杏吧原创

CLEAN coal is the new mantra 鈥� the holy grail that will allow us to keep burning the black stuff without wrecking the climate. But in the coalfields of southern Illinois, they have heard that one before.

Jeff Biggers, in his 鈥渟ecret legacy of coal in the heartland鈥� of the US, tracks that piece of charlatan alliteration back more than a century. It was the advertising slogan of coal salesmen in Chicago in the 1890s, the promise of those who wanted federal funds to turn coal to gas, the claim of those who called acid rain a hoax, and now the pitch of those selling dreams of burning coal, capturing its carbon dioxide, and burying it who knows where.

As he angrily begins and ends the book, 鈥渃lean coal鈥� has even been adopted by a young senator from the coal state of Illinois who became president: Barack Obama.

But, while informed by politics and technology, this book is mainly a family memoir, an elegy to the wooded ridges and valleys of southern Illinois that nurtured Biggers鈥檚 ancestors. The hillbillies turned to coal mining, saw their land strip-mined and their homesteads and soil hauled away by coal magnates like the legendary Francis Peabody, whose company remains .

When Biggers returned to find his roots he found a blasted landscape, the hilltops ripped off and dumped into the valleys to expose the coal. 鈥淥ur 200-year-old family history was nothing more than overburden.鈥� Only the cemeteries had been spared.

So he moved among those left behind, driving his pick-up truck to meet preachers and union men, those dying of black lung disease and the plain lost, hearing their stories and contemplating the history of their land. Biggers is a cultural historian and it is the social strip-mining that angers him most. But seldom have the environmental and social landscapes been so well described in a single essay.

A long chapter asks 鈥渨ho killed the miners?鈥� 鈥� the 104,000 men killed in US coal mines in the 20th century. Not even modern-day China can yet challenge that statistic. He chronicles the racism that saw slavery linger on here underground, and the vicious union wars. But he finds room too for heroes, like , a legendary union activist into her eighties known also as the 鈥渕iners鈥� angel鈥�.

Perhaps Barack Obama should read up on her. The story is that Obama learned his politics organising the poor in Chicago. But Biggers wonders if the president didn鈥檛 pick up more from playing rounds of golf with mining magnates on courses constructed on the obliterated landscape of his ancestors.