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On the circle back to Yeager field, Tom Hyde, a corporate attorney, calls this a "tragedy." We all nod, knowing that "tragedy" does not quite describe the enormity of the things we've just seen or the cold-blooded nature of it. In our one-hour flight we saw perhaps one percent of the destruction now metastasizing through four states. Until recently it was all but ignored by the national media. We have known of the costs of mining at least since Harry Caudill published Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 1963, but we have yet to summon the moral energy to resolve the problem or to pay the full costs of the allegedly cheap electricity that we use.

Under a hot afternoon sun we board a 15-person van to drive to the edge of the coalfields to see what it looks like on the ground. On the way to Kayford Mountain, we take the interstate south from Charleston and exit at a place called Sharon onto winding roads that lead to mining country. Trailer parks, small evangelical churches, truck repair shops, and small often lovingly tended houses line the road, intermixed with homes abandoned long ago when underground mining jobs disappeared. The two-lane paved road turns to gravel and climbs toward the top of the hollow and Kayford Mountain. Within a mile or two the first valley fill appears, a green V-shaped insertion between wooded hills. Reading the signs made by water coursing down its face, Jack Spadaro notes that this one will soon fail. Valley fills are mountains turned upside down: rocky mining debris, illegally buried trees, along with what many locals believe to be more sinister things brought in by unmarked trucks in the dead of night. Jack adds that some valley fills may contain as much as 500 million tons of blasted mountains and run for as long as six miles. We ascend the slope toward Kayford, passing by the No Trespassing signs that appear around the gate leading to the mining operations.

Larry Gibson, a diminutive bulldog of a man fighting for his land, meets us at the summit, really a small peak on what was once a long ridge. The family has been on Kayford since the eighteenth century, operating a small coal mine. Larry is the proverbial David fighting Goliath, but he has no slingshot, unless it is that of moral authority spoken with a fierce, inborn eloquence. Those traits and the raw courage he shows every day have made Larry a symbol for the movement, with his picture in Vanity Fair, National Geographic, and other newsstand magazines. Larry's land has been saved so far because he made forty acres of it into a park, and has fought tooth and nail to save it from the lords of Massey Energy. They have leveled nearly everything around him and have punched holes underneath Kayford because the mineral rights below the surface were long ago separated from ownership of the surface above in a shameless scam perpetrated on illiterate and trusting mountain people.

Larry describes what has happened, using a model of the area that comes apart—more or less like the mountains around him have been dismantled. As he talks he illustrates what has happened by taking the model apart piece by piece, leaving the top of Kayford looking rather like a knob sticking up amidst the encircling devastation. So warned, we walk down the country lane to witness the advancing ruin. Fifteen of us stand for maybe half an hour on the edge of the abyss, watching giant bulldozers and trucks at work below us. Plumes of dust from the operations rise up several thousand feet. The next set of explosive charges is ready to go on an area about the size of a football field. Every day some three million pounds of explosives are used in the eleven counties south of Charleston. This is a war zone. The mountains are the enemy, profits from coal the prize, and the local residents and all those who might have otherwise lived here are the collateral damage.

We try to wrap our minds around what we are seeing, but words do no justice to the atrocity before us. For a pittance, the oldest mountains on Earth are being turned into gravel and,their ecologies radically simplified forever. Perhaps as a defense mechanism from feeling too much or being overwhelmed by what we've seen, we talk about lesser things. On the late afternoon drive back to Charleston we pass by the coal-loading facilities along the Kanawha River. Mile after mile of barges line up to haul coal to hungry Ohio River power plants, the umbilical cord between mines, mountains, and us—the consumers of cheap electricity.

Over dinner that night we hear from two residents of Mingo County who describe what it is like to live in the coalfields. Without forests to absorb rainwater, flash floods are a normal occurrence. A three-inch rain can become a ten-foot wall of water cascading off the flattened mountains and down the hollows. The mining industry calls these "acts of God," and thoroughly bought public officials agree, leaving the victims with no recourse. Groundwater is contaminated by coal slurry and the chemicals used to make coal suitable for utilities. Well water is so acidic that it dissolves pipes and plumbing fixtures. Cancer rates are off the charts, but few in Charleston or Washington care enough to notice. Coal companies are major buyers of politicians; the head of Massey Energy, Donald Blankenship, has been known to spend lots of money to buy precisely the kind of representatives he likes—the sort that can accommodate themselves to exploitation of land and people and the profits to be made from it. His campaign to ravage the rest of West Virginia is titled, "For the Sake of the Kids."

