Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes


Book Description

This book collects and summarizes current scientific knowledge concerning coal-mined landscapes of the Appalachian region in eastern United States. Containing contributions from authors across disciplines, the book addresses topics relevant to the region’s coal-mining history and its future; its human communities; and the soils, waters, plants, wildlife, and human-use potentials of Appalachia’s coal-mined landscapes. The book provides a comprehensive overview of coal mining’s legacy in Appalachia, USA. It book describes the resources of the Appalachian coalfield, its lands and waters, and its human communities – as they have been left in the aftermath of intensive mining, drawing upon peer-reviewed science and other regional data to provide clear and objective descriptions. By understanding the Appalachian experience, officials and planners in other resource extraction- affected world regions can gain knowledge and perspectives that will aid their own efforts to plan and manage for environmental quality and for human welfare. Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes: Resources and Communities in a New Energy Era will be of use to natural resource managers and scientists within Appalachia and in other world regions experiencing widespread mining, researchers with interest in the region’s disturbance legacy, and economic and community planners concerned with Appalachia’s future.




Removing Mountains


Book Description

An ethnography of coal country in southern West Virginia.




Coal Country


Book Description

An illustrated chronicle of the growing protest movement against mountaintop removal mining (MTR) of coal in Appalachia, including essays, commentary, and oral histories.




Coal, Cages, Crisis


Book Description

How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators—Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.




The Southern Appalachians


Book Description




The Devil Is Here in These Hills


Book Description

“The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).




Regional Landscapes of the US and Canada


Book Description

Extensively praised, Regional Landscapes of the US and Canada, 8th Edition is known for providing general readers with an excellent introduction to major geographic concepts and fundamental themes. The new eighth edition builds on this proven success, presenting updated and revised material. Anyone interested in the geography of Canada and the US will find this a valuable, accessible resource.




Ramp Hollow


Book Description

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.




Appalachian Mountain Girl


Book Description

In the compelling memoir, Rhoda Warren, whose father was a miner, introduces us to Letcher, KY in 1930. She takes us inside this isolated community, whose denizens lived difficult, poverty-stricken lives. This is the story of the Bailey family's escape from the grueling Corbin Glow mines to find a better life in Letcher--"The prettiest place in the world." Rhoda Warren's account is three-dimensional: with humor and warmth, but without sentimentality. She recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and "family values" buttressed and sustained them.




Mountains of Injustice


Book Description

Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high. Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.