Hat tip to Lambert Strether.
“We took the oldest mountain chain in the world and turned it into rubble.”
Tarence Ray and Tom Sexton, known as The Trillbillies, or the Trillbilly Workers Party, are musicians and activists based in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
They talk about how mountaintop removal, a method of extracting coal in use since strip mining was outlawed about 30 years ago, completely destroys the land and makes it useless for any other purpose.
It has gone on under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, they said.
They said that since the coal industry started using mountaintop removal, coal production has increased 400 percent, but coal industry jobs have continued to decline.
LINKS
Whitesburg-based Trillbilly Workers’s Party podcast takes a left-wing view of Appalachian life by Cheryl Truman for the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader.
The Trillbilly Workers Party by Lia Russell for Scalawag. Â Free Listening on SoundCloud.
Get Real: What liberals like Paul Krugman still don’t understand about rural America by the Trillbillies’ Tarence Ray for The Baffler.
Tags: Appalachia, coal industry, Extraction Capitalism, Kentucky, Mountaintop Removal, Trillbillies, Trillbilly Worker's Party
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
April 19, 2019 at 4:59 pm |
That is sad, an understatement.
When I lived in North Carolina, I lived near a Black Mountain, an entirely different location. But it’s all part of the Appalachian Mountains. The main difference is North Carolina hasn’t been devastated by coal mining in this way.
I’m fond of this region of the Upper South. It’s where multiple lines of my mother’s family comes from, going back centuries. I’ve visited and traveled through Kentucky on multiple occasions. Other than mining sites like this, it is beautiful country.
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