Appalachia is a window on another world, a place where black and blasted mountains stand counterpoint to lush, green valleys, and elegant Victorians crowd simpler frame homes down into narrow valleys where rivers sometimes run ashy with coal dust.
If you live in Appalachia, loosely defined as an area stretching from Georgia and Alabama in the south to as far north as New York state, your life is haunted by the ever-present image of these bleak and blasted mountains. This area, which follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, is home to more than 20 million people, many of whom share a common cultural heritage of music, religion and austerity inherited from their Scots Irish ancestors.
They have often been accused of being narrow-minded. The truth is that they are insular, and this reserve is as much ingrained as an artifact of their sometimes dreadful poverty. They have also been accused of being ignorant, and many do lack higher education, but all are quick to turn a hand to repairing a chair, planting a garden, fashioning a wood stove from an old barrel and generally making more with less.
Appalachia, roughly the size of the United Kingdom and shaped like Italy, is a demographic without parallel in the United States; suborned by poverty, steeped in sickness, subject to a host of social ills from alcohol to drugs, shaped by a tradition of isolationism, and subjugated to the rule of coal.
The heart of Appalachia, a quadrangle defined by the mountainous regions of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, is one of the most beautiful and ecologically diverse areas in the country. This extraordinary beauty is broken by coal towns like Rural, West Virginia, an imaginary place whose main thoroughfare is lined with old, red-brick buildings and cracked sidewalks, the cement curbs falling into the gutter in places, the asphalt broken and seldom patched.
Elsewhere, but not along the main street, grand old houses remind one of the days when the mine owners lived in ostentatious wealth while the miners scrabbled for a living. This hasn't changed much, except that many of the coal seams have played out and the wealthy owners moved on to greener (or blacker) pastures. However, with energy supplies in jeopardy, and fuel costs rising, companies are coming back to get the last remnants out of the ground. In the near distance behind Rural, rounded mountains loom, covered with mixed pine and deciduous forest. But perhaps not for long.
A new ruling by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which would make it easier for mining companies to rip the tops off mountains in search of coal, has not improved the outlook for these forgotten people, and even though the ruling requires U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval before it can be finalized, the current record of the EPA - which clearly favors business over human welfare - makes it likely the ruling will become law.
Bush administration officials say the proposed changes are essential in eliminating confusion over existing mining laws, and add that the environmental impact is "slightly positive". Environmental groups differ, saying it is a get-out-of-jail-free ticket for mining companies that will allow them to strip-mine mountains and dump the residue in valleys and streams, where it will continue to pollute soil and water for decades.
That's the political background. The human background is a mythical family named McShea, whose ancestors settled in W. Virginia in the 19th century. They live outside Rural, in an area where the hills were mined and grew back, in a clapboard home where food often wins out over electricity; the McSheas still have coal oil lanterns.
Now, as in many former strip-mining areas, enormous machines have begun moving again, and the sound of explosions is becoming as commonplace as in 2003 Baghdad. The white curtains in the McShea kitchen are a flag of hope and futility; the coal dust seeps through every crack in the weathered doors and windows. Almost half the children in Appalachia have more colds and allergies than the national average, and most have frequent viral or bacterial infections as well. Two earaches a month are not uncommon.
In coal country, unlike almost everywhere else on earth, the mountains are not forever. What one morning is a gentle crown topped with native birch, pine and sycamore harboring birds and wildlife, is the next morning a ragged landscape devoid of any green and living thing.
The damage isn't confined to the mountain, however. Blasts are strong enough to crack foundations and walls, tip homes off their bases and break windows, and the mining companies are not held to account because livelihoods depend on those companies; ill-will can lose a miner his job. Because of mining techniques, wells have been polluted, cemeteries unearthed and towns abandoned. According to the nonprofit grassroots organization Appalachian Voices, 450 mountains have been destroyed to date. United Mountain Defense has coined a word for this wholesale destruction of environments, calling it "ecocide".
