by Chris Hedges
Larry Gibson surveys mountains shaved for their coal near his property.
“An’ what chance are these people gonna have?” he says, looking down to a cluster of houses in the “holler” below. The mountains lie so close together that houses and communities scratch out space tucked in hollows, long rows between them known locally as hollers: “Ya see how narrow these hollers are? We’re gonna lose a lot of people.
“When it comes right down to it, I been callin’ fer a revolution across this country fer a long time now,” Gibson says. “I think it was Thomas Jefferson said, I think it was ’im, who said we should have a revolution every twenty years to keep the country in check. We’ bin way overdue.”
“What would it look like?” I ask.
“It would be holdin’ the government in contempt,” he says. “It would be holdin’ the government to credibility and accountability. It would be holdin’ people accountable fer their actions. That’s all I’m askin’ fer. They come in here and tell me, ‘Larry, you have to be reliable, accountable, responsible, credible,’ all the things they tell me, everything they jus’ taught me, I jus’ told you now, they ain’t bin doin’. That’s all I’m askin’.
“They’re gonna destroy my state, and the government’s gonna give them the incentives to do it,” he says. “My grandchildren and great-grandchildren won’t have any heritage here. They won’t have any mountain culture here, ’cause they’re wipin’ it out. I had the best of time of my life not knowin’ I wasn’t rich or comfortable or wealthy. How could I enjoy myself outdoors if I wasn’t wealthy? Who measures wealth? How do you do it? All the energy we have, all the people they destroyed, all the fatalities on these mine sites, and they keep makin’ reference to this as cheap energy.”
“What keeps you going?” I ask.
“I’m right,” he says. “That’s all.”
The next morning Joe and I are at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, to fly over the coalfields with Vivian Stockman, the project coordinator for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and Susan Lapis, a pilot and chemistry professor. The flight was arranged through SouthWings, a nonprofit group that flies observers across the Southeast to promote conservation. Stockman, who gets airsick when buffeted by the winds, has pressure-point wristbands and a patch on her neck to combat the nausea. We settle into the worn, black leather seats of Lapis’s 1977 Cessna 182 Skylane, which she calls the “station wagons of the air,” and put on earphones. We are parked next to a gray Air Force C-130 cargo plane. The Cessna rocks slightly in the gusts as we lift off from the concrete runway. We head south.
Lapis, as if she is patiently speaking to first-year chemistry students, explains what happens when heavy metals are blasted into the air. Enzymes, she says, depend on heavy metals. She tells us what happens when the balance is ripped apart by the release of calcium and magnesium into the atmosphere.
“When I was an organic chemistry student working in the lab, the way we would get a relatively insoluble substance to dissolve in a solvent was to grind it up with a mortar and pestle into a powder or little pieces. This increases the surface area of the substance to be dissolved, and thus makes it more readily soluble,” Lapis tells us through the headphones. “To harvest the coal in MTR [mountaintop removal], the layers of mountain in between the layers of coal are blasted to smithereens and dumped into valley fills. When rainwater trickles through this pulverized rock—more surface area—it can more easily dissolve minerals from the rock, some of which are heavy metals that are toxic in high concentrations. The metal ion-rich runoff from the valley fills then goes into streams, rivers, and groundwater of West Virginia in unnatural concentrations, sometimes toxic.
“From the air you can see weirdly-colored pools of water on the mine sites,” she says as we fly over an impoundment of coal slurry streaked with swirls of bright green, gray, and black, “colored by these metals in unnatural concentrations. Some people up in the hollows get foul-smelling, discolored water coming out of their wells or their kitchen spigots, and the coal companies are providing them with safe drinking water in huge containers. Some folks have to carry these giant jugs down the hill into the house for water to bathe the baby!”
