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In August 2004, a massive boulder loosened by mining blasts rolled down a Virginia hillside, crushing to death the sleeping three-year-old Jeremy Davidson. In the spring of 2000, soon-to-be college graduate Darlies Carter was returning home from work when she was struck head-on and killed by an out-of-control, overloaded coal truck driven by a Xanax-intoxicated driver. In October of the same year, over 300 million gallons of toxic coal sludge—thirty times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill—moved lava-like through eastern Kentucky and into West Virginia, choking to death everything in its path.
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These tragedies did not make the national news. Nor will the many similar stories of ruined homes and gardens, poisoned water-wells, run-over children, flash floods, and destroyed headwater streams. Why? Because this is happening in Appalachia. Appalachian people and their region simply do not register in the national consciousness, even though their work and land is responsible for over 50 percent of the electricity that runs our nation. Listening to their heartache, as I did recently on an author's tour of mining-ravaged eastern Kentucky, and attending to the history of this region, one can well understand the frustration of a Martin County resident who said (referring to the sustained attention and assistance given to the disaster in Prince William Sound), "We're just not quite as cute as those otters." Given our national neglect and the naked greed and aggression of the coal industry, the stated conclusion of many Appalachian residents is that they have become "throwaway people."
More than 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau said that people know the natural world only as robbers. In order to make more money, we will stop at nothing. Armed with the latest technology, we now have the capability to blow the whole creation to hell. As the history of Appalachia and its people so clearly shows, it is a capability that is being fully realized and refined.
Missing Mountains , which consists of a collection of poems, essays, short fiction, and photographs, is the first installment coming from several of Kentucky's best known and emerging writers and artists who have committed themselves to bringing a halt to mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. MTR represents our extractive economy at its most egregiously violent. In this practice, rather than burrowing into and under a mountain to extract the seams of coal, engineers simply bulldoze a mountaintop clear of the rich vegetation and soil, pushing it into the valleys below. Then holes sixty feet deep and as wide as a basketball are filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (the same mixture used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building) and set off. Thousands of tons of rock and earth explode into the air (sometimes hitting residences and cracking home foundations below). Bulldozers return to the site to push this debris into the hollows. This process continues relentlessly until the coal seams are exposed. Now the coal can easily and cheaply be loaded onto lines of trucks that then haul the coal to be cleaned and then shipped (mostly) to electricity-producing power plants.
From a short-term economic standpoint this mining method makes perfect sense. Monster-size machines operating above ground require far fewer workers than conventional mining (in a little over 20 years mining jobs in Kentucky were cut by nearly two thirds from approximately 36,000 in 1979 to 13,000 in 2003). Moreover, we need to access the coal quickly in a time of rising oil prices and volatile oil markets. But from an ecological and cultural standpoint, MTR represents robbery and violence gone wild as vast stretches of Appalachia are reduced to a lunar-like landscape and one small community after another is torn apart or vacated by coal politics.
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