The permit for the largest mountaintop removal project in West Virginia is almost history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has propsed a veto of Arch Coal’s Spruce Number 1 strip mine that would have buried more than seven miles of streams and destroy 2,278 acres (about 3.5 square miles) of rich mountains. This veto still has to go through the official process to get finalized but this is the biggest concrete victory on stopping mountaintop removal in a long time. We need to celebrate.
We need to celebrate because we’re protecting Appalachia, but we need to be cautiously celebrating. The economy in the coalfields is still heavily dependent on, well, coal. While it’s true that there are one-sixth of the mining jobs in West Virginia that there were 50 years go, there’s 20,000 now, certain portions of the state are definitely still dependent on coal.
I remember that, in the October 2009 Public Hearing in Charleston on Mountaintop Removal, a pro-Mountaintop Removal speaker from Logan County lamented seeing environmentalists partying next to the mountain they saved while he tried to figure out what’s next for his family now that those paychecks weren’t coming. That’s the question we should be asking of the Obama Administration as we thank them for their veto. We should be both asking them what’s next for the coalfields and bringing them solutions.
The coal industry will leave communities and workers behind whether it’s through a ban on Mountaintop Removal or the coal running out. Huge swaths of the West Virginia Coalfields have been left behind because the coal simply ran out or got too expensive to mine.
Anyone who has looked at McDowell County, formerly the highest coal producing county in the country, will see a county where the coal industry has picked up and left. Anyone who was born and raised in the county and is above the age of sixty has seen 3 friends leave and not come back (that’s right, the population is now one-fourth of what it was 60 years ago), has seen the poverty rate climb to 38%, and has seen the county recognized as having the worst health rating in the entire state.
Coal has not been good to the West Virginia coalfields, but we have to be honest with ourselves and our movement about what the results of coal companies leaving town will be. A ban on Mountaintop Removal is certainly what we need. But, without proposing alternative solutions, the anti-mountaintop removal movement will be leaving the coalfields nearly as far behind as the coal companies have.
The good news, though is that there are already inspiring examples of ongoing work, concrete projects, and grassroots organizing to usher in a new economy in Appalachia. While the Coal River Wind Project is the most concrete example of the choice that one area has between permanent wind jobs (which would potentially be union jobs) and temporary Mountaintop Removal jobs (which are non-union jobs). There is work happening in Eastern Kentucky through the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, Southwest Virginia through the RRENEW Collective, Southern WV through the J.O.B.S. Project, the Coal River Valley through the Coal River Community Sustainability Team and many other efforts to bring about sustainable economies throughout the coalfields of Appalachia.
The West Virginia Youth Action League, representing six campus and community youth groups across West Virginia, is planning a major “Green the Coalfields” Summer Program where West Virginia Youths are partnering with local community groups to inject youth energy into ongoing efforts to reclaim the coalfields. This work is happening and coalfield economies are beginning to diversify, we have a long way to go before we see more people working in good, green, sustainable and fulfilling economies than the extractive, destructive, and dirty coal economy.
The proposed veto of the Spruce Permit and the preservation of almost 2,300 acres of rich mountains is surely a historic and important step. Let’s do the important work of creating solutions to the economic problems in the coalfields. The coal companies will happily leave Appalachia behind, let’s make sure the anti-mountaintop removal movement doesn’t do the same. Let’s make sure we build healthy and sustainable economies that can put people to work for far longer than the coal industry could ever imagine.
Thanks for this Danny – especially the emphasis on solutions. From the YAL (which I hadn’t heard of before now) to the Summer of Solutions, to the work of young entrepreneurs to create green energy businesses, our generation gets it. We just need to make sure the administration, state governments and local leaders get it with us.
I’m devoting quite a bit of work to facilitating economic diversification in Raleigh and Boone counties in southern WV. That said, the single largest step towards diversifying the economy would be to break the mono-economy of coal. As long as the coal industry controls the vast majority of capital – including money, land, labor, etc – in the coalfields, the only diversification that can happen is on the margins of the economy. We do need to be ready to scale up alternative economic activities, but that can’t happen until coal is dead and no longer providing jobs. The work now is to stop coal in its tracks and prepare working models of economic sustainability. We should also ask the government to fund transition programs for coal miners out of work, because the transition will take awhile, and unlike the bright green visions of the national green movement, the transition, if there is one, won’t be easy for everyone.