AlterNet
An Author's Incredible Environmental Journey After a Coal Company
Destroyed His Family's Ancestral Home and Land
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on March 12, 2010, Printed on March 26, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146010/
About half of all electricity in this country comes from coal-fired
power plants. And where does the coal come from? Author Jeff Biggers
writes that coal is mined in 20 states in the U.S., but his newest book,
Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland,
focuses mainly on one area -- southern Illinois.
Eagle Creek has particular historical significance, but it's the
personal significance that drives the narrative of his book. His
family's 200-year-old homestead and 150-year-old cabin were obliterated
by a strip-mining operation. The experience led Biggers on a journey to
fully understand the impact of coal on the environment and on communities.
Biggers' story is deeply rooted in cultural history. Mining companies
have been destroying not just homes, forests and streams, but actual
communities with stories, songs, heroes and legacies. Unfortunately, our
love affair with coal continues, despite dire warnings from top
scientists regarding global warming, the impact on human health from
burning coal and desperate pleas from the people who live in areas of
coal extraction.
Sadly, the Obama administration has only been fanning the flames with
talk about resources for so-called "clean coal," a term that is nothing
but industry smoke and mirrors. Biggers writes in his book about wanting
to convey to the president what our addiction to coal really means:
I wanted our president to know that the strip mines did not only
obliterate our family homeplace and farm: they ripped out the roots of
invaluable historic sites and stories, such as a secret black slave
cemetery that had helped to give birth to the coal industry and churned
them into unrecognizable bits of dust. History did not only vanish -- it
was covered up -- the same way a native and lush Shawnee forest was
wiped out and replaced, through a faux coal mining reclamation program,
with foreign grasslands, and the aquatic life of Eagle Creek disappeared
with the toxic runoff from the slurry pond.
But dead fish don't tell lies. Nor did our ruins. As Mexican writer
Octavio Paz wrote in his Nobel laureate address, the ancient past in his
country never truly disappeared; it remained a presence; it breathed its
spirits into our contemporary decisions. It churned out bits of
cautionary tales that reflected our choices and ways of living today.
BIggers' book is not his only effort to deal with this issue. He's also
created an original and groundbreaking multimedia production, "Welcome
to the Saudi Arabia of Coal," that is hitting theaters across the
country. The play draws from his book, taking the experience of what
it's like to live on the front lines of the coal battles to another level.
In a recent interview, Biggers discussed the motivations for his work
and how we can move toward a coal-free future.
Tara Lohan: Tell me about the location of your book, Eagle Creek. What's
the historical significance? And what's the importance to your family?
Jeff Biggers: Eagle Creek is/was one of the oldest forest settlements in
the American heartland, located in Saline County, in southern Illinois.
Tucked into the Shawnee National Forest, Eagle Creek has been inhabited
for over 1,000 years. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson coveted the
area's famed coal and salt reserves, which fueled territorial expansion
to the West. Francis Peabody, namesake of Peabody Energy -- the world's
largest coal producer -- sank his first coal mine in the neighboring
county in 1890.
In 1999, the 8th generation of my family at Eagle Creek was forced by
out by several strip-mining operations, and and our 150-year-old log
cabin and 200-year-old settlement on the boundary of the federally
protected Illinois Wilderness Areas were destroyed. This family tragedy
set me off on a 10-year journey to examine the staggering human and
environmental costs of coal.
"The rape of Appalachia," wrote author Harry Caudill in his classic,
Night Comes to the Cumberlands, "got its practice" in Illinois.
Commercial strip mining dates back to my state of Illinois, where the
first horses and scrapers opened the first surface mines in the 1850s.
Over the next 150 years, steam-engine shovels and modern draglines have
stripped millions of acres of farmland and virgin forests, across 20
states in the nation, leaving behind devastated moonscapes and polluted
waterways.
Despite the passing of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in
1977, which regulates the impact of strip mining and monitors
reclamation programs, the radical strip-mining method of mountaintop
removal mining -- the process of blowing up mountains with massive
explosives, and dumping the waste into valleys -- has destroyed over 500
mountains, and wiped out nearly 1.5 million acres of hardwood forests in
the carbon sink of Appalachia.
TL: Your writing gives a lot of weight to this issue -- it's much more
than an issue of energy or environmental concerns. You write, 'Eagle
Creek, like most coalfield areas, had been the staging ground of a
collective act of historicide: the murder of our history.' Explain what
you mean by that.
