Sherry Chandler

The Cost of Coal

There’s an exciting new online magazine out there: The New Southerner, edited by Bobbi Buchanan. This bimonthly is billed as an alternative magazine for southerners, and it has made a good start.

Here is an excerpt from their book feature – Wendell Berry’s Afterword to Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop But It Wasn’t There (Wind Publications, 2005):

Coal is undoubtedly something of value. And it is, at present, something we need–though we must hope we will not always need it, for we will not always have it. But coal, like the other fossil fuels, is a peculiar commodity. It is valuable to us only if we burn it. Once burned, it is no longer a commodity but only a problem, a source of energy that has become a source of pollution. And the source of the coal itself is not renewable. When the coal is gone, it will be gone forever, and the coal economy will be gone with it.

The natural resources of permanent value to the so-called coalfields of Eastern Kentucky are the topsoils and the forests and the streams. These are valuable, not, like coal, on the condition of their destruction, but on the opposite condition: that they should be properly cared for. And so we need, right now, to start thinking better than we ever have before about topsoils and forests and streams. We must think about all three at once, for it is a violation of their nature to think about any one of them alone.

The mixed mesophytic forest of the Cumberland Plateau was a great wonder and a great wealth before it was almost entirely cut down in the first half of the last century. Its regrowth could become a great wonder and a great wealth again; it could become the basis of a great regional economy–but only if it is properly cared for.

After the heart-wrenching events of last week, we need to think even harder about coal and how we get it out of the mountains. Nobody needs me to tell them that deep mining has been a nightmare of exploitation or how the nation has fattened itself on the lives of a few brave men, heroes as surely as soldiers in uniform, yet far more patronized and neglected. Good mostly for an occasional emotional wallow and some wonderful country songs.

What frightens me is the thought that we will now be sold mountaintop removal as a safer, cheaper alternative. I’ll let Wendell make that argument for me. He is so much more eloquent and he knows more:

So ingrained is our state’s submissiveness to its exploiters that I recently heard one of our prominent politicians defend the destructive practices of the coal companies on the ground that we need the coal to “tide us over” to better sources of energy. He thus was offering the people and the region, which he represented and was entrusted to protect, as a sacrifice to what I assume he was thinking of as “the greater good” of the United States. But this idea, which he apparently believed to be new, was exactly our century–old policy for the mountain coalfields: the land and the people would be sacrificed for the greater good of the United States–and, only incidentally, of course, for the greater good of the coal corporations.

The response that is called for, it seems to me, is not a vision of “a better future,” which would be easy and probably useless, but instead an increase of consciousness and critical judgment in the present. That would be harder, but it would be right.

Read the rest of this excellent essay. Buy and read the book.

I’ll leave you with a final link to this Knight-Ridder article Enforcement of mine safety seen slipping under Bush By Seth Borenstein, Linda J. Johnson and Lee Mueller (thanks to Washington Monthly for the link):

At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company a scant $440 for a “significant and substantial” violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died earlier this week.

The $440 fine remains unpaid.

There is no cheap fossil fuel. Only a question of who pays the price.

Possibly related posts:

Cost of coal

“Kentucky’s Undeground Economy”

Enshrined?

Oh for a tongue like Molly Ivins’

The High Cost of Low Prices

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