Lapis explains that she could once move south by identifying landmarks from the air such as Williams Mountain, whose long, rocky outcrop resembled a battleship. But when we reach the mountain, we see only a denuded plateau of looping ring roads and gray rubble. She banks the plane so we can see down into another massive impoundment, filled with circles of bright green. “Heavy metal pollution,” she says as we fly over the dam. The coal ash in the slurry ponds, often the size of small lakes, contains high levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium, selenium, and mercury.1 Many of these waste ponds are perched perilously in mountainous crags above towns and even schools. When the dirt walls of the ponds burst, the damage is catastrophic.
We fly over hundreds of trees, which along with the topsoil and sandstone, are being bulldozed over the side of a mountain by seventy-five-ton Caterpillar D10 bulldozers. Many of the trees lying like matchsticks on the sides of the peak are on fire. The gray smoke drifts upward.
“When we come back next month all the trees there will be gone,” Lapis says.
We see the thin layers of green that cling to the remaining rock face and the streaks where the sprayed-on grass seed has washed away.
“What are we thinking?” Lapis says softly.
As the plane dips over Clear Fork, we see, snaking through the trees, the old logging roads from the 1920s, when companies stripped southern West Virginia of its virgin forests. We fly over Brushy Fork Slurry Impoundment, the largest earthen dam in the Western Hemisphere, which was built above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, now closed because of the threat of a dam burst. Yellow construction vehicles crawl across the blasted moonscape.
The effects of mountaintop removal as seen from the air.
“Your eye tricks you from up here,” Lapis says. “Those are some of the largest machines on earth. They have twelve-foot tires.”
She noses the plane toward a dragline excavator. Draglines, which cost upward of $100 million dollars and can be twenty stories tall, are among the largest pieces of mobile equipment built on land.2 Bulldozers, container trucks, and backhoes, even the oversized versions we see below us, look like children’s toys next to the draglines. The draglines do the work of hundreds of miners. Half a century ago it took a miner a day to dig and haul sixteen tons of coal out of the ground. A dragline, once a few hundred feet are blasted off the top of a mountain, can fill the back of a truck with sixty tons of bituminous coal rock in a few minutes. Jobs in the mining industry have fallen from a high of about one hundred and thirty thousand a few decades ago to about fourteen thousand workers. Once the unions were broken and the mines were mechanized, the coal companies began to strip-mine and then blast off the tops of mountains. Most “miners” are, in fact, heavy machine operators.3
The coal companies write the laws. They control local and state politicians.4 They destroy the water tables, suck billions of dollars’ worth of coal out of the state, and render hundreds of acres uninhabitable. And ninety-five percent of the coal companies are not even based in West Virginia. The rights and health of those who live on the land are meaningless. The fossil-fuel industry’s dirty game of corporate politics was on display following the arrests in the fall of 2011 of 1,253 activists from the environmental group 350.org outside the White House. The protestors opposed the proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from the tar sands in Canada through the United States to the Gulf Coast. James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, has said that the building of the pipeline would mean “game over for the climate.”5 President Barack Obama, ducking the issue, said he would review the proposal and make a decision after the November 2012 presidential election.
The U.S. House of Representatives, urged on by lobbyists, however, voted a few days later 234 to
194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline.6 The House attached its demand to a bill proposing a popular payroll tax cut. Oil Change International calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted in favor of the measure received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry. The 194 representatives who opposed it received $8 million.7 Speaker of the House John Boehner, a champion of the pipeline, has received a total of $1,111,080 in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry. His counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who pushed it through the Senate, has received $1,277,208. Obama, saying the Republican deadline left no time to approve the project, did not sign off on the pipeline. But his administration did not reject it, either. The president invited the company building the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, to reapply, which it has done. Obama, who approved the southern section of the oil pipeline, pushed a final decision on the full pipeline into 2013, beyond the presidential elections.8
Elected officials at the state and federal level are paid employees of the corporate state. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the major corporations in the country, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, and News Corp, spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. A staggering ninety-four percent of the Chamber’s contributions went to politicians who deny the existence of climate change.9
Disease in the coalfields is rampant. The coal ash deposits have heavy concentrations of hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen. Cancer, like black lung disease, is an epidemic. Kidney stones are so common that in some communities nearly all the residents have had their gallbladders removed. More than half a million acres, or eight hundred square miles, of the Appalachians have been destroyed. More than five hundred mountain peaks are gone, along with an estimated one thousand miles of streams, which provide most of the headstreams for the eastern United States.
