Those who visit the coalfields today will recognize the horrid images that preface this book.  They might even pick out some places and faces.  They might have shook those rough old hands, with the earth slipping through them, whose owner in overalls stands partway in the frame.

From the comfort of a coffee table, “Even a casual reader glancing at the photos…will readily understand the devastation…”

“You know not what you’ve lost in the land unless you know what it was like before.”  It is appropriate, then, to begin the book with the beauty of Appalachia unmolested.

Coal’s environmental problems have been on the public docket since at least 1285, when London commissions sought to assuage air pollution in the city brought on by burning coal.

In sweeping “postcards of destruction,” skilled photographers like Antrim Caskey, Vivian Stockman, and Giles Ashford document the damage; they are expounded upon with short chapters by writers such as Denise Giardina, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Carl Pope, Wendell Berry, and Ken Hechler.

The authors of this book could have filled all of its pages and more with stories of coalfield residents and their grievance.  Several prominent figures like Maria Gunnoe, Lucious Thompson, and Judy Bonds are featured, as well as other activists who say “Compromise, hell!”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invokes the spirited efforts of his father, who fought strip mining back in the 1960s.  The late senator ominously predicted that the coal companies would shatter union ranks and leave communities in perpetual poverty.

Douglas R. Tompkins describes Appalachia accurately as a “resource colony,” existing within our own country.  It is true that the most robust companies that mine in Appalachia have come from other regions to do so, and siphon the profits out.

Hearkening to David Brower, the late environmentalist: “there will be no jobs, no culture, no society, and no prosperity on a dead planet.”
The book mentions climactic stability; it emphasizes the importance of balancing greenhouse gases and the urgent threat coal emissions pose as they leverage us over that fulcrum.  Climatologists like James Hansen and James Lovelock have forewarned of this danger; now more and more scientists are agreeing.

Also quite pertinent to today’s conversation around carbon cap and trade is Cindy Rank’s chapter titled “Cutting Emissions Doesn’t Cut It,” which lists the myriad reasons why, essentially, coal will always be a dirty fuel. 

Peak coal production for the world will come around 2030, say two reports written in 2007 (Energy Watch Group & Institute for Energy).  Sooner, they say, for China.

“Plundering Appalachia” ends with a call to legally abolish mountaintop removal, a motion that was introduced in Congress by Ken Hechler in 1971; at age 94 he continues to fight for that cause.

Denise Giardina provides a authoritative afterword, “Desecration.”  An acclaimed writer and McDowell County native forced into exile, Giardina has all the words and all the experience to put coal mining in a human perspective. 
   
“Plundering Appalachia” is yet another powerful beacon to what is already a well-documented American saga of a destruction against a land, a people, and a democracy.

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