A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Hillbullies

The freedom to travel more often and collect interviews inevitably led me back to Appalachia, the land so rich with storytellers. In terms of economic reality, nothing had changed since the 1970s, when I did Appalachian stories for All Things Considered. Big energy companies still exploited the region’s coal deposits with little benefit to the people who lived there. What had changed was the process for extracting the coal. Industry used to burrow into the beautiful Appalachian Mountains and extract the coal through tunnels. Later it employed the more invasive process of strip mining, cutting away a slice of the mountain all the way around at the source of the coal seam, leaving an ugly scar. Now the companies just take the mountains down. Using a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, coal companies blow off the tops and sides of the mountains to expose the seams of coal. The trees, topsoil, and rock are pushed over the side into hollows between the mountains, often burying streams running through the hollows. Estimated to have formed nearly 300 million years ago, the Appalachian Mountains are North America’s oldest. During the last Ice Age, the central and southern Appalachians were spared. When the ice melted, the dense, lush, green forests of Appalachia reforested the rest of the continent. The mountains provide habitat for thousands of species of flora and fauna. The scourge of mountaintop-removal coal mining is the perfect storm of environmental degradation—nature’s worst nightmare. It destroys mountains, forests, streams, and habitat all at H I L L B U L L I E S 184 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X once. If this were happening in the Adirondacks or the Catskills, people wouldn’t stand for it. Here was a story begging for me to return to my home state. Andy produced it and Geoffrey recorded it. I loved introducing them to my Kentucky friends of thirty years earlier, especially Pat and Tom Gish. Back in the fifties, the Gishes bought the Mountain Eagle newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and transformed it from a weekly account of quilting bees and lodge meetings to a crusading champion of journalism. Tom and Pat shocked local politicians by demanding they hold their meetings in public, as mandated by law. Editorials about nepotism in public school hiring caused quite a stir. Coal companies, which controlled everything in the region (and still do), could not believe that a local newspaper would challenge their authority. There was pushback, of course, first in the form of an advertising boycott. When that didn’t work, the paper’s office was set afire. A Whitesburg city police officer was convicted of the crime. Nothing stopped the Gishes from doing their journalistic duty. There are a lot of big-city publishers who are not nearly so bold as Pat and Tom, who saw the subjects of their editorials every day at the coffee shop and the grocery store and at church on Sunday. Tom Gish was part of our documentary, as was a nature scholar, a county official, and people whose quality of life had been destroyed by mountaintop-removal coal mining. The principal spokesperson for the industry was Bill Caylor of the Kentucky Coal Association, who touted coal as our cheapest and most abundant source of energy. He reminded us that more than 50 percent of the nation’s electricity is supplied by coal-burning power plants and that we need cheap fuel to power our computers, refrigerators, and air conditioners. The cost in dollars is cheap, but I had plenty of witnesses to other costs, including the loss of mountains, forests, streams, and a way of life. Our star was writer Wendell Berry, whose essays on community are world-renowned. When Wendell pronounced mountaintop removal a “sin,” I could already hear the closing music swelling in the background . I wrapped it up by noting that the process enjoyed bipartisan support (Kentucky’s two Republican senators and West Virginia’s two Democratic senators accept political dollars from coal companies). 185 H I L L B U L L I E S I also mentioned that even the country’s major environmental groups did not list the end of mountaintop-removal coal mining as a top priority because they’re so focused on global warming—the reigning popular environmental cause. It’s great that they...