Reckoning at Eagle Creek -- The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland by Jeff Biggers, Nation Books '10, $26.95, 300 pages, ISBN #1568584210. Index, bibliography, resources and organizations, no source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Jeff Biggers is an author/journalist but hardly an objective one -- at least when it comes to his favorite topic -- coal. Seems the author's grandfather worked in the southern Illinois coal mines, where he developed black lung disease. So at a time when some environmentalists are exploring strategies to escape the grip of Big Oil, Biggers is crusading against oil's alternative, what he calls King Coal, a fuel source he says is neither clean, cheap or healthy.
In a brief Q&A, Biggers attempts to debunk the myth of coal as alternative energy:
Q. Isn't coal commonly referred to as a 'cheap' form of energy?
A. Coal is not a cheap form of energy. A recent study by West Virginia University concluded that in the Appalachian coalfields alone, 'the negative impact of coal mining totaled $42 billion annually, and resulted in thousands of premature deaths.' According to a recent study by the University of California in Santa Barbara, external health costs from coal-fired plants cost an additional $268 billion annually. Over 104,000 Americans and immigrants have died in accidents in our nation's coal mines; still today, three miners die daily from black lung disease. According to the American Lung Association, 24,000 Americans die prematurely from coal-fired plant pollution each year. Another 550,000 asthma attacks, 38,000 heart attacks and 12,000 hospital admissions are also attributed to coal-fired plants. Further, in the winter of 2008, a TVA coal ash pond broke, resulting in an estimated $1 billion clean-up in eastern Tennessee. Nearly half of the American populace lives within 30 minutes of the nation's estimated 1,300 coal ash ponds."
Q. How did strip mining -- and the radical method of mountaintop removal mining -- get its groove in the coal market?
A. 'The rape of Appalachia,' wrote author Harry Caudill in his classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 'got its practice' in Illinois. Commercial strip mining dates back to eastern Illinois, where the first horses and scrapers opened the first surface mines in the 1850s. Over the next 150 years, steam-engine shoves and modern draglines have stripped millions of acres of farm land and virgin forests, across 20 states in the nation, leaving behind devastated moonscapes and polluted waterways.
Jeff Biggers, author of The United States of Appalachia and In the Sierra Madre, has worked as a writer, radio corresopndent and educator. He is touring America this spring not only to promote his book but as part of the Coal Free Future Project multimedia theatre production.
