Janie Slaven: GUEST COLUMN: Who's going to clean up this mess?
Jun. 3—Specifics of the occasion escape me, but it was summer at sundown and we were headed home from town, Sean and I riding in the bed of the family's 1950s era Chevy pickup truck, as content and carefree as a couple of farm kids could be.
Mom and Dad were in the cab, our younger brother Rian between them, positioned not to have a knee cracked by the long iron rod of the floor-mounted manual stick shift.
We may have been at a ball game — Bagley Little League or Midget ball. Wasn't the high school team. They played their games down in Yale.
I doubt that we had been roller skating at the big cement slab at the middle of town, one of the few entertainment options for kids out where we lived in the rural recesses of west central Iowa. And it wasn't likely that we had dinner out at the local cafe. Dad could pinch a penny and our folks ran a pretty self-sufficient farming operation — beef, chicken and lamb meat packed tight in the freezer along side the walleye and northern pike filets Dad brought home from his annual Canadian fishing trips. Mom's rather large garden down by the barn and well house provided a healthy crop of vegetables — freshly picked or canned and sitting on shelves down in the cellar.
What I do recall from that long ago day is that Sean and I had milkshakes and I am pretty sure mine was chocolate. And I distinctly remember this: When I finished my last slurp, I tossed the paper cup into the ditch on the driver's side of the road. Of course Dad saw it, braked to a sudden stop and let loose with a few well-chosen swear words. He was a sailor, after all. Good with swearing. And his message was abundantly clear. Not only is it just flat-out disrespectful to litter, it's lazy and arrogant. Who was I expecting to come along and pick up behind me?
I climbed out of the truck, stepped into the ditch and picked up the discarded cup.
"If there's anything else down there, pick it up, too," Dad ordered.
Well, it is not lost on me that no matter how Dad, a perfectionist, wanted everything in its place, he could not control the elements. Farmers were always humbled by the raw power of nature — wind and rain storms out where we lived. And sometimes that meant that during a torrential downpour, the creeks would swell with runoff polluted by fertilizers and pesticides.
Not good.
What got me to thinking about all of this was a recent story by ProPublica that recounted the ways of Jeff Hoops, a coal baron from Bluefield who built Blackjewel mining into the nation's sixth largest coal company by acquiring bankrupt mines, squeezing the last penny of profit out of them when market prices turned favorable and then declaring bankruptcy where he didn't have to pay all of the mining operation's debts.
Money for cleanup and reclamation? Hardly. Standing at the front of that line were preferred creditors like banks and hedge funds. The environment? The place where the rest of us live and work and play?
Yeah, right.
The story goes on to say that according to a 2021 legislative audit, West Virginia's reclamation bonds have covered only one-tenth of the cleanup costs at abandoned mines around the state. Separately, another analysis, by Appalachian Voices, projected cleanup costs in West Virginia alone as high as $3.5 billion.
What has happened and continues to this day is clear. Bankrupt coal companies are dumping their cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply can't afford to pick up the tab.
Kind of like carelessly and arrogantly but not so innocently tossing waste into a ditch because, well, everyone is doing it. Only much worse.
Here's the thing: Coal production across Appalachia is forecast to drop more than 20 percent over the next decade. That can only lead to more bankruptcies, more abandoned mines, more environmental disasters — waiting for someone else to clean up the mess.
Cain is Editor of The Register-Herald in Beckley, WV.