Pauline and Carol, from the town of Sylvester, both in their seventies, are known locally as the "dust busters" because they go around the town wiping down flat surfaces with white cloths. The cloths, covered with coal dust from a nearby loading facility, are then presented as evidence of foul air at open hearings to the irritated and unmovable servants of the people. Black lung and silicosis disease are now common among young and old alike who are exposed to the dust from surface operations but have never set foot in a mine. They have little or no voice in government; they are considered to be expendable. Pauline, a fiercely eloquent woman, whose husband was wounded and captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, rhetorically asks, "Is this what he fought for?"

To permanently destroy millions of acres of Appalachia in order to extract maybe twenty years of coal is not just stupid; it is a derangement at a scale for which we as yet do not have adequate words, let alone the good sense and the laws to stop it. Unlike deep mining, mountaintop removal employs few workers. It is destroying the wonders of the mixed mesophytic forest of northern Appalachia once and for all, including habitat for dozens of endangered species. It contaminates groundwater with toxics and heavy metals and renders the land permanently uninhabitable and unusable. Glib talk of the economic potential of flatter places for commerce of one kind or another is just that: glib talk. Coal companies' efforts to plant grass and a few trees here and there are like putting lipstick on a corpse.

One of the most diverse and beautiful ecosystems in the world is being destroyed and rendered forever uninhabitable, along with the lives and culture of the people who have stayed behind in places like Sylvester and Kayford. We justify this on the grounds of necessity and cost. But virtually every competent independent study of energy use done in the past thirty years has concluded that we could cost-effectively eliminate half or more of our energy use, and simultaneously strengthen our economy, lower costs of asthma and lung disease, raise our standard of living, and improve environmental quality. More complete accounting of the costs of coal would also include the rising tide of damage and insurance claims attributable to climate change. Some say that if we don't burn coal the economy will collapse and we will all have to go back to the caves. But with wind and solar power growing by more than 25 percent per year and the technology of energy efficiency advancing rapidly, we have good options that make burning coal unnecessary. And before long, we will wish that we had not destroyed so much of the capacity of the Appalachian forests and soils to absorb the carbon that makes for bigger storms and more severe heat waves and droughts.

No one in a position of authority in West Virginia politics, excepting that noble patriarch of good sense, former US Representative and West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler, asks the obvious questions. How far does the plume of heavy metals coming from coal-washing operations go down the Kanawha, Ohio, and Mississippi and into the drinking water of communities elsewhere? What other economy, based on the sustainable use of forests, non-timber products, eco-tourism, and human craft skills, might flourish in these hills? What is the true cost of "cheap" coal? Why do the profits from coal mining leave the state? Why is so much of the land owned by absentee corporations like the Pocahontas Land Company? Once you subtract the permanent ecological ruin and crimes against humanity, there really isn't much to add, as a country song once put it. Those touting "clean coal" ought to spend some time in the coalfields and talk to the residents in order to understand what those words really mean at the point of extraction. And for those who assume that the carbon from burning coal can be safely and permanently sequestered underground at an affordable cost, I have oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.

Nearly a thousand miles separates the coalfields of West Virginia from New Orleans and the Gulf coast, yet they are a lot closer than that. The connection is carbon. Coal is mostly carbon, and for every ton burned, 3.6 tons of CO2 eventually enters the atmosphere, raising global temperatures, warming oceans and thereby creating bigger storms, melting ice, and raising sea levels. For every ton of coal extracted from the mountains, perhaps a 100 tons of what is tellingly called "overburden" is dumped, burying steams and filling the valleys and hollows of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And between the hills of Appalachia and the sinking land of the Louisiana coast, tens of thousands of people living downwind from coal-fired power plants die prematurely each year from inhalation of small particles of smoke laced with heavy metals that penetrate deeply into lungs.

Like all life forms, we search out great pools of carbon to perpetuate ourselves. It is our mismanagement of carbon that threatens the human future. This is an old story. Humans have long fought for the control of carbon found in rich soils and deep forests, and later in fossil fuels. The root of all evil does not begin with money, but with the carbon in its various forms that money can buy. The exploitation of carbon is the original sin, leading quite possibly to the heat death of a great portion of life on Earth, including us. This is what James Lovelock calls the revenge of Gaia which, if it comes to pass, will be Hell on Earth.

Sources

Caudill, H. 1963. Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Boston: Little Brown.

Immanuel, K., 2005. Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years. Nature. August 4. pp. 686-688.

Lovelock, J., 2006. The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin.

Reece, E., 2006. Lost Mountain. New York: Riverhead Books.

Kerr, R. 2006. A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas. Science. March 24. pp. 1698-1701.

Tidwell, M., 2003. Bayou Farewell. New York: Vintage.

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David W. Orr is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Ecoliteracy and professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College. At Oberlin, he directed a collaboration of students, staff members, and some of the most innovative designers and architects in the world. Together they designed and built the Environmental Studies Center, a building selected as one of 30 "milestone buildings in the 20th century" by the US Department of Energy. He is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The Campus and Environmental Responsibility.

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