by Chris Hedges
The southern part of West Virginia is cursed by its resources. The Appalachian Mountain chain, which may be the oldest mountain range in the world, is made up of hundreds of steep razorback mountains. The glaciers during the Ice Age never reached this far south, and the topsoil is some of the oldest and richest in the world. The soil produces ramps, ginseng, and “molly moochers,” or morels, among other ten-thousand-year-old species, that are gone forever once the soil is removed.19 Billions of dollars of timber and coal have been plundered for more than a century by outside interests, while those living here have become among the poorest in the nation. But even with mountaintop removal, coal production in 2009 fell by thirteen percent—one of the biggest declines in fifty years.20
The scale of the assault is visible across the landscape. In December 2008 the coal ash spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, released 1.1 billion gallons of waste across three hundred acres and into nearby rivers. The ash-filled sludge had accumulated for decades from the Kingston coal-fired plant. The spill was a hundred times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.21 The 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster, caused by the bursting of a slurry impoundment dam at the Pittston Coal Company in Logan County, West Virginia, sent more than 132 million gallons of swirling poison into the valley towns below.22 The flooding left one hundred and twenty-five people dead and more than twelve hundred injured. Some four thousand people were left homeless.23 Lives and whole communities vanish after such dam bursts. And as we drive the back roads of southern West Virginia, Joe and I see long rows of deserted and desolate structures in the twilight and long mudflats where buildings once stood. The depletion of soil and trees has resulted in frequent flash floods. In 2001 and 2002 rains dumped some ten inches in twelve hours. Torrents of water poured down the denuded slopes and ripped through communities, leaving forty dead. Those whose homes are destroyed usually take what money they can get from the government’s disaster relief program and move. Those who remain live amid the ruins.
Jenkinjones, West Virginia.
We drive from Gary to Jenkinjones. It was once a bustling coal town built and operated by the Pocahontas Fuel Company. The road into the holler that shelters Jenkinjones—named for the coal baron who was one of the founders of the company—is bordered on either side by a desolate row of chimneys that stand over charred wrecks of clapboard houses. The brick and concrete structures that were the anchor of the company town, including the old payroll office downtown and the company store with carved letters reading Pocahontas Fuel Company 1917 over the entrance, are hollow shells. Piles of rubble line the floor inside the three arched doorways of the company store. We kick our way through the debris. A mangy gray dog slinks past us, tail tucked between its legs, head lowered, teeth bared. The wind whistles forlornly through the trees.
The only building with any sign of life is the small post office. But with the planned cuts proposed by the U.S. Postal Service, it is scheduled to be shut in May 2012. At that point civic life will be extinguished. Post offices in the surrounding towns of Cass, Elkhorn, and Eckman were closed at the end of 2011. Postmistress Kathy Miller has lived in Jenkinjones for forty-seven years. She sits alone behind the counter. She says she has about seventy regular visitors. Nearly all are disabled or retired.
“I will go from working forty hours a week to three hours a week in the post office on Saturdays,” Miller says of the anticipated closing. “Everyone here is hoping Congress will do something.”
“The decline was gradual at first,” she says, “then we had those two major floods in 2000 and 2001. The main street was four or five feet under water. Twenty-four houses washed away.”
Eighteen-wheeler coal trucks rumble down the back roads. They spew clouds of coal dust into the air. Black grit covers the sides of the roads, the trees and the ground. It coats lawns and the fronts of houses. It blankets cars and lawn furniture. It leaves a film of grime on windows and seeps inside houses. Mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, manganese, beryllium, chromium, and other carcinogenic substances from coal saturate the landscape. You eat it. You drink it. You breathe it. In the elementary schools there are lines of inhalers in the nurse’s office for the boys and girls.
Maria Gunnoe lives with her husband and three children in Bob White on Route 85 in Boone County. Five acres of her land have washed away from repeated flooding. She has been flooded out of her home seven times. The massive mounds of rubble from blown-off mountaintops have triggered thirteen landslides that, with each rainfall, creep closer and closer to her home. If the rain is heavy, these landslides can move forward as much as five feet in a day. If they are not stopped, she will be buried.
