Undermined in Coal Country: On the Measures in a Working Land by Bill Conlogue (review)

Marywood University English professor Bill Conlogue's Undermined in Coal Countryis an ardent defense of the value of literature and history in knowing one's place in the world. With prose reminiscent of William Least Heat-Moon and John McPhee and the passion for place and profession exhibited by K. Ross Toole, Conlogue deftly demonstrates the power of the liberal arts. He does this by weaving together personal memoir, Pennsyvania's coal mining history, the history of Marywood University, and works of literature ranging from the Epic of Gilgameshto Dante's Infernoto the coal mining poetry of Scranton native Thomas Blomain. Conlogue covers a wide variety of topics including coal mining's insatiable appetite for timber, the mules that worked in the mines, anthracite boosting, pillar robbing, mine fires and disasters, immigration and labor, subsidence, mine safety, company towns, bootlegging coal, and the nature of human knowledge.

Central to Conlogue's narrative is his concern about two interrelated issues undermining American society: the decaying of liberal arts education and the despoiling of the Earth. He believes that healing America's scarred landscapes and impoverished academy will require revivifying the liberal arts and kindling a love of literature. Liberal arts education, Conlogue claims, fosters democratically engaged, moral, and empathetic citizens inspired to care for the places that they call home and ready to take personal responsibility for their environmental impact. Throughout Undermined in Coal Country, he questions the traditional heroic story of Scranton's coal mining history and calls attention to its hidden social costs and environmental legacy. Along the way, he discusses his role as an English professor unsettling undergraduate minds in a field fighting to prove its relevance at a university that sits atop unstable ground. Conlogue concludes, "Without a strong liberal arts component … universities will be unable to offer students the tools to ask good environmental questions, let alone to debate answers" (p. 141). In a place like Scranton, which has been degraded and rendered unstable by coal companies, it is crucial that we begin to consider new stories that will help initiate a process of renewal and remind us what is at stake when fossil fuels are extracted from the land beneath our feet.

Conlogue engages primary sources spanning from the Archives of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the journal Colliery Engineer and Metal Minerto D. H. Lawrence's 1909 short story "Odour of Chrysanthemums." Due to the interdisciplinary nature of Undermined in Coal Country, Conlogue consulted a wide range of secondary sources from literature, history, engineering, political science, economics, and law. Also, while he cites only some the following scholars, Conlogue's historical treatment of coal mining in Pennsylvania connects to the work done by Barbara Freese, Priscilla Long, Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, Chad Montrie, and Christopher Jones. Conlogue's text also resonates with scholarship by STS scholar Rosalind Williams and ecocritic Lawrence Buell. Lastly, this is a piece of environmental writing that echoes cultural critics concerned with place, such as Wendell Berry.

Undermined in Coal Countryis not a technical treatise on the history of coal mining or what one may consider a traditional history of technology. Yet Conlogue's citations illustrate that he took pains to become acquainted with the engineering and technical side of coal mining along with its environmental consequences. In analyzing the culture of a coal mining region where blue-collar workers are integrated with university students, he does, however, miss an opportunity to discuss how class may play a role in the eroding image of the liberal arts in a "working land." This absence is problematic because Conlogue's text and life bridges both the working lives of Pennsylvania laborers and life in the academy. Without sustained attention to class, his words resonate with the unresolved tension between labor and the environment discussed by environmental historian Richard White in "Are You...