Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities (review)

For more than a century the people of Appalachia have depended for their livelihood on the extraction of natural resources, first timber, then coal. This dependence cost mountaineers their economic independence; it also made West Virginia, particularly the eight-county area in the south that is the focus of this work by Shirley Burns, a peripheral colony of the economy’s core, the industrial Northeast. According to the core-periphery model, the core enjoys economic prosperity and its associated benefits at the cost of the periphery.

In the case of West Virginia, exploitation came initially from railroads that first extracted timber, then took the coal that West Virginians mined for low pay at the cost of their health and shortened life expectancies. Desperate for economic development and, in some cases, personal economic gain, successive state governments and leadership groups came quickly to collaborate with the mining companies, and the people lost their voice. When technology allowed, strip mining followed.

Strip mining is popular with the coal companies because it requires few workers, generally nonunion, heavy-equipment operators rather than miners. Jobs in mining declined sharply, exacerbating the poverty of the single-industry region. When strip-mining technology and increased demand for coal in the 1980s came together with complaisant government and weak unions, the ecological disaster of making mesas out of mountaintops encountered few effective opponents. Soon, twenty-story draglines weighing up to eight million pounds were removing the tops of the mountains, digging the coal below, and lowering the Appalachians by 800 to 1,000 feet, one mountain at a time.

Bringing Down the Mountains discusses the history of the state and the evolution of the technology—the economic, social, and ecological impacts. Burns mostly maintains balance in writing about the pros and cons, the miners and the companies, but her sympathies clearly lie in opposition to what she sees as disastrous change to the area where she was reared. She acknowledges the economic hardship already prevalent in the region, and the decline of mining as a livelihood, but her real argument is that the stripping of mountaintops offers no real solution to Appalachian poverty. Also, she demonstrates how the companies use their power ruthlessly against the people whose lives and livelihoods are in the way of their profits, how the extractive industry uses the government to bypass ecological safeguards and provide less than sufficient “reclamation,” leaving clear-cut plateaus a thousand feet below what once were tree-covered mountain peaks.

Throughout, Burns includes the hard numbers that make the dilemma apparent, those that show the poverty and the need for work, the streams destroyed, the families uprooted, the communities abandoned. Sometimes her numbers need context—for instance, the relative handful of mountains destroyed and streams killed by landfill or slurry dam: 800 square miles of mountain and 784, 1,200, or 2,000 miles of stream in Appalachia. Sometimes she forgets to put in the number that might reinforce her point, as when she fails to give details about how much lower a mountain is, or how it compares with those surrounding it. Burns’s gee-whiz numbers can also fall flat when put into a context that is even more gee-whiz—for instance, lost stream miles. The Encyclopedia of Appalachia records 59,000 miles of stream in the same “parts of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and east Tennessee” where 784 to 2,000 miles have been destroyed ( http://utpress.org/Appalachia/EntryDisplay.php?EntryID=007 , accessed 3 April 2009).

Mountaintop removal is a dismal story with no happy ending. In a time when abundant energy has given way to escalating prices and calls for exploitation of formerly off-limits energy supplies, Burns offers a cautionary tale of the future. Not only is it a caution to other Appalachian coal regions vulnerable to comparable mining by the same...