Coal

Twenty-nine miners died last year in West Virginia in a coal mine cave-in. The owner of the mine had received hundreds of safety violation citations from OSHA, but apparently decided it would be less expensive to pay the fines than to fix the problems. Now there are twenty-nine families without a dad or son or brother.

Between 1850 and 1950 the toll of miners was much higher, about 1000 miners killed each year. (For anyone who's math impaired, that's 100,000 miners dead over a century.) Along the spine of the Appalachians, and even here in Colorado, miners and their families paid the price for the national harvest of coal.

The number of men who were killed outright doesn't take into account the enormous toll of men who were injured or whose health was broken from working in the mines. My first job with the National Park Service was at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, at the toe of Virginia, where it meets Tennessee and Kentucky. I remember the mobile health van and the line of old miners lined up for black lung examinations.

Now I'm not a luddite. I don't look nostalgically at a mythical past in which everyone was a happy peasant, and I use fossil fuels as much as anyone else. What I don't understand morally or economically or environmentally or from the standpoint of public health, is the reluctance many people display at moving away from our dependence on these dirty sources of energy.

It is morally unacceptable for us to sacrifice the lives of miners for our own convenience and our temporary prosperity. The damage done to our planet by mining is evident for all to see. (An old surface mine is clearly visible at Colorado Springs even though it has been inactive for more than 100 years.)

Eventually, the coal supplies will be exhausted. What will our descendants have then, and what will they think of us?