This is the scene, when the coal-fired electricity that lights up New York City’s neon theatre district lowers on stage:

We are inside the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek. With their family’s 150-year-old homestead threatened by a planned mountaintop removal strip-mining operation, Hovie, a strip-miner himself, is determined to move his pregnant wife out of the country. As the last remaining member on her family’s ancestral property, Marie is torn by their agonizing fate, and the dangerous health conditions in the mining area. When she speaks of her dream to raise their child–the 8th generation of her family to be born in Eagle Creek–Hovie divulges a deeply held secret. 

“I’m sorry, baby, but the times have changed,” he says, holding his wife by the shoulders. “We have no idea how much lead or arsenic has been in our water. What are we going to put in the baby’s bottle? I’ll tell you the truth. I know those coal slurry ponds leak. I built them.”

It’s a pivotal moment in the play, “4 ½ Hours: Across the Stones of Fire,” a multimedia theatre production loosely adapted from my memoir/history, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. As part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, “4 ½ Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” will make its New York premiere at the Gene Frankel Theatre on June 4-13.

After a ten-year literary odyssey to research and write a personal expose on the secret history of coal mining in the American heartland, the next step of taking the page to the stage has been one of the hardest–and most exhilarating–acts in my literary career.

Reckoning at Eagle Creek is a family saga deeply rooted in the great American pastoral, an homage to the resiliency of my grandfather, a coal miner, and our family’s centuries-old woodlands culture. After my family’s 150-year-old homestead was strip-mined into oblivion, in one of the most diverse forests and historic communities in the American heartland, I set out to examine the overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation’s dirty energy policy over the past two centuries.

Strip-mining, as I learned in Eagle Creek, doesn’t only strip the land; it strips our historical memory. As a cultural history, the book digs deep into the tangled roots of the coal industry beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. It chronicles the removal of Native Americans, the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln, and the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety. It uncovers the devastating environmental consequences of industrial strip-mining.

As I began to adapt the history pages to the stage, working with the Coal Free Future Project, an ensemble of actors and activists from the coalfields, the characters inevitably took on their own lives. A young couple faced with the demise of their homeplace–their future, and their past–emerged at center stage of the great tragedy of strip-mining, mountaintop removal and reckless coal mining disasters still playing out across the coalfields in 24 states in our country today. 

In the end, I realized the play, like my memoir, was ultimately a love story–love for your family, love for your spouse, love for the land, and what you have to do to hold onto and defend your love.

Such a love story transcends the confines of the page or stage, of course. Hundreds of thousands of tons of coal stripmined are consumed by New Yorkers every year at 13 power plants in 11 counties.

When we open at the Gene Frankel Theatre on June 4th, the rumble of mining explosives will sound far beyond the theatre walls for me. As the final assault on our holler, under the cover of darkness in their amphitheatre of destruction, Peabody Energy will detonate explosives on the once forested edges of my beloved Eagle Creek.

Note: This is a guest post by Stephanie Pistello, Ben Evans, and Jeff Biggers, co-founders of the Coal Free Future Project. 

In the wake of the worst coal mining disaster in 40 years, compromise and political machinations this spring have resulted in a regulatory crisis of failure; workplace safety in the mines, including the black lung scandal, has emerged as a national tragedy; toxic coal ash remains uncategorized as hazardous waste; mountaintop removal operations and devastating strip mining in 24 states continue under regulatory plunder, not abolishment; billions of taxpayers’ dollars pour down the black hole of carbon capture and storage boondoggles, increasing coal production; climate legislation hangs in the balance of political games.

In 1776, Thomas Paine challenged our country to embrace the cause of independence over compromise. In a moment of crisis, he declared: “We have it in our power to make the world over again.”

Our modern-day Paine, James Hansen at the NASA Goddard Center, has issued a similar clarion call: “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. Our global climate is nearing tipping points.”

It’s time to envision a coal-free future. It’s time for clean energy independence.

We need a road map for a coal-free future. Not a hodge-podge collection of new regulations.

Coal mining, which provides 45 percent of our electricity, will not end tomorrow. Every coal miner deserves a right to a sustainable livelihood; given the legacy of our coal miners, we also believe no coal miner should be displaced from his or her job until we develop clean energy alternatives. This means that coalfield residents, like all Americans, deserve a road map for a feasible transition to clean-energy jobs — including a Coal Miner’s GI Bill for retraining and a massive reinvestment in sustainable economic development in coalfield communities — before we reach a point of no return.

