Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: What should we have done instead? You just referred to Switzerland, for instance. What has that country done that we haven't?

CAUDILL: Switzerland is one of the poorest lands on the globe. It's the same size as east Kentucky and three-fifths the size of West Virginia. It has no minerals of any value except its brine beds which are only one-tenth as large as the brine beds in West Virginia. It has no coal, no iron, no copper deposits, the -most meager forests imaginable. Twenty-one percent of the country, in fact, will grow nothing at all.

And yet twice as many people live in Switzerland as live in West Virginia. Where we have a third of our population on welfare, the official government figures released by Switzerland at the end of last year listed only 54 unemployed individuals in the whole country out of a labor force that included 800,000 imported foreign workers. The Manchester Guardian printed an article recently which stated that, per capita, Switzerland is the richest country in the world.

West Virginia, as I'm sure you know, used to have signs posted on main highways coming into the state. Those signs said, "Welcome to West Virginia, The Switzerland of North America." But there are no comparisons between Switzerland and West Virginia, except for the fact that they're both mountainous. The Swiss have adopted policies that have made them rich in their mountains, while we've adopted policies that have made us poor in ours.

To put it another way, the people of West Virginia and the people of east Kentucky have gotten poor in an exceedingly rich land while the people of Switzerland have gotten rich in a very poor land. And it all stems from the policies that each population has adopted. The Swiss chose a route that has led upward to work, creativity, productivity, wealth, and independence. We've followed a path that has taken us down into poverty; dependence, and the everlasting reliance on welfare checks.

PLOWBOY: All right. Let's say that we had done it all differently. Instead of letting the coal barons plunder these mountains at will and get off scot-free the way we've done, let's say we started taxing the big coal companies fairly back in their early days. And that we used the money collected to provide education for the people who lived here in the hills from which all that black wealth was taken. Would that education for its inhabitants early on have drastically changed Appalachia's recent past and present?

CAUDILL: If we had had the will and the mind and the intelligence at the local level to levy a fair and adequate tax on coal and the other minerals taken from these mountains and then if we had put that money into good schools, we could have changed the whole situation.

It wouldn't have taken a very large tax, either. If we had collected just 10 cents a ton on coal moving out of here in the early years-and keep in mind that 10 cents then had the purchasing power of about 60 or 70 cents now-we would have had-in a county like Letcher, for example-$60 million to spend by 1955. Well, $60 million invested in schoolhouses and in roads to get children to school and in decently paid teachers would have created an entirely different situation.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print