Ain't no mountain

Under the pressures of corporate patronage, what should have been declared a Superfund site instead received a perfunctory and cosmetic cleanup, and what should have been a damaging criminal negligence suit against the responsible company, Massey Energy, instead ended in a $5,500 fine. This is what happens when Bush's appointee for labor secretary, Elaine Chao, who oversees the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), is the wife of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the coal industry. Chao appointed a former mining company manager to take over the Martin County investigation and he produced a report that let Massey off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. The wolves have been put in charge of the sheep.

When the bankrupt Horizon Resources, the parent company of Leslie Resources, sold its assets in the summer of 2004, the Lost Mountain mine came under the control of New York billionaire Wilbur Ross and his International Coal Group (ICG). Ross has made a lucrative practice of buying bankrupt coal and steel operations, canceling their employees' healthcare and retirement benefits with the permission of the federal courts, and then unloading his investments at a steep profit, effectively shifting the costs of the business onto the working class and the profits to the investment class. (The Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners died last month and a 13th slipped into a coma after an explosion left them trapped for more than 40 hours, is, incidentally, another of the operations ICG acquired from Horizon. Sago had a long history of serious safety violations for which it had been fined a negligible $24,000.)

While it is both appropriate and easy to curse dishonorable politicians and ruthless corporate moguls, the difficult truth remains that we are responsible both for their power and for the energy demands that drive their actions. U.S. coal companies now extract a billion tons of coal per year, 70 percent of which comes from surface mines like the one on Lost Mountain. The overwhelming majority of that coal feeds coal-fired power plants that provide electricity to more than half of American homes, whose demand for electricity has risen 70 percent in the last 20 years. There is a good chance that as you read this review -- and as I wrote it, and as Reece wrote the book that it is about -- we are all participating in the destruction of Appalachia.

Reece's acknowledgment of this shared responsibility and his sensitivity to how the controversies over strip mining play out in the culture help make "Lost Mountain" more than a mere screed. Though he lives in Lexington, Ky., and once worked as a janitor at a coal-fired power plant in Louisville, Reece knows that in the eyes of many in Appalachia his residence in western Kentucky and status as a professor make him just another outsider who cares more about trees than he does about country people. In one passage, Reese surveys a protest and counter-protest in Lexington over the release of the Department of Interior's Environmental Impact Statement on mountaintop removal (the handiwork of Steven Griles) and deftly sums up the cultural divide. "You've seen them before," he writes of the protesters. "They wear tie-dye shirts, Birkenstock sandals, and earnest expressions. They give fiery speeches about corporate greed and human arrogance. They play bongos." And the counter-protesters: "You've seen them too -- the golf shirts, the khaki shorts. They hang out in cigar bars and like the president."

Yet, despite the embarrassing small-mindedness of the culture wars, Reece is unafraid to throw in his lot with the bongo players, at least for now: "The fighting between conservationists and the coal industry -- between an ethic and the economy -- will rage for years. That's clear. And the fight might have to get quite ugly before substantial, sustainable change occurs," Reece writes. "We will have to choose sides, it seems, to reach the point where we realize there are no sides, and that there are no sides because there is no outside." This is the refrain of "Lost Mountain," that we're all in this together, and Reece can be forgiven if he sometimes hits us over the head with it. He cannot reshape the lost hills of Appalachia, so he aims to reshape our consciousness to conform not to the flat and barren logic of the market but to the health and wisdom of an old-growth forest.

But what kind of an economy would such an ethic construct? Would it survive being "mugged by reality"? To this Reece offers the example of the Ecovillage, a collection of apartments, gardens and greenhouses on the campus of Berea College outside of Lexington that is devoted to housing single parents. The Ecovillage recycles its own wastewater and, thanks to careful design, uses 75 percent less energy and water than the average American neighborhood. Its residents, meanwhile, live a perfectly comfortable lifestyle with washing machines, fluorescent lights and all the rest.

On a grander scale, Reece suggests that a carbon tax be levied on coal and other fossil fuels and that a large part of the revenue be used to subsidize reforestation projects. (The carbon tax is a notion that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has recently begun pushing as part of his "geo-green" political agenda.) Or failing that, Kentucky could at least raise its coal severance tax (which is levied on coal operators per ton of coal extracted) to a par with other coal-mining states and dedicate the extra revenue to fostering regional economies based around "furniture makers and cabinetmakers, tree farmers, fish farmers, foresters and people raising non-timber forest products such as mushrooms and herbs." For many years, the people and hills of Appalachia have been paying a stiff price for the cooling, heating and lighting of our homes. Much of what weve taken cant be returned, but we can at least begin to create a system in which health and wealth are returned to their sources. We can, in the words of the ecologist Aldo Leopold, begin to "think like a mountain."

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