The coalfields should be ground zero for President Obama’s clean energy initiatives, Al Gore’s Repower America, and all green jobs projects.

All coal mining communities know that the first time in 25 years, utilities coal stockpiles have increased during the summer; absentee coal companies are cutting jobs and idling higher-cost mines to keep their stock holders happy in a period of slumping demand; recent U.S. Geological Survey estimates place “peak coal” production as early as 2020.

As grandchildren of black-lung-afflicted coal miners from Kentucky, Illinois, and southwestern Virginia, we honor our families’ sacrifices in recognizing, not denying, the true cost of coal. Our grandfathers benefited from a transition to mechanization to improve mine safety. The time has come for a transition to clean-energy jobs.

Coal is not cheap nor clean; coal has been killing us — for over 200 years. Over 104,000 Americans have died in coal-mining accidents; three coal miners die daily from black-lung disease. Millions of acres of forests and farmlands have been strip-mined into oblivion; pioneering communities have been plundered. Half of Americans live within an hour of a toxic coal ash dump.

The Physicians for Social Responsibility recently found that coal “contributes to four of the top five causes of mortality in the U.S. and is responsible for increasing the incidence of major diseases.”

The National Academy of Scientists totaled costs of coal at more than $62 billion in “external damages” to our health and lives. A West Virginia University report noted the coal industry “costs the Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits.” In Kentucky, according to a Mountain Association of Community Economic Development study, coal may provide $528 million in state revenue, but costs $643 million in state expenditures.

Nothing has motivated our commitment for clean energy more than the tragedy of mountaintop-removal and nationwide strip mining in 24 states. We have seen the devastation of clear-cutting our nation’s great forests and carbon sink of Appalachia and blowing up its oldest mountain range. We have met the casualties of absentee commerce; grieving parents who have lost loved ones to coal slurry-contaminated water; veterans and elderly who endure blasting, fly rock and silica dust; families who have seen their homes washed away in floods caused by erosion; streams poisoned with mining waste; boarded-up communities, strangled by a boom-and-bust single economy.

The plunder of Appalachia and all coalfield communities must end.

More so, with coal-fired plants contributing over 30 percent of our CO2 emissions, everyone’s fate is connected to the coalfields now.

“Clean coal” carbon capture and storage plans are not only chimeras for Big Coal profit, but will ultimately increase coal production by 20-30 percent.

In the end, our fiduciary responsibility to our children demands a new way of generating our electricity in Kentucky and the country. It also affords us a great opportunity for economic and social revitalization

Clean energy independence, not coal, will bring more sustainable jobs.

Wind, solar, hydropower and turbine manufacturing, along with weatherization, retrofitting appliances and homes, could create jobs. The Appalachian Regional Commission found that “energy-efficiency investments could result in an increase of 77,378 net jobs by 2030″ in the region.

For us, such a clean energy revolution began with the proposed Smith # 1 coal-fired plant in eastern Kentucky, which was recently set aside. Instead of a costly coal-fired dinosaur, a recent study found that a combination of “energy efficiency, weatherization, hydropower and wind power initiatives in the East Kentucky Power Cooperative region would generate more than 8,750 new jobs for Kentucky residents, with a total impact of more than $1.7 billon on the region’s economy over the next three years.”

Ultimately, this clean energy independence would meet the energy needs of EKPC customers and cost less than the proposed coal plant.

A coal-free future began in Kentucky, in the heartland of our nation’s coalfields. Now it’s time to imagine a coal-free future for the rest of the country.

The writers are co-founders of the Coal Free Future Project.

How do you celebrate Earth Day, when your homeland or homeplace has been stripmined into oblivion?

For my family, standing in the ruins of our 150-year-old homestead in the devastated historic community of Eagle Creek, in the Shawnee Forest of southern Illinois, we turned to guerilla reclamation: My billie boys, the 9th generation of Eagle Creek ancestry, planted the first native plum trees on the unmanaged grassland reclamation site, in what was once one of the most diverse forests in the nation.

We raised the dead on Eagle Creek for Earth Day this year.

Ten years ago on Earth Day, the scene was entirely different.

I stood with my mother and Uncle Richard at the rim of a lunar expanse of ruts and rocks and broken earth. We had to protect our eyes. A dark wind swept along the ridge. Howling little eddies of fury. Huge trucks stormed in all directions. It looked like an earthquake had devastated the area.

