Flyover

      If you look at Appalachia’s Cumberland Plateau from a satellite’s point of view, high above the Earth’s surface, it looks like it has a skin disease, its surface spotted with scabby places. Come in closer, as high as an airplane, flying low from southwestern Virginia north into southern West Virginia. At first you’ll see long ridgelines and wide valleys, then the typical ruffly jumble of Cumberland Plateau mountains.

      In far southern West Virginia these mountains look pristine, draped in a lush, thickly textured, living, breathing blanket of forest, in early summer colored with more shades of green than you can imagine, the greens of hundreds of kinds of trees and shrubs. This is the mother forest for all of eastern North America, from which life has flowed to places stripped of it by glaciers and other catastrophes. Its gorgeous intricacy has evolved continuously since long before any humans were here to see it, on old, old mountains worn down to a multitude of soft, rounded hills and steep little hollows. Together forest and mountain, sweet air, and plentiful streams make this an intimate, homey landscape that’s easy to love. People who live here believe that this is what heaven must look like.

      The trees here today are not old growth. Here, as throughout central and southern Appalachia, virtually all of the forest was cut early in the twentieth century. But lumbering technology was primitive then, just men with saws and horses. During and after that logging, little of the land was plowed up, and much of the soil remained intact. The forest that grew back in that soil was and is diminished, but still fabulously rich and diverse.

      If you look carefully from your airplane view, here and there you’ll also see the remains of older strip mines, small enough in scale that they mar, but don’t destroy, the overall pattern of hills and hollows. The forest has closed in around them. As with old-style logging, old-style coal mining for the most part left intact enough of the natural fabric of life for the mother forest to regenerate.

      But on the horizon, just to the north, you’ll see a dozen or more enormous gaps in the natural landscape visible from dozens of miles away—visible, in fact, from space. What looks from a satellite view like scabs are really open wounds, some of them miles across, all caused by mountaintop removal and similar modern, large-scale methods of strip mining for coal.

      Mountaintop removal (MTR) does exactly what it says. At each MTR site, a mountaintop is stripped of trees, blown to bits with vast amounts of explosives, then pushed aside by giant equipment—all to expose a layer of coal. (A large dragline, the ultimate MTR machine, can move a hundred or more cubic yards in a single bite.) After that coal is mined out, still more trees are stripped and still more mountain is blown up and pushed aside to expose a lower layer of coal. MTR mining commonly lops hundreds of feet off the top of a mountain. Hundreds of thousands of acres of ancient forested Appalachian mountains have been “removed” this way and will never again support the glorious mosaic of biologically rich and diverse forest-and-stream communities that evolved there over millions of years.

      Strip mining on such a very large scale began in Appalachia in the 1980s and has expanded dramatically since 2000, spreading from West Virginia and eastern Kentucky into southwestern Virginia and then eastern Tennessee and Alabama. From your airplane view you can read the coal companies’ plans for further expansion in the ongoing clear-cutting of many more thousands of acres of forest. Often the cut trees are not even harvested but simply bulldozed together and burned, the flames shooting as high as the wasted poplar, oak, maple, and beech trees once stood, so urgently voracious is the coal companies’ demand for more and more and more.

      Come closer still, and stand on a hill overlooking a mountaintop removal site. (You’ll have to make an effort to find such a place, because most large-scale strip mines are hidden from public view, as though the people responsible for them are ashamed of what they’re doing.) There you’ll see how the open wounds of strip mining ooze poison down into the hillsides and hollows and waters below. Rubble and knocked-over trees and flyrock tumble offsite into adjacent forest. Runoff silt clogs thousands of miles of mountain streams—and hundreds of miles of streams are now completely buried under debris. Aquifers are cracked by blasting, wells dried up or poisoned. Flash floods run off the stripped mountaintops. Landslides slip from unstable slopes. Heavy metals and other toxins leach out of slurry ponds and valley fills. Blackwater spills kill or impair everything living downstream. Coal dust and chemicals used in coal processing sicken schoolchildren. Overloaded coal trucks destroy roads and kill people in collisions.

      Strip mining devastates the communities down in the hollows between the mountains, where homes, schools, and churches are clustered. The wealth extracted from these mountains through logging and mining has long flowed out of the region rather than to the people who live here, and the current strip-mining boom has destroyed much of what previously remained of the region’s wealth of sustainable natural resources. Communities have shriveled to remnants of their former selves, as people have fled the direct physical effects of the mining or been forced to leave home to seek work. (MTR employs lots of big equipment but few workers.) The people still living here have stayed not because they’re doing well but because this is their home, because living here is an essential part of who they are.

      Although most people here believe that King Coal’s destruction of the mountains and their people is wrong, few are willing to stick their necks out to say so—and for good reason. People who stick their necks out often get whacked in the head, particularly in Appalachia’s coalfields, where power has long been maintained by violence in many forms, all of them ugly. And besides, why bother? Why take care of your home if your only hope for a decent life