Coal Hollow

Released just one month after the Sago disaster, "Coal Hollow" -- a new book of photographic portraits and oral histories collected by Ken and Melanie Light -- takes readers where the network news cameras left off, deep into the hills of southern West Virginia. The result of five years' work and hundreds of miles of travel, "Coal Hollow" is a social documentary rooted in the tradition of Farm Security Administration photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. But instead of migrant mothers and Depression-era drifters, the Lights' subjects are heartbreakingly contemporary. Whether industry barons, retired miners, snake handlers, preachers or state Supreme Court justices, each of the men and women in the Lights' chronicle have lived their lives in the shadow of the free-market coal economy and watched it shape not only the topography of the hills around them, but also their families, their jobs and their towns.

(... enormous skippage ...)

Is the problem that coal as an industry has run its course?

Melanie: Absolutely not. Coal is booming, companies are making a lot of money and bringing out more coal than ever before. They just don't need the workers. It's the human and the environmental factor that has collapsed. They are just blasting those mountains. For hundreds and hundreds of square miles, they are basically recontouring the Appalachian Mountains.

After a point isn't that sort of usage going to be unsustainable?

Melanie: Well, that's tricky. If the country decides that they can sacrifice Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming and other places where there aren't a lot of people...

You mean as a kind of collateral damage?

Melanie: Yes, exactly. If people will accept that, then there's no question that it will just go on. And right now a lot of the environmental laws that provide oversight are being rolled back. Again, it sounds so corny, but it's really the will of the people. If people don't wake up and say that it matters, then nothing will happen.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/03/23/coal_hollow/print.html