“All the water I consume, including tea and coffee, is bottled,” she says:
I spend about $250 a month on bottled water. The West Virginia Water Company wants $46,000 to put water in to me, even though it is only five hundred feet of water line. I can’t afford that. My garden, which we have had for thirty-seven years, is covered with coal slurry. We can’t grow food in that. My front yard was washed out. My fruit trees are gone. My nut trees are gone. I was left with a massive trench in my front yard. That was in 2003 and I am still mad. My well is contaminated. And those who do drink the water get very sick, usually pancreatic cancer, liver disease, gallstones, or digestive tract problems. Our newest building in town is a kidney dialysis unit. The DEP [West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection] doesn’t allow citizens to submit samples of their water. The DEP doesn’t work for the citizens. It works for the coal companies. I have seen them lie to citizens so the coal companies can continue mountaintop removal. And people are being smothered to death from breathing all this coal dust. We thought about leavin’, but my property has been devalued so much I can’t get nothin’ for it.
“The coal companies control everything, including what my kids learn in school,” Gunnoe says. “My son’s school textbook says that surface mining leaves the land in better condition once the mining is over. The coal companies and the government depend on us to be uneducated and moldable. I recently adopted my six-year-old nephew. Mountaintop removal scares him. We drive through the twilight and literally see mountains being pushed into the valleys. This is terrifying to a child. The disassembling of mountains—what does that message send to our kids?”
She adopted her nephew because her brother, after he broke his back working in a sawmill, became addicted to painkillers.
“He has been on OxyContin for the last eleven or twelve years,” she says. “And once these people become addicted, they are like zombies. They will steal anything they can get their hands on. I bought my nephew a bicycle, but he never even saw it. It got sold for drugs.
“When I pick up my yearbook from high school, I can see on almost every page someone who has died of a drug overdose, and I am only forty-two,” she says. “It kinda takes away from your class reunions.
“The best experts say we got about twenty-two years of coal left,” she says. “But no one is thinking ahead. We should be figuring something out, and we should be doin’ it quick, otherwise our kids will be left with no energy, no water, and no plans for what to do.”
Gunnoe is a thin woman with curly black hair. She is part Cherokee. Her vocal opposition to the coal companies, like Larry Gibson’s, has engendered the fury of many of her neighbors, who fear the loss of the coal industry will mean an end to any viable employment. One of her dogs was shot dead and left in the parking lot where her children catch the school bus. Another dog was shot and killed while tied up in the back of her house. The gas tank to her truck was filled with sand, requiring $1,200 in repairs. Her children have been taunted at school as “tree huggers.” She has erected a six-foot protective fence around her house that she calls “my cage.” But she says that even for the miners who blast away the mountains, the destruction can be overwhelming.
“I know men who work on these operations, and they are emotionally impacted,” she says. “Not all of them wa
nt to be doin’ what they are doin’. They don’t have a choice. They fish and hunt in these mountains so they know what is happenin’. They are physically ripping out the backbone of this country, and they know it will never be the same. There is emotional stress in this.”
As societies become more complex they inevitably become more precarious and vulnerable. As they begin to break down, the terrified and confused population withdraws from reality, unable to acknowledge their fragility and impending collapse. The elites retreat into isolated compounds, whether at Versailles, the Forbidden City, or modern palatial estates. They indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of wealth, and extravagant consumption. The suffering masses are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, “. . . extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.”24 This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and collapse.
The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland, Italy, and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the desperate and growing human migrations, and the refusal to halt our destruction of the ecosystem, are the harbingers of our own decline. Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain.26 Contaminated water kills more than six thousand people every day around the globe.27 Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are at 390 parts per million (ppm) and climbing,28 with most climate scientists warning that the level must remain below 350 ppm to sustain life as we know it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by 2100.29 At that point, huge parts of the planet, beset with overpopulation, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures, and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence. And yet we retreat into fantasy. The U.S. Senate, in the summer of 2010, refused to take a vote on a watered-down and largely ineffectual climate bill. The House, in April 2011, voted 184 to 240 against legislation asserting that global warming was real.30
The same happened on Easter Island. The inhabitants, when they first settled the sixty-four-square-mile island during the fifth century, found abundant freshwater and woods. Seafood was plentiful. Within five or six centuries, Easter Island’s population swelled to some ten thousand people. The natural resources were depleted.
