Central Appalachia: The Back Story

People in Eastern Kentucky are tired of being portrayed as uneducated hillbillies unable to help themselves. In February 2009, the ABC television show 20/20 nourished this ugly stereotype with an episode on the region. Not surprisingly, large numbers of local people were incensed, their indignation pouring out in letters to the editor in regional newspapers and on You Tube videos like the one by Bob Allen, a high school math teacher in a town mentioned in the program. Allen chided the reporter, Diane Sawyer, for lack of sufficient curiosity to hunt for something more original.¹ At the end, he apologized sarcastically for not including subtitles while he spoke. In the 20/20 episode, subtitles were used when people from the region were talking, yet there was no one whose speech was unintelligible.

In 1964, President Johnson launched the War on Poverty in Martin County in Eastern Kentucky. The photograph of Johnson kneeling on local resident Tom Fletcher’s porch with Fletcher and three of his children in the picture is an iconic image in the War on Poverty. The focus of the camera is on the two men, Johnson’s profile and Fletcher’s worn face with hardened lines and rotted teeth.

Johnson picked Central Appalachia for a reason. The deep and persistent poverty here presented a challenge in which a metaphor like war probably felt like the right language. More than 40 years later, we still find 29 of the 100 poorest U.S. counties in Eastern Kentucky.² Materially, conditions here are better than they were 45 years ago, but in all this time, little has changed to give local people more opportunities to escape poverty.

King Coal

Eastern Kentucky, like other impoverished areas of Central Appalachia, carries another association: coal mining. The 20/20 episode discussed coal mining but missed a chance to educate the public about the close relationship between the presence of coal and poverty. The documentary represented coal mining as one of the few economic opportunities available to young people in the region. That may be accurate, but it would have been helpful to relate why there are so few other options and how coal is implicated in perpetuating poverty in the region.

Jeff Goodel, author of the book Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, describes Central Appalachia as more like the Congo than the rest of the United States.³ This would seem to be an exaggeration until you grasp what the Congo and Central Appalachia have in common. Both have been plagued by what’s known as the “resource curse.” Vast natural resources have made a small group of people extremely rich and left most of the local population very poor.

In Central Appalachia, the spoils have gone mostly to outsiders in the mining industry who share the wealth with elites who control state politics. But it’s not inevitable for places endowed with a bounty of natural resources to follow this path. Greed, and complicit policies that permit it to continue, explain why coal companies are allowed to harvest the mineral wealth without paying severance taxes on it. Had the coal companies been compelled to put a higher share of their profits back into the region, Eastern Kentucky might have some of the best schools in the nation; but as anyone familiar with the area knows, it didn’t work out this way.

Master Blasters

Everyday, bombs go off somewhere in Central Appalachia. It’s the mining companies blowing the tops off mountains. For the coal companies, this is an efficient way to get to the coal. Like most jobs that used to require a strong back and powerful arms, advances in technology have eliminated much of the human labor in mine work.

Mountains can be blown up to reach the coal seams underneath with fewer than 10 workers. Deep mining, where miners tunnel into the mountains for thousands of feet, is still done; but it requires many more workers to retrieve the coal, since the enormous earthmoving equipment used in mountain top removal (MTR) is impractical in deep mining.

MTR has destroyed hundreds of mountains, wiped out millions of acres of forestland, and contaminated air, streams and drinking water as debris is dumped into streambeds. Mining has always been a hazardous occupation for miners; with MTR, whole communities are at risk. Mining companies have lobbied to weaken the legislation that requires them to clean up their sites, and they have succeeded. All of Kentucky’s lakes and rivers are under advisory for mercury contamination.⁴

Climate change legislation threatens the future of coal mining, because burning coal for electricity contributes to unsustainable amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. To avoid the worst-case scenarios of climate change projections, coal must be phased out and replaced by cleaner, renewable forms of energy. People living in Central Appalachia are, of course, concerned about what comes next. Not necessarily about how they will heat their homes and turn on the lights, but about what their local economy will look like once coal mining is gone. Coal companies, stoking this anxiety, have portrayed groups opposed to MTR as environmental extremists. But it doesn’t take an environmentalist to explain the case against coal. A study by the Institute of Health Policy Research at West Virginia University found that coal mining costs the Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits. ⁵

In Coal River Valley, West Virginia, the community is engaged in an epic struggle with Massey Energy, one of the largest coal companies in the country, which has a permit to blast 6,450 acres off the top of a mountain. A plan proposed by the community to build a wind farm on the mountain instead would generate 50 times more annual tax revenue and create more and better-paying jobs. Moreover, the wind farm could last indefinitely, whereas geological data show the mountain has less than 20 years of recoverable coal left.

The county’s planning and zoning ordinance says that it will “protect the health, safety, and general welfare of the present and future population of Raleigh County; insure growth and development is economical and sound; encourage the conservation of natural resources and historical preservation.” Despite this, the community has struggled to get local elected officials to consider the wind-farm proposal.

In the Hollows and Under Bridges

Pauline White of the Shepherd’s Food Pantry.

In Floyd County, Kentucky, 60 residents of the same hollow stopped a mountain top removal project that had been planned adjacent to their homes. When Beverly May, who has a house in this hollow, first learned of the planned MTR, she said, “I took to my bed and cried for three days.” However, not one to easily give up, she rose to her feet and organized her neighbors for a fight.

The legal battle lasted for more than two years before it was settled in 2009—in favor of the community. May and her neighbors fought the MTR project using a provision in the federal mining laws meant to protect public resources. The road in and out of their hollow was deemed a public resource since their hollow backs up to the foot of the mountain. Thus, the mining company wouldn’t be able to haul coal out of the hollow unless it built a separate road, which was an expensive proposition for them.

The petition process was by no means easy for the community. They faced regular intimidation from the mining company. But community members stuck together and held firm. Quite simply, they wanted to remain a community more than they wanted the compensation package offered by the company. “What we have in Eastern Kentucky that people outside the area under-appreciate is community,” says May. “There are friendships and kinships here that go back for 200 years. I have neighbors in this hollow who knew my great-grandmother.”

These are not the kinds of stories about Eastern Kentucky that are often heard outside the region. The Shepherd’s Food Pantry in Lynch is another example of what makes Eastern Kentucky’s communities stronger than they appear from their census data or on that 20/20 episode. The Shepherd’s Food Pantry operates out of a former union hall; the only remaining union tie is that many people who use the pantry are retired union miners.

Pauline White, who runs the pantry, related a story about a young couple, a boy and girl in their late teens, who had been living under the bridge at the edge of town. The girl had to drop out of school and leave home to escape an abusive stepfather. The boy came with her because she was pregnant with his child. Wise made a call to a friend and helped the boy get a job at the Arby’s Restaurant in town. A couple of years have passed, and now he’s the assistant manager, she went back to school to get her diploma, and they are married and the parents of a beautiful, healthy baby girl. Their story may not sound important or particularly special, but in communities like this where people rely on one another literally to survive, these are the voices that deserve to be heard.

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