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  • Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970-2004
  • Chad Montrie
Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970-2004. By Shirley Stewart Burns. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 215.)

With a long family history of underground coal mining behind her, including a grandfather and a father dead from black lung, Shirley Stewart Burns speaks with personal authority about the ways the coal industry has harmed the land and people of southern West Virginia. Drawing on her training as a journalist and historian, she also exercises considerable skill in detailing the expansion of mountaintop removal (MTR) and its growing opposition. Her book, Bringing Down the Mountains, organizes this story into six chapters. It starts with an overview of southern West Virginia strip mining and continues with sections on the social and environmental impact of mountaintop removal, the rise and decline of the United Mine Workers, coal politics in West Virginia, as well as recent judicial decisions on MTR regulation.

Burns contends that mountaintop removal has become increasingly prevalent in her part of the country for several reasons. First, during the twentieth century the coal industry made great efforts to reduce labor costs through mechanization, and the different variants of strip mining—MTR is only the latest—are part of that trend. Secondly, the Clean Air Act, passed in the early 1970s, made southern West Virginia's relatively low-sulfur coal more marketable, enticing coal operators as well as giant energy [End Page 125] conglomerates. And lastly, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), passed in 1977, failed to prohibit mountaintop removal, as many activists had demanded. In fact, the regulatory legislation made exception for MTR and, with industry-friendly enforcement, it basically sanctioned legalized destruction in the coalfields.

Bringing Down the Mountains also insists that mountaintop removal is the product of West Virginia's role as periphery to a resource- and wealth-extracting core. This explains, in part, why opponents of MTR and strip mining in general have had such a difficult time getting the coal industry to abide by even weak environmental control laws, like SMCRA and the Clean Water Act. Again and again, Burns rightly points out, the people (including miners) have seen their interests disregarded by the state legislature, Congress, and state and federal courts. This is no coincidence, she tells us, but rather the fruits of a neo-colonial relationship with the rest of the nation, ever in need of more coal.

Yet, while Burns provides readers with an incisive and critical look at MTR in the one place where it has become most common, Bringing Down the Mountains is wanting in several ways. The historical background on strip mining's opposition is too brief to provide adequate context (three or four pages, compared to the lengthier but less essential overview of 1920s UMW history). In particular, the book makes no mention of 1960s grassroots militancy, which historians need to explore in much greater detail. Just as importantly, it does not attend to the origins and evolution of a post-SMCRA opposition, from the late 1970s to the present, saving a few scattered paragraphs. Neither does it completely fill out the contemporary struggle, neglecting the now yearly, youth-led Mountain Justice Summer campaigns, an interesting and promising injection of "global justice" thinking and tactics.

One of the main reasons for oversights in Bringing Down the Mountains is a thin primary source base. With the exception of articles from the New York Times and Charleston Gazette, dating mostly to the late 1990s and the first few years of the twenty-first century, Burns relies heavily on an incomplete secondary literature. This would be understandable if she were merely writing a journalistic-style overview, a "first draft of history," but we already have plenty of those on MTR (in print and film), and the book should be more. To do this—a multi-part project some aspiring graduate students or other scholars might consider—an historian would have to look also at coal and energy trade journals, the United Mine Workers Journal and other union sources, newsletters from...

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