How green was our valley of Eagle Creek, when my mom and I last walked these hills together. Corn and sorghum tassels had jutted out from the slopes like ancient signposts. The rolling forests seemed eternal in those days, protected by sentries of hickory, oak, maple, gum, beech, dogwood, and wild grapevines that thickened up the ramparts of Eagle Creek with the intrigue of danger.

Our family homestead, known since 1849 as the Oval Hill Farm, sat on a knoll in the eastern shadows of the Eagle Mountains, which withdrew to the upheavals of 400- million-year-old faulted ridges that were older than many American ranges. Our ancestors had first moved into the area in 1805. On the southeastern horizon, the promontory outlook of the federally protected Garden of the Gods Wilderness area, one of a handful of such protected areas in the American heartland, retreated into the traces of the Shawnee National Forest boundaries that looped around the panhandle of our hollow with the intransigence of a national border.

On a clear day, as a child, I once pretended to be an eagle and took flight down the hill, rose above the forests, and soared beyond the Ohio River and Kentucky, which lay only twenty miles away.

“I can’t believe this,” my mom whispered.

We could see the route of destruction. The first explosions had taken place in the summer of 1998. The coal company had set off the ammonium nitrate-fuel oil blasts in the surrounding Eagle Creek valley, gnawing away at the edges of our family hill. One thousand six hundred pounds of explosives sat in each hole like a land mine, set to ripple across the valley with enough thunder to bring down the walls of Jericho.

The Wisconsin glaciers that had encamped on the Midwest never reached our boot-heel range of southeastern Illinois. The dense forests crowning our hillsides and hollow, like most of the Shawnee hill region from the Mississippi to the Wabash River, once rivaled Appalachia or the Ozarks for plant diversity. Some even called it the Illinois Ozarks. It was that rare main chain of mountains and hills to stretch east to west. Over 1,100 plant species, 270 birds, two score of mammals and reptiles.

Then came the reckoning on our hillside along Eagle Creek. After harassing and intimidating our last remaining cousin on Oval Hill, a coal mining company had bought most of the hollow where my extended family had lived for two centuries and blasted away the old homeplace.

The throttle of machinery, an industrial cocktail of explosives, and a handful of large equipment drivers removed our Oval Hill farm and leveled the ridge by the end of the fall. Flattened the knoll to its knees, and then to ashes. The old pond, the four native plum trees, the sorghum and cornfields, the garden, the barn, and the 150-year-old log cabin were buried in a crater formed before the Paleozoic era.

Despite all of the laws and regulations on the books for stripmining and reclamation obligations, a 2006 study in the International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environmental examined 80 years of reclamation efforts and came to this conclusion: The forests and the fertile farmlands are not coming back. The report found: “Mined land cropped for bond release commonly becomes unmanaged grasslands. Scant mineland is returned to trees, with survival and growth poorer than on reclaimed minelands pre-regulation. Problems include high soil strength, poor water relations and excessive ground cover. Sustainable plant communities have not developed.”

My little boys planted the first trees in the ruins of Eagle Creek.

An estimated 960,000 tons of coal were stripped from our ancestor’s original farm and adjoining areas. Shipped to a medium sized coal-fired power plant, it would have generated roughly 2.06 MWe of electricity, based on typical estimates of burning coal. That would have been enough electricity to supply American demands for approximately four and half hours.

That was the exchange rate of our dirty energy policy for my family, like tens of thousands of Americans besieged by stripmining in 24 states and several Native American reservations: 200 years of history, for four and half hours of coal-fired electricity.

This E
arth Day, however, those four and a half hours marked the beginning of reclaiming our land, and heritage, from the coal industry.

At 3:30pm EST today, residents in West Virginia and across the nation will be observing a moment of silence for the fallen coal miners in last week’s Upper Big Branch mine disaster, their families, and the rescue crews.

Everyone in the nation–across the 48 states that burn coal for electricity–should take this moment to consider the sacrifice of coal mining communities and recognize the true cost of coal.

As the first funerals for the worst mining disaster in 40 years took place last weekend in West Virginia, President Obama quoted a fallen coal miner’s mother: “It is just West Virginia. When something bad happens, we come together.” The President added: “‘When something bad happens, we come together.’ Through tragedy and heartache, that’s the spirit that has sustained this community, and this country, for over 200 years.”

Far from an isolated case, last week’s mining tragedy in West Virginia demands more than a President’s prayers or a secret investigative report or closed-door commission hearing.

