For more than a hundred years, coal from Appalachia helped power the nation and the world. But that’s changing as new forms of clean energy emerge. A new book documents the rise of coal and its eminent decline, when coal is no longer king.
Without coal, there might never have been an industrial revolution. But the new revolution in cleaner energy is clearly coming, so scientists from Virginia Tech and West Virginia University, set out to document everything they could find, regarding the coal economy of the past 2 centuries and a way of life that sustained communities.
“The title is, “Appalachia, Coal, Mined, Landscapes, Resources, and Communities in a New Energy Era.” Carl Zipper is professor emeritus in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginian Tech.
“When my co-editor and I started the book, we expected to focus it on our areas of research. We both worked with lands, waters, plants, aquatic, biota in Appalachia, coal, mine landscapes.
That’s where our research has been both of us for several decades. But as we began discussing the project among ourselves, we realized that we really need to bring in some people, you know, it’s not just about land and water and animals. It’s also about people.
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