JB: "Historicide" is the removal of people from their histories.
Strip-mining doesn't only strip the land; it also strips the people and
their heritage. In our case, the more I investigated the destruction of
Eagle Creek and southern Illinois, I realized it wasn't just our family
history that had been eliminated. The act of historicide also included
1,000 years of bones of the first natives in the region, the modern
Shawnee encampments and farms, the pioneering squatters and homesteaders
in our family, and the slaves and coal miners in one of the first
settlements in the nation's heartland--all of which had been churned
into ashes.
And there were a lot of secrets in those ashes--secrets that implicated
the legacies of our American heroes Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson,
Abraham Lincoln and Tecumseh, and labor leaders like Mother Jones and
John L. Lewis. In the end, I found this act of historicide did not only
serve an as indictment on our selective viewing of history, but also
unveiled an important cautionary tale of how we were repeating the same
injustices and errors of the past, precisely because we had erased our
memory of this history. Coal had created a stunning anatomy of denial in
every generation, including today.
TL: How did the discovery of coal in the area affect the Native
Americans living there? Later, how did the exploitation of coal
intersect with slavery?
JB: Coal has been entwined in the fate of Native Americans since the
French discovery of coal among the Shawnee in Illinois in the 1600s.
After a trip to England in 1786, where he witnessed the power of the
coal-fired steam engine, Thomas Jefferson set out to discover America's
large coal reserves. In 1803, Jefferson instructed explorers Lewis and
Clark to note all coal deposits on their famed journey; that same year,
Indiana governor William Harrison carried out Jefferson's Indian removal
policy in the Ohio River Valley, in order to gain control of the vast
mineral resources, including those in Eagle Creek.
President Andrew Jackson concluded Jefferson's policy with the Indian
Removal Act, declaring that the nation would prefer the improvements of
industry over "forests covered with a few thousand savages." To launch
this new coal industry, however, the first American coal mines opened
with African slave labor in Virginia in the mid-1700s. Despite the
Northwest Ordinance forbidding slavery in the Illinois territory, black
slaves were also legally used to mine coal and salt in Eagle Creek and
the southern Illinois region through the early 1800s. My ancestors, as
anti-slavery Baptists, fought the slave-owning coal companies in our
hollers, and we've been fighting outside coal companies ever since.
TL: Coal companies seem to have cared so little for their workers (as
evidenced by what the unions went through and the changes they were able
to bring about) and yet they've also had a protected status in so many
places because of the jobs they have provided. How do you reconcile
those things now? How are people in coal country feeling now that the
jobs are scarcer thanks to practices like strip mining?
JB: As my grandfather, a coal miner who suffered from black lung and
barely survived a mine cave-in, once told me, every mining safety law
was written with the blood and guts of coal miners. We knew about the
deadly effects of black lung disease, for example, in 1831, but did
nothing until the late 1960s. Still today, three coal miners die daily
from black lung disease. Over 104,000 American have died in mining
accidents.
Our coal industry went through a century of homicidal negligence, for
the most part. And in the process, it also put a death knell of sorts--a
true stranglehold--on any kind of economical diversification in the
coalfield regions. (Coal, by the way, is mined in over 20 states.) Over
the past 150 years, our coalfield communities have been subjected to the
boom-bust whims of absentee coal companies and the dirty energy market.
The end result: Coalfield communities rank among those counties with the
highest unemployment, poverty and worst health care factors, while
billions and billions of dollars of coal have been trained and trucked
away.
As I often say, the only people who support strip-mining are those on
the company's payroll. Coal miners and their families understand better
than anyone that strip-mining jobs don't lead to any sustainable future.
Since the 1980s, we've lost more than 60 percent of our coal mining jobs
in most coalfield areas due to the heavy mechanization of strip-mining
and longwall mining.
TL: Near the start of the book you quote Obama saying the U.S. is the
Saudia Arabia of coal. What's his position on so-called 'clean coal'?
JB: Ever since his first trip to the southern Illinois coalfields in
1997, as a young state senator from Chicago, our president has
regrettably bought into the anatomy of denial of our coal industry and
ignored the true costs of our dirtiest and deadliest energy policy.
As the president must know, the marketing slogan of "clean coal" --
first promoted as "smoke-free clean coal" by Francis Peabody on the
streets of Chicago in the 1890s -- has been trotted out for over a
century, whenever the coal industry runs up against its dirty reality.
