered, is a sad stretch of dilapidated brick buildings puckered by empty lots with tufts of grass attempting to reclaim the concrete.
If you drive east from the town, in the direction of Greenbrier County, steep hills rise on either side of a small highway with tiny homes built so close to the road that the lips of their porches seem to touch the pavement.
These forested foothills hide what is behind them -- acres upon acres of what looks like moonscape but used to be one of the world's most diverse hardwood forests. As coal has gotten harder and harder to reach, the coal industry in West Virginia has resorted to mountaintop removal mining, blowing from 600-1,000 feet off the tops of mountains with 3 millions pounds of explosives per day. The process results in a tremendous amount of excess debris, technically about 15 feet of "overburden" for every one foot of coal, Bonds said, which is then dumped into valleys, burying streams and covering habitat.
Coal River Mountain Watch reports that 400,000 acres of Appalachia's mountains have been leveled and 1,400 streams buried by the process.
While many valleys are being filled with mountain debris, others are being converted into sludge dams (called "slurry impoundments" by the industry), giant holding tanks filled with billions of gallons of wastewater leftover from cleaning coal at preparation
plants.
Most folks in the area live in hollows, pronounced locally like "hollers," the valley area between ridges. But blasting, and flooding and landslides from unstable valley fills are forcing people to abandon their homes. And they aren't the only ones -- hungry black bears, snakes, deer, raccoons, possums, and the wholecast of forest creatures are among the displaced.
"It is a total disregard for the price of humans, for the people of Appalachia, for our land and our children," said Bonds.
You don't have to own a plane to understand the destruction. A quick trip on Google Earth reveals the devastation, the deforestation, and the geological assault on a mountain region that should stand as a national treasure.
The Appalachian Mountains are 480 million years old. They have rubbed shoulders with the African continent and four times the Southern Appalachians have survived the creeping fingers of advancing glaciers, making the area one of oldest and most diverse forests. The region also yields a bountiful crop of ginseng, with 4,800 pounds of it being harvested in West Virginia a year.
"These forests are the lungs of the east," says Bonds, and they are also a well-stocked medicine cabinet.
The mountains have also produced mountain people. Bonds wears a shirt that says "Save the Endangered Hillbilly."
"You can't have hillbillies if you don't have hills, and they are blowing ours up," Bonds recently told a woman who laughed at the shirt's premise.
You can't have mountaineers without mountains and as the mountains of West Virginia are being destroyed, so are a people's heritage, Bond explains. To Appalachians, "hillbilly" symbolizes a way of life that was based on subsistence, resourcefulness, and an intricate knowledge of the natural environment.
The future of Appalachians is tied to the land, and their joint survival will likely hinge on the energy decisions made in the next few years and decades. But they are not the only ones in danger.
"People may not see this coal, but when they flip a switch on, they are destroying my life," said Bonds. "They are also destroying their own children's future, and they are destroying any type of future this earth may have."
Mountaintop removal is ultimately so unsustainable and destructive a practice that, 25 years in, it has finally raised the alarm of activists of all stripes.
Although the West Virginia Coal Association will have you believe that only 1 percent of minable land is being mined that way, mountaintop removal now accounts for about 26 percent of the coal mined in Appalachia, mostly in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, the locale of Reece's book.
"Lost Mountain" is heartbreaking for anyone who reveres the natural order and its beauty, a seamless blend of personal essay and reportage. He refers to the Appalachian chain as home to "the oldest and most diverse forests in North America," its diversity of tree species making it the continent's "seedbed."
After a fly-over of a mesa that used to be a mountain, Reece was so struck by the image that he set about investigating the life and death of one mountain in 2004. It was named not for its fate but for its connection with Lost Creek 1,847 below.
He spent a year, what he calls "a covert sojourn," climbing around and spying on the mining operations as the mountain came apart, returning to spots once covered with trees and now denuded, describing leaning trees, half unearthed, trees pushed down the mountain like so many spilled toothpicks and the chilling sight of an ovenbird in a tree as a spray of rock from blasting comes raining down, the ovenbird being a harbinger of the end game in obert Frost's poem "The Ovenbird," which ends:
"The question that he frames in all but words,
Is what to make of a diminished thing."
"Lost Mountain" could serve an environmental sciences class as textbook, but it also can make you feel fierce about the land you love.
Threerun: You are exactly right..it begins at the city...county level and works downward in layers...crooked judges, lawyers looking for the easy money...mine unions...teachers...everyone is connected almost by bloodline in Wv...and because its such a small state...the crooks can be seen easier...
For the people to lift themselves up, resources must exist...not only for the grifters but more or less for everyone...
And we keep them in power because?
And millersangel I 'm with you. I don't feel coal is the answer. The severance tax may keep us in the black (well, that's when you lump it with gambling revenue too ) but what does that do for the overall conditions of the state? Nada. Poop. Zero sum. Throw some gravel on the road and move along.
It's more of the same and promises to only keep the same idiots in the dugout and bullpen. Time to trade up, get some fresh arms and new bats. Fire the manager and his staff. If you want to play in the majors, build a new team to take to the field.
This state (with the exception of Morgantown and the EP) attracts who? retiree's? Out of state folks that are looking to escape higher costs of living so they can eek out retirement here? That's our draw? Without offsetting workers to help pay for the services our elders need?
And MTR is sickening, just sickening. And we want to build our future on it? Shortsighted profit. Same old, same old.
I know that at one time the Knoxville and East Tennessee area were very poor--my mom has cousins who grew up there--but now the region is doing pretty well I hear esp. for being in Appalachia. Tennessee must be doing something right. It went from an area as poor or even poorer the WV to a place where businesses and many people are moving.
And the capital,Nashville,is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. I wonder if the state has better leadership than WV. Maybe climate is on its side as well,because even though part of it is in appalachia,they have milder weather then PA,WV,and east KY.
The coal companies own the land where MTR takes place...they are legally using it for profit and ruining the Eco-system in the process...when they are finished they have created a perfect park for the windmills that are transforming our other mountains into ugliness.
Couldn't all of this hell be concentrated in one area...perhaps the idea is to begin at the bottom of the state and mine it through to Weirton...God help us!
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) but what does that do for the overall conditions of the state? Nada. Poop. Zero sum. Throw some gravel on the road and move along.
