CULTURE, CLASS, AND POLITICS IN MODERN APPALACHIA: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF RONALD L. LEWIS

To Dance with the Devil: The Social Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining

305 To Dance with the Devil: The Social Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining Shirley Stewart Burns “There are two roads in life, a right one and a wrong one. There is no in-between path to take.” —Pauline Canterberry, resident of Sylvester, West Virginia AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY gave way to the twentieth, West Virginia’s rural backcounties experienced a fundamental transformation. Natural-resource speculators pervaded the area; chief among them were the coal and timber industries, along with their handmaiden, the railroad industry. Throughout West Virginia, beautiful hardwood forests came crashing down until, by the 1920s, nearly all of them were gone.1 Railroads penetrated the rugged countryside to whisk the natural treasures of timber and coal away from the state and into the large cities beyond. Older agricultural communities were soon joined by new industrial towns that dotted the landscape for the express purpose of providing a home for workers and their families. The repercussions of this rapid-fire change resonated throughout the southern region. Subsistence farmers accustomed to bartering soon disappeared, replaced by wage-earning laborers who toiled in the mines rather than in the fields. Then, as the industrial age shifted to the information age, coal miners found themselves struggling for their economic lives. Technology had rendered them nearly obsolete. Underground miners saw their ranks slashed as CULTURE, CLASS, AND POLITICS 306 the continuous miner and longwall machinery replaced tens of thousands of men. Surface workers witnessed the introduction of twenty-story draglines that performed the work previously requiring hundreds of workers. The amount of surface-mined acreage has continually increased since 1982, and surface-mining production has been on the rise since 1991.2 This is largely attributable to the newest surface-mining machinery, such as that used in mountaintop removal (MTR).3 MTR is a coal extraction process wherein the tops of mountains are removed in order to expose underlying coal seams near the surface. The resulting overburden (the soil and rock that comprised the mountain) is shoved into adjacent valleys where it often covers headwater streams. Since the introduction of the twenty-story dragline—instrumental in the MTR process—in the 1980s, coal-mining employment has plummeted from 59,700 in 1980 to 15,200 in 2004.4 Coal production has increased, but the bottom line for companies has vastly improved since the highest cost of operating—labor—has been virtually eliminated. Coupled with increased demand for “cheap” electricity and the desire of the coal industry to cut labor costs, the MTR method of coal extraction became the latest stopover in the trajectory of strip mining history. Companies soon found the fastest and least expensive way to meet the insatiable demand for cheap energy while still meeting federal air quality standards was to utilize low-sulfur coal reserves that are found in the southern West Virginia coal- fields. Also needed was the very land the communities inhabited. These changes in mining methods dramatically affected coalfield residents . Few alternative economic opportunities were available in these areas where coal had been in power for more than one hundred years and where shortsighted politicians had done little to advance economic diversification . While many individuals migrated from southern West Virginia, others stayed because of personal ties to their families and communities. Those who refused to migrate found themselves in the most precarious position of all, caught between dwindling coal jobs and the desire to protect their own homes and families from what they deemed a very unpromising future. Many of those who did not leave remained loyal to the coal industry, but now they found themselves in a predicament where the coal companies needed the mountains and valleys in order to meet the increasing demand for coal. The very land these residents had already sacrificed so much to live on was TO DANCE WITH THE DEVIL 307 now itself being obliterated. Quite a few residents flatly refused to leave the land their families had settled more than two hundred years ago, regardless of the conditions or pressures exerted on them by the companies and their agents. These social complexities still pervade the southern West Virginia communities facing depopulation by the encroaching MTR operations. More than a Nuisance Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller live in Sylvester, Boone County. Sylvester is a small, incorporated town of some 195 people on the outskirts of Whitesville.5 Sylvester was founded in 1952 in hopes...