It’s time for President Obama to break the silence of the growing coalfield crisis, from underground mining disasters to the strip-mining and mountaintop removal disasters, and take immediate and urgent action to end two centuries of regulated manslaughter in the coalfields, and bring coalfield outlaws to justice.

By now, the regulatory machinations that have allowed Massey Energy and other coal companies to shirk their legal obligations to workplace safety have been well-documented. But they are nothing new to coalfield communities–nor is the shameful history of reckless coal mining disasters and regulatory inaction new to the President.

Just last fall, coalfield residents huddled in President Obama’s adopted state of Illinois to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Cherry Mine Disaster, when 259 coal miners (and children) died in an underground fire. Outraged by the lack of inspection and mining safety, legislators in Washington, DC, created the first U.S. Bureau of Mines. But the act lacked any real teeth. The agency was not granted any authority to enforce any of the laws, only promote health and safety. The accidents from coal dust and methane gas, the explosions, the fires–these all continued on an alarming scale as production and poorly run operations boomed.

In 1997, as a young state senator from Chicago, President Obama made his first visit to the southern Illinois coalfields on a golf outing, and first learned about the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” and the heartland’s limitless supply of “clean coal.”

A dirty secret was buried less than a mile away, hundreds of feet below ground: On December 21, 1951, at the New Orient No. 2 coal mine between Benton and West Frankfort, a methane gas explosion had taken the lives of 119 miners this time. With the nation in shock, United Mine Worker leader John L. Lewis expressed the righteous anger of the mining communities across the country: “The mining industry continues to be a mortician’s paradise.”

Less than a year after my own grandfather survived an explosion in a nearby coal mine in southern Illinois, and less than four years since an explosion ripped through the nearby Centralia mine and killed 111 miners in a notoriously unsafe and condemned mine, federal inspectors had found numerous violations at the New Orient # 2 in the summer of 1951. The mine was considered “extremely hazardous.” The inspectors’ main concern was with the buildup of methane gas, inadequate ventilation, and a noticeable lack of rock dusting–the very same issues that have dogged virtually every mine, including the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.

The New Orient # 2 mining accident prompted the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act of 1952, which called for annual inspections in underground coal mines, and charged the Bureau of Mines to issue citations and imminent-danger withdrawal orders. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the act also “authorized the assessment of civil penalties against mine operators for noncompliance with withdrawal orders or for refusing to give inspectors access to mine property.”

The penalties, as we saw in last week’s disaster, mean nothing to profit-bound multinational energy companies who place production over safety. Sixty years later, the tragic legacy of our coal miners in southern Illinois remains a bitter testament to historicide–the murder of our history and its lessons, and the removal of our coal miners’ sacrifice from American history.

The abuse of the coal miner has always gone hand in hand with the abuse of the land and coalfield communities.

In truth, the explosion at the violation-ridden Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia is just the tip of the iceberg of a regulatory coal mining crisis in 24 states—from underground to surface mining–that has led to a largely denied deathtoll for our nation’s miners and coalfield communities. But we must keep in mind: Massey Energy, now being exposed for its track record of operating underground and surface mines in a continual state of violation, is not the only guilty company to flaunt life-threatening regulatory violations and laws.

As Massey CEO Don Blankenship has openly admitted, violations are an accepted practice by virtually all companies–and the regulatory agencies that allow them to continue operation–for an industry that has witnessed the death of over 104,000 Americans and immigrants in accidents and disasters over the last century.

President Obama must not wait for another disaster to validate the crisis of dirty coal today. But as long as coal companies are allowed to maintain a habitual practice of violating mining safety laws and simply paying the fines–as production and profits incre
ase–the President and our federal agencies will have failed our nation’s coal miners and any sense of justice in the coalfields.

According to a “talking points” memo circulated by MSHA this week, “MSHA does not have the authority to permanently close or shut down a mine based upon a set number of violations, or any other criteria.”

This should no longer an acceptable practice for coal miners or any American citizens today.

More so, the scandalous disaster of black lung disease, which still takes the lives of three coal miners daily–10,000 over the last decade–is another reminder of regulatory inaction today. Black lung disease, wrought by the inhalation of coal dust, was diagnosed in 1831, and would be preventable if coal companies followed proper regulations for coal dust.

When Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and MSHA administrator Joe Main meet with President Obama this week to discuss the West Virginia mine tragedy, the President can either bring this era of bloodshed to an end, and empower MSHA to shut down and prosecute the lawlessness in the coalfields.

