Lump of coal 7 days to die farming1/11/2024 ![]() Though coal was first officially spotted in central Appalachia in the 1700s, major commercial production began in earnest only in the 1870s, after railroads finally burrowed through dense, rolling heave of the Cumberland mountains. Throughout the last 125 or so years, West Virginia’s economy and state budget has depended far more heavily on coal than Virginia and, to a lesser extent, Kentucky, making it a useful proxy for the socioeconomic trends associated with the region’s coal-reliance. Even more remarkably, the region fares much worse on all these measures when compared to Appalachia as a whole, a span of country that reaches from eastern Mississippi to upstate New York. Nearly a quarter of its residents were in poverty, compared with 15.5% nationwide. At 8.6%, the unemployment rate in central Appalachians is 1.7 percentage points higher that of the US. Fewer than 60% of working-age adults had jobs or were looking for work, compared with 77.4% at the national level. Between 20, central Appalachia’s median household income was just over $34,000-around 63% of what the typical American household earned. Not great, according to the most recent data from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), the economic development partnership between federal, state, and local governments. To the local politicians who sponsored this strategy, the idea was that making conditions favorable to outside corporations would develop the local economy, creating jobs and enriching residents. ![]() The experiment underway in central Appalachia began with subsidizing coal by suppressing household wealth. Thus untangling the knotty problems of central Appalachia holds lessons for the rest of the country about how imbalances of wealth and power, created generations ago, can trap places and their people in the past. Across America, obscure clusters of misery are growing in number and concentration-as people get sicker, poorer, and more isolated than they were just a few decades ago. But the pattern of its struggles is not unique. The many ways in which politicians and coal barons have kept coal artificially cheap has, over the course of generations, devoured the potential of the area’s residents, and that of their economy.Ĭentral Appalachia’s problems stem from its distinctive history. The political and economic impotence of Appalachian residents that resulted has permitted a deeply cynical capitalist experiment to take place, in which coal companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they incur to the public. The extreme imbalance of land ownership in central Appalachia shifted the power over where and how Appalachians lived to corporations. A deeply cynical capitalist experiment has taken place, in which coal companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they incur to the public.Īt the root of these problems lies the ironic insight that struck Nick Mullins as he mined coal deep in the earth his family once owned. This odd cluster is consistently one of America’s worst pockets of affliction. Chart virtually any measure of human struggle, and there it will be, just right of center on a map of the US-a distinct blotch. It could be lung cancer deaths you’re looking at, or diabetes mortality. But they’re plain enough to see on a map. The destruction of central Appalachia’s economy, environment, social fabric and, ultimately, its people’s health is, in a sense, hidden. The costs of this subsidy aren’t tallied on corporate or government balance sheets.
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