From the time the North East interest come in and and stole the coal and mineral. The area has been exploited by coal corporations. John Mayo's broad form deed even the amended one we work under now does not let the land owner have much say when he is having his home blasted from under him.

It is not so much the difference between the people who mine coal for a living and those that are having their land destroyed by mining. Most times as my case we are one and the same. I was raised by a coal miner and mined coal myself but we mined it without destroying the whole damn region. We never had this kind of controversy until they started strippin coal and using MTR more specifically.

The Big Union mines and all the hundreds of one unit non union drift shaft mines employed thousands. It takes just a handfull of men to strip and MTR and since we do not have all the thousands of jobs in the communities we had at one time there is a disconnect between the coal industry and the people in the communties where they mine coal.

The few jobs we are being thrown our way in no way makes up for the damage they are causing in the region. Once when we had at least the thousands of mining jobs from a type of mining that did not destroy the mountain you could almost see a trade off for what little environmental damage they were doing. Now the coal corporations have quit underground mining to strip and MTR where they save a few bucks a ton over underground mining. They had a habit of having their way in coal counties from the age old practice of buying the local and state politicians they think they can still just continue the exploitation of the people and the area as they always have. Local politicians still have the same bad habit of allowing themselves to be bought and the people until of late have had the same bad habit of electing the same old coal corporate crowd. Our county legislative people at the state level has coal interest or is either a lawyer who works for the coal corporations.

Thing is the local school boards have become better and education is making some of the people take another look at the coal corporations and how they operate. The comapany line has went the way of the company store and the coal company newspaper.

The new age of mass media, the internet, cable TV, Satellite TV has hindered the coal corporations from dominating the conversation. The problems they are causing to the world as a whole and to the region that most of the country does not feel belongs exclusively to the indiginous people that live there is now a national conversation. Most of us don't live in Yellow Stone but we are not going to let a coal corporation destroy it. The Southern Appalachian Mountains belong to the nation at large and I don't feel the coal corporations will for long be able to keep the conversation local.

The differences between a coal miner and a person being covered with the dust and having his water polluted are insignificant to a coal corporation who has always had the local and state politicans bought and controlled the legislation.

The people worrying about the long term survival of the planet and the destruction of one of the nations deciduous mountain ranges will take the conversation out of the hollows of East Kentucky and West Virginia.

The coal corporations are spending millions now on clean coal ads for TV. Spending millions on lobbyist at the federal level to ensure not only their survival but their old way of doing business and mining coal. If they had back in the 70's when several government agencies were trying to gasify coal and make CTL without destryoing the environment in the manufactuing process put just 1% of their present ad and lobby money behind it they may have developed a coal fuel the world would have let them burn. If they had been a little more congnizant of the environmental destruction they were causing and stuck with all the major forms of underground mining instead of going over almost exclusively to strip and MTR the thousands of people working in the coal mining industry would have surely been a factor when stopping the mining of coal.

Most of East Ky. and Southern W.Va. has become a welfare region, there are not that many mining jobs to save or worry about. It only takes a hand full of men to strip coal. By taking the number of mining jobs down to an insignificant number and using a process to replace the underground miner that is destroying a whole region beyond repair the coal corporation has shot their ownself in the foot.

The hand full of strip jobs in this area are expendable there is no economic trade off anymore. The coal corporations are owned by out of state interest so is the coal. The large amount of money that was pumped into the local economy with underground mining is long gone.
The world is not going to let this go on for the sake of a few strip mine jobs that are destroying the region and the world.

The major argument is national, on how to get off a fuel that produces 50% of your power generation. Once the decision is made on that the local stuff won't matter.  

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

I'll take it as true that coal hires fewer locals than before.

If there was more economic impact in the community do you feel the community would be more willing to live with eco disruption?

Truthfully I'm quite happy to see coal having a more isolated relationship from society. I'm quite anxious to see coal replaced.

When I was growing up almost everybody on my hollow" think of it in terms of a street" was employed in the mines. Underground mines, horizontal shaft or drift mines. Some good union jobs in union mines. Most in what we called truck mines. Single unit mines where the wages were lower but still it was a paycheck.

Now I have one nephew that works in a drift mine. No one else on my hollow now works in the mines. There is a stip job on the hollow that blows the hell out of everything, dust, noise all night and day from the trucks. All aggrivation but no money into the community form it. If most of the families had a person working on that job there would probably not be people down at the fiscal court complaining about it. There would probably not be people on every blog site complaining about the mountain top removal and the whole hollow being turned into a mess with side hollows filled and lost forever.

