Coal Hollow
Ken Light
Contact Press Images
Coal is still king in much of Appalachia. West Virginia is the second highest producer of coal in the United States. The land is being ripped up at a furious rate now and very few workers are needed. Mechanization and improved technology have made coal mining an incredibly efficient process. As a result, the business of coal is booming and the coal mining culture of Appalachia is dying. These people, whose backbreaking labor has provided us with abundant and cheap energy have been cursed by the shiny black rock and their misery has never been adequately addressed. While we may rail at the government for having allowed the things we eat and the land upon which we live to become contaminated, we must also consider our responsibility to the humans who became collateral damage in the coal economy.
This show is about the people that the coal industry left behind. It records the vestiges of the coal camps in southern West Virginia.
It is an oft-told story, to be sure. Many beautifully written and compelling accounts of the battles between the coal miners and the operators have been brought to the attention of the public without any lasting or substantial effects. These images attempt to give this span of literature a human face. These people bear direct witness to all these complex economic, social and environmental issues. These photos create a visceral experience for the viewer of the human cost of coal production.
Preview
The black rock has been the blessing and curse at the center of a great human tragedy. Those dirty lumps of fossilized plant and animal life enabled humankind to thrive on the planet and reach its potential through modern civilization. Coal is at the lowest level of the economic food chain. As such, it is the foundation of life as we in the developed world know it. Coal mining in the early nineteenth century allowed denuded forests to grow back and was at the core of the Industrial Revolution. Even if an alternative source of energy were to be used, coal mining must continue indefinitely. Six out of every ten times an American flips on a switch, the source of that energy is from coal. Not only does it produce electricity, coal has thousands of byproducts that find their way into items we use every day. Consider this random sampling: batteries, aspirin, street paving, germicides, dyes and toothpaste. Look around any room; if the contents weren’t grown, they were mined. Even the very machines used to transform all those raw materials in the things we buy were shaped and tempered by white-hot, coke-fired foundries.
The pollution created by mining and burning coal has been vast and deadly. Not only has the process of mining devastated some of the most beautiful land across our country, the effects of coal burning energy plants has affected the health of millions of people and poisoned our food chain. So much mercury from coal burning power plants has drifted into rivers, lakes and oceans that many varieties of freshwater fish are no longer safe for anyone to eat.
The point of entry to this lost world is Beckley, West Virginia. A thin net of roads is cast southward over the deep furrows of the ancient, rolling Cumberland mountains and coalesces along the bottomlands. The coal camps have idiosyncratic names, reflecting a haphazard approach to development: Jolo, Amigo, Oceana, Giatto, Yukon, Coalwood, Big Sandy, Johnny Cake Junction. The land is blessed with beauty and majesty. The blue ridges recede far into the distance like screens that partition its inhabitants into a private, isolated world. It takes a bit of time for an outsider to grasp the hybrid nature of the land and its people. As deeply as the people have etched into the land to take away coal, the land has been etched into the fiber of the people. Trailers and houses and trees and bushes are woven together. Though people don’t live as directly off the land as their forebears did, people still have gardens and hunt in the woods. But even beyond the intimacy people have with the land, there is a deep connection to their way of life. There is a great reluctance to leave their family and community along with the feeling that they can always come home to the hills.
The other West Virginia could be mistaken for a slum in any part of the Third World. Coal camps still line the creeks like peas in the folds of an apron, but they are hollow and dried out. Dilapidated houses and trailers litter the hollows like piles of waste mixed up with denuded forest, jagged, abandoned swaths of strip mines and toxic slurry ponds. Raw sewage flows down the creeks along some of the most beautiful mountains in our country. Big cities, like Welch or Mullins, once teemed with a hundred thousand people are now hollow, disintegrating mazes. Aging, disabled miners, their widows and a lost generation of people who have never lived in a viable economy are hanging on, passing time in front of the TV or “settin’” on the porch. Anyone who could leave has already gone somewhere else to live and work. Along with mineral debris, the coal companies left behind human slag. The broken earth and people await reclamation.
Melanie Light
published by University of California Press Fall 2006
