Earl Dotter, Coalfield Generations: Health, Mining, and the Environment; Southern Spaces

In this series of photographs about the impact of new surface mining techniques on the environment, Dotter captures the threat that mountaintop removal strip mining poses to the natural environment, residents and their communities, and constructed features such as roadways. Initial images portray the mountaintop removal process in progress, as miners operating dragline shovels remove the overburden covering a coal seam on a mountaintop in Boone County, West Virginia. A vertical shot captures the devastation of the natural skyline and the proximity of the ecosystem's upheaval to a nearby residential community in McRoberts, Kentucky. Dotter's images follow the process of coal extraction and removal as trucks haul mined coal from mountaintop sites and deposit it on rail cars and barges leaving the region. The proximity of these operations to waterways highlights questions about water pollution at sites like the Kanawha Coal Load Out Facility in Montgomery, West Virginia.

Another group of images depicts valley fill waste impoundments, where coal companies dump refuse from mountaintop removal and coal extraction. Dotter's images capture the shroud of privacy in which such sites exist with warning signs, as well as the ways in which coal sludge and other waste erode land and water. Such impoundments threaten towns with waste disaster devastation (as happened in Martin County, Kentucky in 2000) because of the sheer volume of refuse dumped there. New generations of environmentalists protest these conditions in the Appalachians. Dotter highlights these activists in images of Raleigh County, West Virginia, home of the Brushy Fork Sludge Impoundment — more than seven billion gallons of coal slurry sitting precariously above schools and homes.

Dotter reveals the damage that large machine coal operation exacts on the built environment through images of roads destroyed by the constant traffic of treacherously overloaded coal trucks. Coupled with an endemic disregard for seatbelt use in the region, these unsafe routes contribute to traffic accidents and dangerous travel conditions. Dotter talks about the contemporary impact of mining on the environment in excerpts from the 2008 interview, below.

Mountaintop removal: Of course, strip mining goes back to the 1950s in Appalachia on a much smaller scale. But with the emergence of larger machinery and the mountaintop removal technique, the impact is hard to miss today. Communities where there is no coal are spared and remain with their beautiful mountaintop skyline, but it's not hard to find that skyline interrupted dramatically when you go to a hollow that has several seams of coal that have been accessed by removing the overburden and moving that overburden into the only available location in the hollows that are adjacent to that mountaintop. That has impacted runoff and created dramatic incidents such as occurred in Martin County, Kentucky eight years ago and other communities that you hear about on a smaller scale. I worry that we'll have another hundred-year storm like the Buffalo Creek flood and the impact of that will be quite severe because of what has occurred with mountaintop removal.

Activism: This new generation of environmental activists came from all over the U.S. — mostly the eastern U.S. — but there were kids from New England, from the South, and they were working with a local activist who was concerned, most specifically, with a school built under a very significant mine-waste impoundment — and a very large coal silo built almost immediately behind this school. These activists had scientific backgrounds and were doing tests of water quality in the area. They had other expertise that they were sharing with locals. It's not too different from my era when VISTA and Appalachia volunteers were on the scene providing specific expertise and assistance when requested.