Take this from a person who was born in a coal company house, who's ol man died in the mines and who worked in the mines. We were covered up with coal mining jobs. I am not saying they all were the best jobs but if you wanted to work it was available. Now we have a few underground mines but the most of the coal run is from stripping and it takes fewer men to do it.

Do the country a favor and shut down MTR. I would like to tell you it would shut down the coal industry since that is your main goal. It will only slow Eastern Coal Production down short term until Western Coal can take up the slack. The large part of the coal reserve is underground. They own it and are paying unmined mineral tax on it. When MTR is illegal they will do contour stripping, "putting the mountains back on the original contour" as was originally required by the 1977 Surface Mining and Reclamation Act. That is still an environmental mess and if it is outlawed they will go back to underground  mining. It will not destroy the coal business  stopping MTR mining but it will save
the Southern Appalachian Mountains

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

If you still had the thousands of miners working in the underground mines in Eastern Ky. and W.Va. they would fight tooth and nail to support the coal industry.

What you have now is indifference and people who are disconnected and don't have much of an opinion. The noise is made by coal company people putting articles in local papers and the legislative people doing editorials in local papers supporting coal.

They buy scientist to support their position and run clean coal ads and local political leaders will tell you their area is 100% behind coal.

Some who are not one generation removed from mining will cling to it out of tradition or some misplaced loyalty. Just as half their forefathers fought for the south because they were just one generation out of old Virginia or they are Regular Baptist just because their daddy was.

UNTIL, you ask them what happened to their daddy's mine and who do you know that is actually working in the mines now? If you ask them to think and tell them what type of mining replaced their fathers type of mining they turn on a dime.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

The industrial machine that is winding down now owes the coal field regions a cleanup, and plenty of good jobs doing that cleanup.

That coal saved our asses in WW II, the industrial might came from coal, iron ore, and steely human nerve.  The nerve to mine, smelt, and manufacture the arsenal of democracy.

Switching to a green energy economy will save us this time, why not let the mining families who lost members in the mines and the labor battles be a part of the renewable energy boom?

Throw out the coal country people with the crooked politicians and coal corporations?  That's plainly bad karma of the nth degree.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

 The plight of Southern Appalachia will be no worse this time than the plight of the Northern
Auto worker. When the country turned from a large loaded up behemoth that guzzles fuel and does not meet reliability standards the world rejected it. The Auto industry had since 74 to produce a reliable fuel efficient vehicle and direct the trend toward this type of vehicle. There inefficiency and inability to adapt will see them go the way of the steel industry who stuck with open hearth blast while the Japanese invested capital into their steel industry and went with oxygen blast. In a capitalistic model you stay current and innovative or you go under and we were programmed to let this happen without making this big a deal of it. I guess because of the daily 24 news cycle with instant news crying panic and doom we think the world is falling apart when all is happening is the evolution of a process.

In reality there are quite a few peripheral jobs surrounding the mining, processing and transporting of coal. The need for metallurgical coal will still have to be met but this will be an amount of mining we can accept if it is done by shaft mining that is under the water table. When and if the need for coal for power generation is reduced or eliminated the first wave of green jobs will be for reclamation fixing the damage done by years of MTR and strip mining. Some of the flat land created may be suitable for soy or other crops for biofuel and soy plastics. The plants actually builds up the soil and may make it suitable for something other than weeds. The area that has been planted by single species trees by the coal corporations may also be used for wood alcohol production. There is little wind corridor here but the mountain tops that are now high plateaus may be suitable for solar panel farms.

People here adapt, they went from subsistence farming and some bumble bee cotton to logging and then when coal was found in the region they went to mining. What ever works for the rust belt up north will work for the people of Southern Appalachia. The people are resilient and adaptable, a large portion have already migrated to the above mentioned area's and are part of the same northern new unemployed plus the textile mills in the south. As long as the nation does not forget about the region again and starts seeing it as part of the nation and not some backwater third world territory the same green technology and alternative energy jobs that eases the unemployment stress in the other sectors will work for the coal producing area.

We need to become as protective as a nation as the Germans are of the forest that have not as of yet been destroyed. As long as the nation thinks this is just a Southern Appalachia problem between the area and the coal corportions the enviromental destruction will continue. These Mountains belong to the nation and should be seen as the great Smoky Mountain national park region below located directly south of us. When new jobs are being considered for the auto workers of the north and the textile workers of the south the people from the coal producing areas of Southern Appalachia sould also be included in the process.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.