Dependent masculinity and political culture in pro-mountaintop removal discourse: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the dragline.

THE SMALL COMMUNITY OF BLAIR, West Virginia, has a violent history as the site of a famous battle in the Mine Wars of the 1920s, when U.S. armed forces fought unionizing coal miners. More recently, Blair was again the site of a mine war, this time over the environmentally destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). In 1998, residents filed a lawsuit against the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) for failing to enforce regulations that call for a buffer zone to protect streams from mining. In a MTR mine, the forest is cut down and explosives are used to loosen the rocks and soil above the coal seam. Giant machines, such as dragline excavators, remove the mountain in order to access the coal. The "overburden" is then deposited in an adjacent valley, where it buries mountain streams and runs into conflict with the Clean Water Act. Although MTR regulations formally require companies to use this "overburden" in the restoration of the mountain's "approximate original contour," the WVDEP typically grants exceptions to this rule, and mining companies almost always leave their mining sites flattened and surrounded by valley fills.

At 3,196 acres, Arch Coal's Daltex mine in Blair was the largest MTR mine ever permitted in West Virginia. (1) Before it was stopped by the lawsuit, it had permanently altered the topography around Blair and effectively destroyed the community. While the mine was working, the coal company was buying up houses in Blair in order to prevent lawsuits over damages and to be able to use the land in the mining operation; it took back the land it had donated to the state for a school, for instance, in order to use that land for a coal preparation plant. As the mining progressed, the community of Blair was being eroded, as more and more of the residents were bought out and moved away. Sarah, a current resident of Blair, described for me the effects of the working mine. Coal dust and dirt filled the air, making it difficult for her husband, an ex-miner with black lung disease, to breathe. The blasting nearly shook her out of bed one night. Her house was damaged. Her well was destroyed.

However, after the mine was closed, the community continued to decline. The town was already dismantled; now there were no longer any mining jobs. For a few of the current and former residents of Blair whom I interviewed, it was difficult to say which was worse, the hazardous conditions caused by the twenty-four-hour blasting and shoveling of an ongoing MTR mine or the economic death caused by the mine closure. Although MTR made the town uninhabitable, coal industry supporters blame the mine closure for the deterioration of Blair. The lawsuit made enemies of community members and brought former friends to blows.

MTR destroys communities, but it enables companies to mine record amounts of coal with about one-eighth the workforce that was needed in the 1950s coal boom. With a few workers and giant earthmovers, companies are recreating the enormous scale of western area mines, while flattening hundreds of thousands of acres of the oldest mountains in North America. In the current coal boom, companies are trying to extract as much coal as possible while prices are high. MTR and valley fills are the cheapest way to do so, and they account for a growing percentage of coal taken from West Virginia--currently about 40 percent. (2) Despite an active grassroots campaign against MTR, there is also substantial popular support for the coal industry in West Virginia, with little distinction made about how the coal is mined. The West Virginia Coal Association is currently running a billboard ad campaign naming the coach of the West Virginia University football team as a "Friend of Coal." Opinions expressed on bumper stickers range from "I'm Pro-Mountain and I Vote" to "I Love Coal."

This article examines the popular support for MTR: how do people learn to love the destruction of their environment"? MTR is simultaneously destroying forests, flattening the beautiful Appalachian mountains, and fundamentally redefining the job of coal mining and reducing demand for workers through increasing mechanization. My argument centers on a political culture shaped by intersecting race, class, and gender formations. The love of mining--and MTR--is related to a particular definition of freedom that lies at the heart of U.S. political culture in ideals of citizenship and belonging to the U.S. community. A gendered understanding of work, embodied in the heterosexual white male breadwinner, gives shape to a specific configuration of masculinity that gains moral worth from family-wage employment. I am calling this formation of masculinity "dependent" in order to problematize dominant constructions of independence and dependence, public and private, that reproduce gender inequality. Through its articulation with this form of masculinity, mining achieves more than simply economic importance; it also maintains "proper" U.S. citizenship.