Appalachia tries to make a life after coal

[theHandpuppet]

Appalachia tries to make a life after coal
By Laura Flanders
July 26, 2014

(excerpt)
A more diverse economy is possible. Before the robber barons arrived, mountains like these produced chestnuts that were sold on the streets of Manhattan and ginseng that was exported to China. Locally tanned leather traveled to South America and Europe.

To begin a new chapter of economic development will require land reform and investment in local people and in local democracy – but it’s possible. That’s the least coal country deserves, says scholar and activist Helen Lewis, who’s lived here for 60 years...

...Lewis moved to southwest Virginia in 1955, just as tens of thousands of miners were moving out. “I was overwhelmed by what was going on,” she recalled last spring. “Mines were being mechanized and half the population was leaving for industrial jobs up north. Strip mining was starting – a whole new form of destruction.”

At the same time, triggered by the exodus, Appalachia was receiving mass media attention – most of it negative. Even as the media expressed concern about poverty (and helped inspire the War on Poverty and programs like food stamps and Medicaid), coverage played into old stereotypes of “backward” hill people with a “culture of poverty” living in what author Michael Harrington called “another America.”....

MORE at http://grist.org/climate-energy/appalachia-tries-to-make-a-life-after-coal/