We've used the "clean coal" slogan for modern coal mining operations in
the 1930s and '40s, coal-to-liquid experiments in the 1970s, sulfur
dioxide emission filters in the 1980-'90s, and today's chimera of carbon
capture and storage technologies for coal-fired plants, which contribute
an estimated 40 percent of our nation's carbon dioxide emissions.
TL: FutureGen, which is supposed to be a demonstration project for
carbon-capture and sequestration technologies, is being billed by some
as a necessary part of a clean energy package. Do you think it will ever
be a viable technology? If so, what role will it play in keeping this
dirty industry afloat a while longer?
JB: Debunked by energy experts as infeasible and prohibitively expensive
for at least the next generation, FutureGen and carbon capture and
storage technologies (CCS) ultimately put the down payment of our
coal-fired future on the taxpayers and burdens the government with
potential accidents, leaks, disposal problems, and the enduring issue of
mercury and carbon dioxide emissions. And putting aside the huge issue
of peak coal, CCS will effectively increase coal production, no matter
what. That, in itself, is a death sentence for coalfield communities.
TL: There is a growing movement now opposing mountaintop removal mining
and coal power. Are you hopeful that activists can help effect
meaningful changes around this issue?
JB: Nothing has motivated this growing and nationwide movement for clean
energy and climate justice more than the tragedy of mountaintop-removal
mining. We've been fighting strip-mining for over 150 years---a fervent
movement nearly got Congress to abolish strip-mining in the 1970s.
Today's movement appears to be even more organized and determined to end
the most egregious human rights and environmental violation today.
We have seen the devastation of clear-cutting our nation's great forests
and carbon sink of Appalachia and blowing up its oldest mountain range.
We have met the casualties of absentee commerce; grieving parents who
have lost loved ones to coal slurry-contaminated water; veterans and
elderly who endure blasting, fly rock and silica dust; families who have
seen their homes washed away in floods caused by erosion; streams
poisoned with mining waste; boarded-up communities, strangled by a
boom-and-bust single economy.
Whether we must turn to civil disobedience to halt the reckless and
illegal blasting of mountaintop removal or the construction of new
coal-fired plants, or lobby Congress to regulate coal ash and pass the
Clean Water Protection Act--to end the dumping of coal waste into our
waterways, and effectively halt mountaintop removal--or force bankers
and lenders to stop funding dirty coal operations, I believe the
movement must work toward a coal-free future.
TL: You write in the book, 'We all live in the coalfields now,' -- we
are all part of the problem. If that's the case how do we try to begin
fixing the problem?
Coal is not cheap nor clean; coal has been killing us for over 200
years. The National Academy of Scientists totaled costs of coal at more
than $62 billion in "external damages" to our health and lives. A West
Virginia University report noted the coal industry "costs the
Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in
economic benefits."
According to James Hansen at the NASA Goddard Center, "Coal is the
single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. Our
global climate is nearing tipping points." Given the reality of climate
destabilization, and the fact that nearly 40 percent of our CO2
emissions erupt from coal-fired plants, we need to commit to a coal-free
future if we are to survive as a planet -- and that begins in the
coalfields.
Coal mining, which provides 45 percent of our electricity, will not end
tomorrow. But coalfield residents, like all Americans, deserve a road
map for a feasible transition to clean-energy jobs -- including a Coal
Miner's GI Bill for retraining and a massive reinvestment in sustainable
economic development in coalfield communities -- before we reach a point
of no return.
A "just transition" for the coalfields, of course, means more than
rhetoric about green jobs--it will require not only a shift in massive
investments and sustainable economic development, but a change in our
long-standing policies that have allowed coal country to be the
sacrifice zone for the nation.
Let me give one example: The proposed Smith #1 coal-fired plant in
eastern Kentucky. Instead of a costly coal-fired dinosaur, a recent
study found that a combination of "energy efficiency, weatherization,
hydropower, and wind power initiatives in the East Kentucky Power
Cooperative region would generate more than 8,750 new jobs for Kentucky
residents, with a total impact of more than $1.7 billion on the region's
economy over the next three years."
For me, the only way to move toward a clean energy future is to commit
to a vision of a coal-free future. Otherwise, we will let ourselves be
blindsided, as we have been for decades, with the "clean coal"
machinations of the coal industry.
Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet. You can follow her on Twitter
@TaraLohan.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146010/
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