Why do mining companies operate this way? The low-sulfur coal in the Cumberland Plateau (southern Appalachia) lies just below a surface layer of earth, trees, native grasses and flowers. To get to it, coal companies blast away the top layer, cart away the vegetation-laden topsoil, and scrape the coal out. The coal-laden topsoil and debris often as not end up in some pristine valley next to streams.
The EPA estimates that this wholesale blasting will destroy 2,200 square miles of forest by 2012. To date, coal companies have buried 1,165 miles of Appalachian streams, and replanted acreage with non-indigenous species that compete with native species, destroying biodiversity and leading to increased erosion.
The cost isn't just environmental. Using modern machinery weighing up to eight million pounds - some pieces as tall as a 20-story building - coal companies managed to dispense with 10,000 workers from 1991 to 1997. In the decade before that, 100,000 mining jobs were similarly mechanized.
The McSheas, father and two sons, are part of that statistic. One son will move north to find a job. The other, already ill from his decade in the mines, hopes to hang on. It's late October, and their pantry is almost bare. Food given out by relief agencies rarely lasts the month for which it was intended, and this late in the season, the garden - tainted by decades of coal dust - produces only a few parsnips, rutabagas and potatoes. Water from their well, also tainted, doesn't improve the prospects for next year's garden. If the drought already creeping into Virginia spreads next summer, this well may be their only source of water.
The McSheas are also part of a larger survey. Though the U.S. Census Bureau claims the median income in W. Virginia is $37,060, another statistic admits that 10 percent of the population is living at, or below, poverty level. In Rural, the average income is $13,000. The McSheas fall into this latter category; when they lose their unemployment benefits, they will be destitute. The elder, after four decades in the industry, has emphysema, a bad back, and an addiction to tobacco he can't always afford. The younger is equally addicted to prescription pain killers, an addiction acquired after a severe mining accident, and his divorce after five years of marriage brought him back under the family roof as a severely depressed individual, but one more wage earner - when jobs can be found.
The McShea men don't see themselves as statistics. Hard lives have made them singularly independent. Doctors and medicine are largely unaffordable, but the McSheas themselves are a statistical certainty. The older will probably not live past 65. Coal towns overall have more than 1,600 excess deaths annually compared to other regions, and these mortality rates increase exponentially with every ton of coal mined.
According to a study published in 2008 in the online journal PLoS, declines in life expectancy in the U.S. - which began overall in the 1980s - predict that the worst declines will take place in regions like Appalachia, Texas, the southern portion of the Midwest, the Southeast, and everywhere along the Mississippi River.
An October, 2008 report from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center shows that poverty, depression, mental illness, drugs and alcohol form a pattern of behaviors that reinforce one another, especially in economically disenfranchised areas like the coal mining regions of central Appalachia. According to the report, more adults in Appalachia are diagnosed with serious psychological stress and major depressive disorders than anywhere in the nation, and these figures are independent of drug use.
In another study from 2008, researchers found that - in 14 Appalachian counties where coal mining operations exceeded four millions tons a year - residents showed higher rates of cardiopulmonary disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, diabetes, and lung and kidney disease, than the population at large.
The outlook for the McSheas, and Appalachia in general, is not improved by a recent report that India is looking to invest in coal mines as a way around its own energy crisis.
India currently imports 50 million tons of coal every year, and the figure is rising. Government officials say purchasing coal at the source is a better way to align costs with demand, particularly as coal mine prices are declining in the U.S. now that various foreign firms have sold their American coal interests.
The McSheas probably don't care who owns the mines, just as long as they get jobs. Twenty five dollars an hour, the average wage for experienced surface miners, puts food on the table and medical on the slate of benefits. The McSheas can't afford to think of the future of Appalachia, parts of which may look like the moon by the end of this century. They have to live in the here and now.
Coal is the most abundant fuel in the U.S., which means that someone is going to be extracting it for decades to come to burn in power plants to create electricity for that "other" America; the one that doesn't have to live in Appalachia.
‘Clean coal' technologies like IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) plants, and carbon sequestration techniques - which propose to pump carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs - are still in their infancy. Even if perfected, they won't do much for the Appalachian landscape or the people who live there. There's no clean way to mine coal, as any miner knows.
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