All Health Politics Is Local by Merlin Chowkwanyun

Author:Merlin Chowkwanyun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2022-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

5

Central Appalachia

Powering America on Other People’s Bodies: Strip Mining, Environmental Health, and Human Suffering

The world of Wallins Creek in Harlan County, Kentucky, was changing rapidly in 1967, and people were panicking. Heavy machinery had taken up a regular presence: a phalanx of cranes, auger drills, tractors, and bulldozers were removing forest, vegetation, and the Earth’s surface to uncover coal seams beneath. Blasting and shaking were now part of the sensory landscape. Immense ecological disruption had resulted, too, and many so-called strip mine operations spanned hundreds of acres. Panic was the right reaction for another reason. Of all the coal reserves in the United States, the most common—nearly 45 percent—was high-grade bituminous coal, whose volatility was second only to anthracite coal that was available in ever dwindling supply, accounting for less than 5 percent of total deposits by that point. And the mother lode of the bituminous variant was in Central Appalachia, in two states, West Virginia and Kentucky, which together in 1960 had more of it than any other region in the United States.1

The 400 residents of Wallins Creek didn’t sit still, though. In 1967, they got together and signed a petition that eventually made its way to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The document spoke of “the dangerous condition brought about by unbridled strip mining . . . which has destroyed timber and has created a serious flooding problem by filling the beds of the stream with rock, dirt and other debree [sic].” “It is our wish,” the petitioners continued, that authorities step in “to prohibit the further strip-mining or augering of coal” where they lived.2 Not too long before and not too far away, Alice Slone, the director of a small school in Hazard, shared similar sentiments with President Lyndon Johnson. “We can never hope for security and prosperity with such hopeless destruction to our homes and property,” she wrote. “More paupers are being made from stripminers than can ever be reclaimed through government funds.”3

People all over Central Appalachia, like the people of Los Angeles County a decade earlier, quickly realized that the transformation around them might harm their health. They petitioned against, wrote about, and protested over hydrologic defilement by acid and minerals; mudslides and floods that required them to flee; improper disposal of refuse and waste; and general threats to their property and well-being. It wasn’t for naught. But scientific recognition of their suffering came much more slowly because they lacked a coalition of politically powerful advocates like those who’d advanced the antismog cause in Los Angeles. By the early 1980s, the nation’s energy infrastructure became even more entrenched in and bound up with the strip mining of coal. It reflected a collective choice to electrify the nation at the expense of Appalachian health and welfare.

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