“Forest clearance for the growing of crops would have led to population increase, but also to soil erosion and decline of soil fertility,” Paul Bahn and John Flenley write in Easter Island, Earth Island:
Progressively more land would have had to be cleared. Trees and shrubs would also be cut down for canoe building, firewood, house construction, and for the timbers and ropes needed in the movement and erection of statues. Palm fruits [from the initially plentiful Chilean wine palm tree] would be eaten, thus reducing regeneration of the palm. Rats, introduced for food, could have fed on the palm fruits, multiplied rapidly and completely prevented palm regeneration. The overexploitation of prolific sea bird resources would have eliminated these for all but the offshore islets. Rats could have helped in this process by eating eggs. The abundant food provided by fishing, sea birds and rats would have encouraged rapid initial human population growth. Unrestrained human population increase would later put pressure on availability of land, leading to disputes and eventually warfare. . . . Inadequate canoes would restrict fishing to the inshore waters, leading to further decline in protein supplies. The result could have been general famine, warfare and the collapse of the whole economy, leading to a marked population decline.31
By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and the last nesting birds.
“Are the events of three hundred years ago on a small remote island of any significance to the world at large?” Bahn and Flenley ask. “Like the Earth, Easter Island was an isolated system. . . . They carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment, and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash. . . . Do we have to repeat the experiment on this grand scale?”32
“There is a feeling of powerlessness,” says Julian Martin, a seventy-four-year-old retired high school teacher and the son of a coal miner. He says of those in the decayed coal towns:
They have no money, very little land and huge trucks carrying one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of coal down a highway over and over. These trucks can’t go on the interstate they are so heavy. They are banned on the interstate. They were against the law in West Virginia, and they just changed the law. Now they are legal. If you grow up in one of these places like Naugatuck, Gilbert, or Krome and you see these huge monster trucks go by and maybe you get in your four-wheeler and get a look at these huge monster earthmover machines, you know you’re nobody. This is the blitzkrieg. And someone wants you to fight back against an outfit that can take the tops off of mountains? You don’t feel like you’re a very big person.
“The coal companies are running people out,” he says, as we speak on a gray, rainy afternoon in the town of Logan. “Eventually it will be like Cuba, where the United Fruit Company owned so much property that if you wanted to go from one end of the island to the other, you had to pass through their gates. Southern West Virginia will be owned by the coal companies, or they will abandon it and it will be this big wasteland.
“I’m scared every time I do anything,” says Martin, who has joined protesters condemning mountaintop removal. “I am afraid of gettin’ killed. And I don’t know why I let that bother me. Hell, I’m seventy-four. I’ve had a good life, an excellent, fantastic life.
“An awful lot of the people in the coal camps are there because they can’t get out,” he says. “The people who got educations have left. You don’t have a core of highly educated leadership, not that it has to be educated. Robert McNamara was educated and see what he did. My dad was uneducated. I was the first one to go to college. These were not stupid people. My grandpa was in the battle of Blair Mountain, he and his brother. They were plenty smart. But the highly talented, creative people have been sucked out of the Appalachians.
“It’s a sacrifice zone,” he says:
It’s so the rest of the country can have electric toothbrushes and leave the lights on all night in parking lots for used cars and banks lit up all night long and shit like that. We have been a national sacrifice zone. Hell, that phrase was created thirty-five, forty years ago. Now it’s terminal. There is no way to stop it. I haven’t had any hope for a long time. But the only reason I keep goin’ is, why the hell not? I’m goin’ die. Shit, might as well hold my head up. I don’t want Bill Raney, the president of the [West Virginia] Coal Association, to be able to tell his lies without somebody saying, “Bill, shit, that’s not true.” These corporations are goin’ to strip the whole country. If you face this reality then you become a guerrilla. You blow up the damn thing. I can’t go there, because they will put me in the penitentiary, and I don’t want to go there. I know they would catch me eventually.
About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file disability claims and seek state and federal pay
ments. “Disability and Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP. Harry M. Caudill, in his monumental 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, describes how relief checks became a kind of bribe for the rural poor in Appalachia. The decimated region was the pilot project for outside government assistance, which had issued the first food stamps in 1961 to a household of fifteen in Paynesville, West Virginia. “Welfarism” began to be practiced, as Caudill wrote, “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.”33 Government “handouts,” he observed, were “speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”34 Obtaining the monthly “handout” became an art form. People were reduced to what Caudill called “. . . the tragic status of ‘symptom hunters.’ If they could find enough symptoms of illness, they might convince the physicians they were ‘sick enough to draw’ . . . to indicate such a disability as incapacitating the men from working. Then his children, as public charges, could draw enough money to feed the family.”35