The spine of the Appalachian Mountains, a range older than the Himalayas, winds its way through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Isolated, lonely patches of verdant hills and forests now lie in the midst of huge gray plateaus, massive, dark-eyed craters, and sprawling, earthen-banked dams filled with billions of gallons of coal slurry. Gigantic slag heaps, the residue of decades of mining operations, lie idle, periodically catching fire and belching oily plumes of smoke and an acrid stench. The coal companies have turned perhaps half a million acres in West Virginia and another half million in Kentucky, once some of the most beautiful and fertile land in the country, along with hundreds of towering peaks, into stunted mounds of rubble. It was impossible to grasp the level of destruction in the war in Bosnia until you got in a helicopter and flew over the landscape, seeing village after village dynamited by advancing Serb forces into ruins. The same scale of destruction, and the same problem in realizing its true extent, holds true for West Virginia and Kentucky.
That destruction, like the pillaging of natural resources in the ancient Mesopotamian, Roman, and Mayan empires, is one of willful if not always conscious self-annihilation. The dependence on coal, which supplies the energy for half the nation’s electricity, means that its extraction, as supplies diminish, becomes ever more extreme. The Appalachian region provides most of the country’s coal, its production dwarfed only by that of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.10 We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.11
Those who carry out this pillage probably believe they can outrun their own destructiveness. They think that their wealth, privilege, and gated communities will save them. Or maybe they do not think about the future at all. But the death they have unleashed, the relentless contamination of air, soil, and water, the physical collapse of communities, and the eventual exhaustion of coal and fossil fuels themselves, will not spare them. They, too, will succumb to the poisoning of nature; the climate dislocations and freak weather caused by global warming; the spread of new, deadly viruses; and the food riots and huge migrations that will begin as the desperate flee from flooded or drought-stricken pockets of the earth. The steady plundering of the natural world, the failure to heed the warning signs of the planet, will teach us a lesson about the danger of hubris. The health of the land and the purity of water is the final measurement of whether any society is sustainable. “A culture,” the poet W. H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods.”12
Joe and I drive from one decrepit coal camp to another, our four-wheel-drive vehicle splattered with mud and coal dust. We pull over and unwind wads of paper towels periodically to wipe away the soot that coats the rear window.
At the small bridge leading into the town of Gary, two young women in dark parkas are sitting listlessly on the concrete base of the crossing sign. A few feet away is a road that leads down a small slope into a more isolated stretch known as “the Pines.” Cars come in and out of the Pines until late into the night to buy or sell drugs. It is, in this old coal-mining town, one of the few signs of activity.
The remnants of the Alpheus Preparation Plant, once the largest coal-cleaning facility in the world.
