Mark Dowie on Michael Shnayerson’s ‘Coal River’
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080313_mark_dowie_on_michael_schnayersons_coal_river/
Posted on Mar 13, 2008
By Mark Dowie
Coal River
By Michael Shnayerson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages
If you’ve mastered Google Earth, or one of its satellite imaging
imitators, take a low-altitude flight over the southwestern reaches of
West Virginia. It’s quite a sight. All those massive gray patches on
that lush green background are mountaintop coal mines. To bare the coal
for stripping, forest cover has been clear-cut and topsoil bulldozed off
into nearby hollows and stream beds. Once bared, coal seams are blasted
open with the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used to level the Oklahoma
City federal building. Then a 20-story dragline is constructed on site
and put to work scooping 100-ton shovels full of coal that are hauled
off to a railhead in trucks that on busy mining days seem to make up
about half the vehicles on the state’s highways. In short order the
mountain is leveled. To obtain the resource that fuels half the nation’s
power plants, as cheaply as possible, 1.5 million acres of Appalachian
land have been stripped of all life, mined and left to erode sludge into
more than 700 miles of once healthy streams.
“It would be hard to imagine a more ill-advised course of action than
ruining large swaths of land to get coal, and then poisoning the
atmosphere with the gases from burning it.” But that is exactly what the
federal government, the Army Corps of Engineers and the environmental
protection agencies of five East Coast states now encourage.
So wrote reporter Michael Shnayerson in the May 2006 issue of Vanity
Fair. There he published a blockbuster investigation of mountaintop
removal mining in West Virginia, where the practice has become
commonplace, accepted as the “new and improved” way to mine coal, safer
by far for the few miners who remain employed but disastrous for the
environment. Now Shnayerson has spun the story up into a trenchant
300-page book called “Coal River,” in which he takes a harder, longer
look at how blasting the tops off mountains and filling steams with mine
waste became the core of our national energy plan.
“Coal River” is a Shakespearean drama played out in a Dickensian
setting. The story’s two antagonists, a boy and a brute, are equally
compelling in their differing ways. Shnayerson’s protagonist is a
tenacious young lawyer named Joe Lovett, who despite a stinging series
of defeats and setbacks, in one court after another, finally prevails
against the perfect adversary, Don Blankenship, chairman and CEO of
Massey Energy.
If you’re tired of labor unions, environmentalists, occupational health
bureaucrats and the weeping wives of dead coal miners, you do what Don
Blankenship did. You close underground coal mines, fire all union
miners, scrape the soil and forests off mountains, blow their tops off
and hire back a few nonunion miners to scoop and haul the coal to market.
Blankenship is a living caricature of corporate venality, a pathetic,
lonely, power-crazed scoundrel who could teach advance courses in union
busting, political manipulation, plutocracy and environmental neglect,
and would happily do so were he not so busy dreaming up ways to screw
injured miners out of workmen’s compensation or shift a property line so
he can place a coal silo a few hundred feet closer to an elementary school.
Lovett, who works tirelessly for a nonprofit called the Appalachian
Center for Economy & Environment, is an appealing hero, and likeable,
but Blankenship, a self-described “radical populist” who seeks to remove
every last liberal judge from the bench, to overturn the entire West
Virginia Legislature and rid the world of labor unions, but also fights
to have a 6 percent sales tax removed from food, is a more nuanced and
intriguing character. In fact in some respects he carries the book,
saving it from the tedium of trial preparation and courtroom bantering.
Civil law proceedings are difficult to report in a compelling manner,
and hard to read. Few book authors have mastered the art of keeping
readers enthralled through a single case or a long-term litigative
campaign. Jonathan Harr did so in “A Civil Action,” an almost flawless
account of one town’s battle against a well polluter. The art, mastered
by Harr, is to deftly combine legal drama with compelling personal
narrative. Shnayerson attempts this method and almost succeeds.
In his defense it must be said that none of his characters possess the
tragic flaws or comedic tendencies of “Civil Action’s” Jan Schlichtmann.
And lacking the one-town, one-villain advantage of the Woburn, Mass.,
saga, Shnayerson is confronted with a statewide eco-atrocity that is
spreading throughout the entire Appalachian region, a tale with many
heroes and many villains. He just picked two of the best and made a book
of them.
And it’s an emotional challenge, even for the best of authors, to write
about rank ecological destruction, the ability of powerful corporados to
buy justice, the perverse anti-environmentalism of an entire federal
administration and the near futility of litigating against rapacious
industries, their defenders and their government enablers. It’s simply
depressing. Perhaps it’s why we crave heroic accounts of truly good
people—“a few brave Americans”—working hard to produce justice and
protect the planet. Thus Joe Lovett will stay with any reader of “Coal
River.” But so will Judy Bonds, the coal miner’s daughter who mobilizes
a whole community to protect itself from the ravages of King Coal, and
even more so Ed Wiley.
Wiley, a gangly, injured miner, walks 455 miles alone from Charleston to
Washington to meet with Sen. Robert Byrd in search of $5 million to
relocate a school threatened by a nearby mountaintop mine. Byrd sees
him, tells him he could build a $5-million road in a heartbeat, but
can’t promise a school. After saying he will do what he can, the
eight-term senator closes the meeting with a prayer for the besotted
people of his coal-weary state. It’s the first time any of his aides
have seen him pray, and one senses that the man who has relied for most
of his political career on the power and wealth of King Coal has had enough.
Joe Lovett’s courtroom triumph over the Army Corps of Engineers is
heartening but tenuous. Yes, the corps is ordered to stop issuing
permits to scofflaw mining firms like Massey. But every other case that
Lovett wins is overturned in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. So we
are left with a tentative victory, accompanied by the scraping sound of
draglines on hundreds of mountaintops up and down the Appalachians, the
roar of gigantic coal trucks on West Virginia highways, a government
indentured to King Coal and an atmosphere that may be terminally
diseased. It’s hardly a satisfactory ending.
Schnayerson’s reporting is first-rate, but his book is illogically
sequenced, and a potentially gripping narrative is too often
interrupted, either by distracting and tedious tangents,
incomprehensible mining jargon or unwarranted, eye-glazing legal and
technical details. And at times the author seems remarkably naive,
almost wide-eyed in amazement about what is, after all, only one small
part of a massive assault on the ecological health of his planet. One
wonders at times where he’s been, or what he was covering before he
discovered the great American coal scandal. But for anyone curious about
the inside story behind one of America’s most dramatic environmental
battles—“America destroying America itself “—or desperate for
inspiration and encouragement in fighting intractable battles against
indomitable foes, “Coal River” is very much worth the effort.
Mark Dowie is the author of several books, including “Losing Ground:
American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century.”
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