Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: What do you see in Appalachia's future?

CAUDILL: I think it'll be mined into a desert. We'll dig till every lump of coal is taken out of these hills.

The only hope we've got that anything with any semblance of utility will be left in these mountains is the hope that we'll be able to liquefy coal in place, eventually, and pump it out of the ground instead of having to tear it out. Liquefication might save us.

Otherwise it's just a matter of time. Every hill will be decapitated and all the woods will be dug up. The streams will be congested with mud and the whole country will be ransacked.

PLOWBOY: Does it have to be that way?,

CAUDILL: Well remember that the Coal Age is only about 300 years old. Up until the beginning of the 1600's, it was a crime punishable by death-to burn coal in England because of the air pollution.

There were half a billion people in the world at that time. Now there's nearly eight billion and every man in the world wants to improve his standard of living by consuming more energy. If you'll just look forward, you'll see that the coal will all be dug. And the limestone-limestone is life-and all the other minerals. They're going to pump this oil. They're going to pump these brines.

PLOWBOY: What about today's worse problem strip mining. Can we stop it?

CAUDILL: No. Not in any practical way. Not unless we learn to liquefy the coal. Most of that coal out west, you know, doesn't have any stone on top of it. You can't deep mine veins like that. They'll fall in and kill the miners: There just isn't any way to deep mine an 80-to-100foot-thick seam of coal that's covered by only 18 or 20 feet of loose overburden. The big companies are naturally going to strip a vein like that and I can understand why. The crime of the matter is that they aren't going to make even the first effort to reclaim the land they turn upside down.

That's the part that's hard for me to take. The fact that we aren't going to make those strippers reclaim what they're tearing apart. The Appalachian Mountain coal fields will be racked and ruined for good in four or five more years. Even if you passed a tough strip mining law now, you'd never know the difference.

PLOWBOY: I had kind of hoped we'd do more than make strippers reclaim the land they tore up. I'd hoped we might stop stripping entirely.

CAUDILL: Not a chance. The pressures to keep it going are too powerful. You're facing a tough combination when you line up against the rails, and the barge lines, and the mining companies, and the great land-owning companies, and the steel companies, and the utilities, and the rural electric co-ops, and the great foreign corporations that are loaded with billions of dollars and who want the coal.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print