Gary is located in a big bend of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. It was built in the early twentieth century by U.S. Steel, the country’s first billion-dollar corporation. The company operated one of the largest coal preparation plants in the world.13 But when U.S. Steel closed the plant in Gary in 1986, twelve hundred workers instantly lost their jobs. Personal income in McDowell County plunged that year by two-thirds. Huge numbers of families packed up and left. The community fell into terminal decay. There are today 861 people in Gary.14 There were 98,887 in McDowell County in 1950.15 Today there are fewer than 23,000. The countywide per capita average income is $12,585. The median home value is $30,500.16
Gary’s rutted streets are lined by empty clapboard houses with sagging roofs. Porches fall away from the buildings. Wooden steps are rotted. Rusted appliances, the frames of old cars, tires, and heaps of garbage lie scattered in front of rows of deserted dwellings or clog the brackish water in the creeks, where low-lying branches are tangled with plastic bags and bottles. Boarded-up storefronts, neglected churches, the bleak brick remains of Gary High School, and the shuttered, flat-roofed stone bank building give the landscape the feel of a ravaged war zone. The spindly remains of chimneys jut up out of the charred timbers of burned houses. The guts of most buildings, as in Camden, have been stripped of piping and copper for sale in the scrap yards. The gold dome of the empty Orthodox church disappeared one night when a thief somehow commandeered a crane. The train station, the restaurant, and the old company stores, meticulously planned by Judge Albert Gary, the architect of J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel empire and the man for whom the town was named, are skeletal remains. Mobile homes stand empty along the side of the road, their siding and torn insulation flapping in the wind in tattered strips. There is no supermarket. Canned or packaged food, high in sodium, sugar, preservatives, and fat, along with cheap bottles of liquor, are sold at the local convenience store and gas station, located across the road from the drug market.
There are rarely mayors in these towns. Basic services such as water, electricity, and fuel are often no longer available. When Joe and I visit the water treatment plant outside of Gary, the two cement collecting pools for wastewater are empty. The gate is padlocked shut. The closed plant is ringed by cyclone fencing topped by three rows of barbed wire. The stench of sewage rises from a pipe where the town’s untreated sewer water pours directly into Tug Fork. It has been like this for more than two years. The feces discharged directly into the creek are nicknamed, by the locals, the “brown trout.”
One morning Amanda Reed, the minister at the Welch Methodist church in nearby Welch, takes us to see Destry Daniels, the minister of the small Methodist church in Gary. The four of us head over to a small house where Rudy Kelly and his wife, who are members of Destry’s congregation, live. Rudy, even
at ninety, is a large, robust man who worked as a miner for forty years and has spend the last couple of decades fighting off black lung disease.
Those who want fresh produce or meat, or those who need a doctor, have to find a ride into the county seat of Welch, which has seen its boom population in the 1950s of one hundred thousand reduced to 2,180. Welch, like Gary, is little more than a ghost town.17 But at least it still has a hospital and a supermarket.
Nearly thirty percent of those in Welch live on less than $10,000 a year.18 Joe and I stay at a small motel outside of Welch called the Count Gilu. One night a woman, disoriented and high, asks us for a bowl so she can eat in her room. On another night a belligerent drunk bangs on Joe’s door in the early hours of the morning. Forty percent of families with children in the city live below the poverty line, a proportion that skyrockets to seventy-five percent of families with children under the age of five. The high-school dropout rate is twenty-eight percent, compared with about eight percent nationwide. The city has had no new construction in nearly twenty years, and seventy percent of the buildings were put up before 1960. The remaining thirty percent were built before 1940. Little is done to keep these structures maintained even if they are inhabited. Whole streets in Welch, like Gary, are deserted, the empty storefronts remnants of another era when shoppers in the county converged on G. C. Murphy’s Department Store, J. C. Penney, the Flat Iron Drug Store, King Cut Rate, Franklin’s Dairy Bar, the Model Furniture Company, or the Carter Hotel, now hollow shells with vacant windows and faded signs over their chained and padlocked doors. One of the few places to eat is the Sterling Drive-In Restaurant on Stewart Street. It opened in 1945. A low roof over the car park allows drivers to have their food delivered to their cars. The sign in front of the drive-in, partially buried by snow the day we are there, reads: “Happy New Year. Today’s Specials. Chicken Livers. Chicken Club Platter.” Nearly everything on the menu is fried, including the chicken livers. The Sterling Drive-In is one of the faded reminders of what life used to be, of a time when the American working class, after the long and bloody battle to form unions, had basic rights, decent salaries, pensions, and medical coverage, a life in which dignity was attainable. The time when the Powhatan Arrow train, which came with a dining car equipped with tablecloths, silverware, and waiters, stopped at the Welch station—a time when Welch was worth stopping at—seems as distant and unreal as an old black-and-white movie.