Climate solutions

Just how bad are things in Appalachia?

One of the most bizarre features of the fight over Appalachian coal mining and MTR is the outright theft of graveyards. We’re not talking about tomb raiders who steal FROM the dead. We’re talking about people who steal cemeteries, wholesale, by the drag-line and bucket-load.

Many coal field graveyards have been damaged, and many are no longer accessible, with some to perhaps all graves missing.

Since one acre of ground can contain 10,000 tons of coal, worth $500,000 or more, a cemetery can be a fairly significant piece of ground for a coal company, and not a very significant issue for a bulldozer.

Its possible to use standard underground mining techniques to get the coal from underneath cemeteries, and even though this causes subsidence of the land, at least the land is still there. But this method is slightly more expensive and time consuming, and the coal industry has increasingly used the direct method of simply tearing up the cemetery and throwing it, graves and all, down into the valley fills.

This is illegal, of course. But the thing to recall is that in coal country, government is not much more than a subsidiary of the coal industry.

I wrote about this last year for Earth Island Institute and Antrim Casky recently wrote a terrific piece for Climate Ground Zero. There are many more instances of graveyards disappearing. There is also this video about the ongoing attempt to protect one graveyard:

There’s more. Bob Kinkaid notes: The coal companies that do mountaintop removal consider our forebears as part of the waste… They push their remains into the valley fills …

Yet another issue surfaced with the construction work recently at the Coalburg WV cemetery.