Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountain Top Removal (review)

Although half of the U.S. electricity comes from coal energy, many Americans know precious little about an earth-ravaging mining practice called mountain top removal (MTR) used to extract coal in Southern Appalachia. The radical strip-mining process obliterates entire mountainsides with thousands of pounds of explosives in order to reach a thin coal seam underneath. The materials churned up as a result—topsoil, shale, and rock (termed "overburden" in the industry)—are pushed over the mountainside, burying headstreams and killing wildlife in the process. After the coal is retrieved, the land left behind looks more like the surface of the moon than it does a place where some of the world's oldest mountains once stood. In addition, slurry impoundments—giant pools that hold the waste left behind when coal is cleaned—dot the neighboring countryside.

Coal companies claim that MTR brings much-needed jobs to Appalachia, but their tactics disregard local residents as equally as the environment. In addition to water contamination, community residents suffer through perpetual coal dust, increased cancer rates, and cracked foundations in their homes (a result of blasting at the mine site). After only intermittent coverage in national media, there is a growing feeling within Appalachia that the region's only hope in fighting MTR lies in its native inhabitants and that is the sentiment Silas House and Jason Howard sought to capture in their 2009 oral history compilation, Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountain Top Removal.

Kentucky natives themselves, House and Howard interviewed twelve Appalachians hailing from West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, all of whom have chosen to fight the barons of industry by speaking out against MTR despite tremendous community pressure to remain quiet. House and Howard frame each interview with an introductory essay, providing context on the narrator's mountain upbringing as well as each one's journey as an anti-MTR crusader. Thus, Something's Rising strikes a balance between interpretation and interview that allows its narrators to speak of their own communities' struggles while also providing concrete details of MTR's general material costs in Appalachia.

Rather than sharing thoughts on long-past events, the oral histories House and Howard collected reflect the current struggle alongside the past. While the narrators come from diverse professions—former underground coal miners, a community health worker, authors, musicians, and a former mine inspector, among others—their stories of dissent echo each other as each narrator describes the importance of history and place as a native Appalachian. Health worker Bev May perhaps sums up all the narrators' dedication to the mountains, explaining, "I value and love being in the mountains. This is home in the all-inclusive sense, and I will not be run off of it" (92). Many of the interviews speak of coal battles fought in the region over the last century, revealing how memory has shaped these activists' present-day dedication to the mountains and underscoring the importance of collective memory in Appalachia, forged equally in mining and dissent.

As the coal industry has often portrayed anti-MTR crusaders as privileged outsiders without a clue about the economic struggles of mountain families, House and Howard's choice of all Appalachian narrators is an effective counterargument. Taken together, the narrators explicate the triangular relationship between media, public opinion, and continued industry dominance over the conversation. House and Howard explain how the industry holds its grip in Appalachia: "[They] remind people that coal provides jobs for the region. However, the coal associations conveniently, purposefully, and wisely choose not to remind people of the many mining jobs lost to mechanization crucial to mountaintop removal ... it is worth noting that the counties that produce the most coal in Appalachia are often the poorest" (13). Many of the interviewees speak directly of the links between coal companies and Appalachia's continued poverty, as Judy Bonds recalls finding her coal miner father's pay stub when she was a...