Fighting king coal

If you didn't care about mining's effects before, you will now

By Reviewed By Scott White

The term "mountaintop removal" has migrated from an industry-specific lexicon to become lodged in popular consciousness, particularly in the central Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. Dueling Op-Eds on the subject are becoming a regular Monday feature in this newspaper.

Just 10 days ago, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth staged a rally in at the state Capitol in support of House Bill 164, the Stream Saver Bill, designed to close the loophole in the federal Clean Water Act that allows coal companies to, literally, push debris from removing a mountaintop into the adjoining holler in which, invariably, a stream flows.

And, as Kentucky environmental activists are teaching us, those filled streams -- now more than 500 miles of them-- form the headwaters of all our major rivers and drinking water sources: Kentucky, Big Sandy, Licking and Ohio rivers.

If moved by this issue you would do well to pick up Michael Shnayerson's Coal River, a cogent depiction of mountaintop removal in the southern coalfields of West Virginia.

Shnayerson, an editor at Vanity Fair magazine, deftly employs real examples to not only frame the debate and the competing interests, but he demonstrates that this type of mining bears real consequences to real people living in real places -- and that those consequences are not always black-and-white.

Coal River's drama unfolds in federal courtrooms, protest marches and local gathering spots well off the West Virginia Turnpike.

Shnayerson accurately captures the competing loyalties of ordinary people who depend on the mines for their livelihoods while living in communities that suffer environmental degradation as a result of the repeated and unpunished violations of environmental laws by mine owners.

Shnayerson makes the case that the permanent deformation of the southern Appalachians is a result of corporate greed abetted by government regulators in the Clinton and Bush administrations. He does so using a typical David-Goliath paradigm.

The "Davids" are Joe Lovett, a public interest lawyer; citizen groups like Coal River Mountain Watch led by displaced-resident-turned-activist Judy Bonds, and a pair of federal judges who are exemplars of judicial independence.

The "Goliaths" are Massey Energy, its president Don Blankenship, and its affiliate corporations, along with its enabling regulators -- the Army Corps of Engineers and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

Massey is a monolith that is the largest owner of coal in West Virginia and hardly a stranger to Kentuckians: a Massey-controlled mine was responsible for the catastrophic slurry-pond spill in Martin County in 2000.

Shnayerson avoids allowing this well-worn idiom to slip into a tired morality play.

Rather, he packs the narrative with action such as standoffs between miner families and out-of-state demonstrators, courtroom arguments in which the very existences of waterways are at stake, bought judicial elections; grass-roots organizing, and brief character sketches of the principal and minor players.

If the tale being told were not so tragic, it would be an invigorating, edge-of-your-seat story.

Shnayerson also achieves a more difficult goal -- making the reader care about the outcome.

Avoiding sentimentality, Coal River, like other great examples of the genre (Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle, Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands and David K. Shipler's The Working Poor), lets the unadorned facts, the perversions of the law and the arrogance of Massey spark a reader's outrage and ultimately, perhaps, create change.

Unlike Lost Mountain, a similar book by Kentuckian Eric Reece, Coal River doesn't seek to paint an idyllic Walden's Pond.

Shnayerson ends his book with the story of Dell Ray, a retired mine electrician who chose where to draw his line: " ... like an early-Appalachian pioneer, (Dell) went out to the porch and sat there, listening to the sounds of the night and keeping watch."

Dell Ray knew that his enemy, the enemy of his land and his heritage, Massey Energy, bore watching.

In Let This Hill Rest, our late great laureate James Still wrote: "Let the leaf fall, let day descend/ On untilled slopes. Let the oak's girth/ Strain and increase, vine drown the rock/ And paling blossoms flow in creeping wind."

Though admittedly this bucolic setting is increasingly rare in Kentucky, it would be to our shame to let it become extinct.

Coal River is a witness to us that such efforts, such hope, are not vain.