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Michael Shnayerson. Coal River: How a Few Brave Americans Took on a Powerful Company-and the Federal Government-to Save the Land They Love. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.
Jeff Goodell. Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Silas House and Jason Howard. Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.
"The world heats up, but Big Coal rumbles on," notes Jeff Goodell in closing Big Coal (Goodell, 260). In many ways, this short statement also applies to Something's Rising and Coal River. Coal remains an essential and cheap energy source in this country, and therefore the coal industry asserts a virtually unstoppable force in U.S. politics. The authors of all three books have a grudging understanding of the dominance of the coal industry in state and national politics, to the detriment of local watersheds and global climate change.
However, each book offers a way to reduce the longstanding dominion of King Coal. Citizens wield the counterweight. Whether acting through citizen suit provisions of environmental laws (such as the Clean Water Act) or acting through common law remedies or pursuing extra-legal activities, citizens are fighting back. How and with what effect are the subjects of Something's Rising and Coal River. Whether we have the collective will to act quickly enough is the underlying theme of Big Coal.
In Something's Rising, Silas House and Jason Howard argue that Appalachian voices are rising against the environmental devastation wrought by coal mining. Coal rules in rural Appalachia, where virtually every family has some connection to mining. Most families have generations of coal miners in their family tree; others have close connections to the businesses that support the coal enterprise. Local economies rely on the coal that is brought out of nearby mountains, and efforts to block production often result in emotional calls to protect mining jobs. (That coal companies conveniently avoid discussing the large number of jobs lost to increasing mechanization of mining operations, or the shift to Western coal mining operations due to advantageous economies of scale, is seldom a topic of conversation in this economically distressed region.) It's against this backdrop that House and Howard tell the stories of social protest in Appalachia, expressed by...