He can also begin the hard discussion of a just transition in the coalfields toward clean energy and sustainable economic development, and make a real commitment to clean energy jobs and investments.

Or, he can turn his back on coal miners and their families, and continue our nation’s denial of the deadly costs of coal.

Jeff Biggers is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. 

Obama Ends 150-Year War of Strip-Mining in 24 States: Mountaintop Removal Loses Its Groove.

Yeah, I’ve been wanting to wake up to that headline for years, too. Instead, I read another Coal Tattoo headline about President Obama genuflecting in front of Big Coal.

But don’t be fooled on April 1st today: Mountaintop removal, the process of blowing up mountains in Appalachia to scoop out the last tiny seams of dirty coal, ain’t new. Nor is the devastating strip-mining of coal limited to the Appalachian coalfields. Nor is it abating.

The war goes on.

To be sure: Strip-mining, which provides the lion’s share of our dirty coal today, takes place in 24 states and on several sovereign Native American reservations. You can find the nearest strip-mining near you, from Alabama to Wyoming—even in Louisiana, New Mexico and Kansas!–on this handy official Energy Information Administration chart.

The largest strip-mine is now slated for Indiana.

Just last week, protesters were arrested in an attempt to stop the approval of a massive strip-mine in the pristine Otter Creek valley in eastern Montana.

Let’s move from Montana to mountaintop removal in four Appalachian states: Mountaintop removal got its groove in Fayette County, West Virginia, in 1970. The first mountaintop removal operation was launched on Cannelton Hollow in area once called Bullpush Mountain. Forty years later, mountaintop removal operations have destroyed over 500 mountains, 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests, and neighboring communities, displaced miners, and stripmined the cultural landscape in the Appalachian region.

The “rape of Appalachia,” as eastern Kentucky author Harry Caudill declared in his classic portrait of Appalachia, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, “got its practice” in Illinois. He was referring to the fact that the nation’s first commercial strip mines took place in eastern and southern Illinois in the 1850s, when horses and scrapers began to bite into the hills and forests and farmland.

Of course, Caudill overlooked the fact that African slaves had been used as human bulldozers in the Virginia coal outcroppings since the mid-1700s.

But Caudill understood, like anyone in the coalfields from Alaska to North Dakota to Texas to Pennsylvania, that strip-mining more than strips the land; it strips the traces of any human contact. It results in a form of historical ethnic cleansing or historicide—the killing or removal of people from their histories, relegating them to the scrap pile of a vanished past.

In truth, strip-mining and its unhinged offspring of mountaintop removal are not only crimes against nature and our communities. They are crimes against our history. They allow us to intentionally strip away the most troubling issues of the coal industry from our historical memory.

The birth of strip-mining in the 1850s in eastern Illinois churned the historical memory of Kickapoo villages into ashes and spoil piles, stagnant mine ponds and pits; the first mechanized strip-mining machines rattled their blades across the land cleared of virgin forests, creeks, and thousand-year-old Native settlements.

The full-scale launch of strip mining–the process of clear-cutting the forests and dynamiting or detonating explosives across the landscape and then using heavy machinery to remove anything overlaying the mineral seams–took a giant leap in 1910 when steam-powered shovels rolled from the railroad tracks and tore pits out of the land with increasing ease. Within a decade, electrical power equipment had been developed: shovels with 12-cubic-yard dippers mounted on the end of a 95-foot boom. They seemed like enormous monsters at the time. But they were tiny. By the 1950s, over a third of all coal in the region was being strip-mined by “walking draglines,” stripping shovels that towered over 250 feet tall and sported buckets of 35 cubic yards.

Strip mining got its real groove when the “Captain” arrived in the 1960s. At one point considered to be the largest dragline in the world, the “Captain” stood twenty- one stories tall, weighed over 28 million pounds, and could sweep up two seams of coal simultaneously in its 180-cubic-yard dipper.

The Captain was a monster. It dug out craters with the panache of a meteor, and once it had finished reaping all the coal out of the area, it walked itself like a surreal robot skyscraper down the road to the next mine.

It was the tallest building in most coalfield regions, though a transient one.

By 1940, Illinois became the national leader in strip-mining coal. It was not limited, of course, to the hilly ranges across southern Illinois. Throughout the midwestern states, over a million acres of prime farmland were lost to strip mining in the mid-twentieth century. The unbridled destruction of fertile farmland in central and western Illinois actually gave rise to a national movement to regulate surface mining. As early as 1940, Senator Everett Dirksen, a conservative Republican from Illinois, introduced federal legislation to require coal companies to reclaim the land to a certain degree of sustainable post-
mining use.

