Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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As recently as 1948, I was defeated for the state legislature because people thought I was a radical for saying that a teacher should be paid a minimum of $100 a month. I even had teachers tell me that I knew no such salary as that could ever be paid.

I never had a teacher while I was in school who made over $100 a month till I got into college. We didn't have any money to pay them with. Despite the millions upon millions of dollars' worth of coal that was being taken out, the county was broke. It couldn't even pay its bonds.

But we could have built schools, we could have built roads, and we could have had a good health department all financed locally with coal revenues. We could have had doctors and nurses and we could have had people going into the schools and educating the children in dental and health care.

One doctor who understands preventative medicine is worth 30 or 40 who pump pills into people if you can get at the children while they're young and interested and want to learn about good health. In failing to do that, however, we just deteriorated. We accumulated a backlog of ills that are almost incurable.

PLOWBOY: Well, what's past is past.But what about now? Is it too late to start doing what we should have done back then?

CAUDILL: It's never too late to make a start it's just that we're still too ignorant to do it.

Here. Look at West Virginia. It's sitting right in the middle of the greatest demand for coal in history. They're stripping it like crazy over there and nearly every lump they dig is leaving the state. A lot of that coal is going to Germany.

Now if the people the West Virginians are sending to their state legislature had a tenth the wisdom of the Arabs, they'd be taxing that coal at every turn. They'd tax the privilege of having it in the ground and they'd tax the privilege of mining it and the privilege of loading it. They'd get a couple of dollars on every ton and they'd plow it right back into West Virginia.

The Arabs have been smart enough to do that with their oil, but not the West Virginians with their coal. They love to send it out cheap and stay ignorant and poor.

You know, every few years outsiders rediscover West Virginia and eastern Kentucky and try to do something to help the people who live here. I find that very interesting. West Virginia, for example, has its own congressmen and its own senators who do nothing, say nothing, advocate nothing, see nothing wrong. It always takes someone like a man named Ken Hechler from New York or a man named John Kennedy from Massachusetts to notice that West Virginia is dying on the vine. The senators and congressmen from West Virginia never seem to notice.

PLOWBOY: What about Kentucky?

CAUDILL We got a severance tax passed in Kentucky even though we didn't get a single mountaineer to vote for it. Not a man in the Kentucky Legislature from the coal fields of east Kentucky voted for the severance tax. We passed it with votes from Louisville and other parts of the state. Our local man opposed it strongly.

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