Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal by Bryan T. McNeil (review)

CombatingMountaintopRemoval: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal is an ethnography of a West Virginia activist group that opposes mountaintop removal coal mining, a practice of strip mining for coal that literally blasts away mountaintops to reach thin seams of coal underneath. McNeil, an anthropologist, focuses his fieldwork on the Coal River Mountain Watch (crmw), a network of local activists opposed to mountaintop removal mining. In recent years, McNeil argues, Coal River Mountain Watch has evolved into an umbrella group for challenging the coal companies and a political system rigged in favour of mountaintop removal mining.

Two themes run through McNeil’s ethnographic research. First is his argument that mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia is an example of the global changes wrought by neoliberalism. Mountaintop removal, McNeil argues, is “the logical product of neoliberalism.” (2) Discussion of neoliberalism often emphasizes transnational corporations, but McNeil argues that the residents of Coal River, West Virginia also felt that neoliberalism influenced their communities.

Second, McNeil suggests that activist coalitions such as crmw are an important new venue for challenging neoliberal policies and corporate power. Their role is especially important in the 21st century due to the collapse of the United Mine Workers of America (umwa), the union that challenged the coal operators and fought for working people in the coalfields. Coal River was once the heart of umwa country, but today’s mines are mostly nonunion. The union has been reduced to a rump of its former power and influence. In the face of declining union power and new assaults on the mountains and its people, McNeil sees “a new kind of struggle to represent people’s interests against the powers of industry” being taken up by community activist groups such as crmw.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part 1, McNeil introduces readers to West Virginia’s Coal River region and describes how mountaintop removal mining arrived in the area in recent decades. In the past, most of the region’s coal mining occurred in underground mines. Underground mining was difficult, dangerous work, but it was labour intensive and employed thousands of miners. Beginning in the 1970s, however, energy companies brought massive earth-moving equipment to the region and began mountaintop removal mining operations. Taking advantage of mechanization, loopholes in environmental regulation, and a growing anti-union climate, mountaintop removal operations expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, organized by transnational energy conglomerates such as Massey Energy. Yet some residents fought back against the new mining practices by forming Coal River Mountain Watch. In several vignettes, McNeil demonstrates how individuals came to identify as activists. The members of crmw rarely call themselves environmentalists, instead emphasizing that mountaintop removal mining is a threat to their communities and way of life, as well as an environmental catastrophe. For the residents of the coalfields, McNeil writes, anti-mountaintop removal activism is part of “a broader political project focused on social and economic justice based on a common understanding of community needs.” (47)

Part 2 argues that the various institutions meant to support coalfield residents – the union, regulatory agencies, and state government – have all failed in recent decades. In Chapter 5, for example, McNeil paints a devastating portrait of the regulatory agencies intended to prevent environmental abuse by coal companies. In McNeil’s close description of how such agencies conduct hearings, the agencies appear to be a kangaroo court intended to give the appearance of democracy without ever challenging coal’s total control over the institutional power structure. McNeil claims that the process “is carefully engineered to keep a safe distance between citizens and the decision-making process.” (99) McNeil’s critique of the state’s economic development policies in Chapter 6 is somewhat less convincing. He correctly points out how pie-in-the-sky development plans such as baseball stadiums rarely create good jobs. But it is unclear what better options are available in the...