This concern fell on deaf ears. Dirksen’s bill didn’t even manage to get out of a subcommittee, but it marked the beginnings of a new awareness about strip mining.

By the 1960s, an extraordinary alliance of farm organizations, community groups, and coalfield delegations from across the nation united in a campaign to abolish strip mining. Millions of acres across the nation resembled, according to the coalfield residents, the “aftermath of Hiroshima.”

It was not only a matter of the land, but also the economy. With 60 percent of our national coal production coming from strip-mining operations, everyone in the coalfields knew that the massive machinery and explosives would eventually wipe out the need for two out of every three coal-mining jobs. Strip-mining operations had been pounding the final nails in the coffin of the large-scale shaft-mine employers in the region for years.

This was the cruel irony of strip mining, of course: It also stripped the miners of their jobs, polluted the communities, and devastated the region for any other economic development. In fact, more jobs would be lost over the next decades to scaled-down heavy-machine-driven strip-mining operations than those impacted by any environmental legislation in the country.

In 1971, West Virginia congressman Ken Hechler had also spelled out the impending impact of strip mining on his region’s broader economy:

“What about the jobs that will be lost if the strippers continue to ruin the tourist industry, wash away priceless topsoil, fill people’s yards with the black muck, which runs off from a strip mine, rip open the bellies of the hills and spill their guts in spoil-banks? This brutal and hideous contempt for valuable land is a far more serious threat to the economy than a few thousand jobs which are easily transferable into the construction industry, or to fill the sharp demand for workers in underground mines.”

Forty years later, Hechler’s prediction has become Appalachia’s nightmare.

Yet, there was a certain banality of evil in the strip-mining debate. The movement to abolish surface mining was effectively derailed by the Goliath-like resources of the coal companies, whose sway on Capitol Hill was no less powerful in the state and township corridors. In the end, federal legislators opted to “regulate” strip mining, instead of banning its undeniable wrath of destruction in the coal areas.

Sound familiar?

In 1977, in the afterglow of the OPEC energy crisis and a new scramble toward coal production, President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, an admittedly “watered down bill” that would enhance “the legitimate and much- needed production of coal.” The president declared that it would also “assuage the fears that the beautiful areas where coal is produced were being destroyed.”

Few residents in the coalfields agreed. In his classic To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia, Chad Montrie described the sense of betrayal of the Appalachian coalition working with the midwestern heartland advocates, and those living in the ruins of the strip mines:

“The present bill was so weakened by compromise that it no longer promised effective control of the coal industry or adequate protection of citizens’ rights. A press release listed the provisions (or absent provisions) the Coalition found particularly troublesome: an eighteen-month exemption of small operators; recognition of mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique (rather than a variance requiring special approval); language allowing for variance from restoration to approximate original contour; failure to impose slope limitations (or a partial ban on contour mining); and failure to fully protect surface owner rights with a comprehensive consent clause.”

According to longtime anti-strip-mining activist Jane Johnson in Illinois, the act also allowed a flood of “grandfathering” of old mining contracts to circumvent the new requirements. Johnson wrote in the Illinois South newsletter in 1987, on the tenth anniversary of the surface-mining act: “People in the cornbelt felt betrayed.”

So did virtually every resident in the affected coalfields in the heartland, Appalachia, and the western tribal areas—across the 24 states of strip-mining glory.

And that betrayal continues today.

As foretold by Caudill, the connection between Appalachia and the Illinois coalfields intensified: Like the unintended consequences of outsourced war from a peace treaty, the Clean Air Act in 1990 not only dismantled the high-sulfur coal industry in Illinois, but also shifted our nation’s demand to Appalachia’s low-sulfur reserves, wildly escalating the process of mountaintop removal–the process of literally blowing up mountains and dumping the waste and overburden into the valleys and waterways.

Over the next decades, despite the new surface-mining laws, a land mass the size of some entire eastern states would be strip-mined and eliminated from our American maps.

Sure, the EPA blocked the largest mountaintop removal permit in West Virginia last week—70-odd permits still remain in limbo, as 3 millions pounds of ANFO explode daily in WV and KY.

And the 150-year war of strip-mining rages on in the other 24 states.

It’s time to bring this war to an end.

Here’s a clip from the war and its impact on my own family in the southern Illinois coalfields:

Jeff Biggers is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Nation Books).