Before the robber barons, before the virgin forests were cut, before coal mines, Coal River Valley must have been gorgeous. It would be interesting to know what the Indians thought of it and what they named it. If you want to see the local benefits of the coal industry take a drive on Route 3 up Big Coal River. The roads, dirt, mud and trees along the edges are black with coal dust, every other mountain has been gouged and altered. Huge piles of "spoil" and "overburden" have been pushed into the hollows and tower menacingly. Those valley fills look like some huge, black glacier getting ready to ooze out into the roadway.

Stop at the Coal River Mountain Watch office in Whitesville and look at the maps that show mountaintop-removal mines under consideration. The blast zones overlap at Marsh Fork High School.

Drive on up the road and see for yourself the gigantic sludge dam hovering over a grade school, which is also within the blast zones of the two newly proposed mines. It might forewarn of the tragedy in Wales when a mountain of coal refuse broke loose and covered a grade school, crushing and smothering all the children inside. There is a sludge dam expansion that will be nearly as high as the New River Gorge Bridge.

Whitesville was once a thriving community with an active, exciting downtown, where thousands of miners came and spent their money. Many of the storefronts are now abandoned. Whitesville is a dilapidated, decayed, dirty skeleton of its past. There are at least 11 coal mines in the area, and they have produced the very opposite of prosperity.

The view along the road between Whitesville and Marsh Fork looks as bad as anything I saw in the so-called Third World in the early 60's. The rural areas of Nigeria actually looked much better. In Nigeria, people lived off farming of the land and there was little environmental damage. They worked hard to bring enough to eat out of poor, sandy soil. But their environment was intact and there was a joyful celebration of life. There was nothing in that rural area of Nigeria as bleak, joyless and depressing as the Whitesville and Marsh Fork environs.

I feel certain that the people who run the coal industry will not hesitate to take the top off every coal-bearing mountain in West Virginia. As the demand and price for coal goes up there will be excuse to mine the high-sulfur seams in northern West Virginia, those mountaintops might will be leveled.

And if you think that some places will be too pristine to be stripped, too beautiful, too much in public view, take a look at the strip mine and the quarry at Snowshoe, the quarry in Germany Valley and stand on a ridge above Webster Springs and look out at the beautiful ridges and see that one in the middle distance has been stripped. "Alarmist!" you may accuse. But if someone had said 50 years ago that the mountaintops of West Virginia would be removed, he too would have been called an alarmist. How could the tops of the mountains be removed in the Mountain State? This is severe, extreme environmentalism. For the most part it is out-of-state extreme environmentalism. Arch Coal got its name from the arch near their headquarters in St. Louis. Massey is a part of an international conglomerate. The Addington brothers are from Kentucky.

Coal River Valley suffered a greater defeat than Jay Rockefeller when he lost in his first bid for governor. Rockefeller got his political start at my birthplace of Emmons on Big Coal River. He was then in favor of the abolition of strip mining. I believed him and put his bumper sticker on my truck. How I wish he had spent enough money to get elected that time. How I wish the money he sent to Democratic bosses in Southern West Virginia had not ended up being used to support Arch Moore.

Rockefeller said in December 1970, "I will fight for the abolition of strip mining completely and forever." He must have been kidding, for just seven years later, as governor, Rockefeller testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee considering the new strip mine law, "mountaintop removal should certainly be encouraged, if not specifically dictated."

If you have the stomach for the devastation, drive to the Stanley Family graveyard on Kayford Mountain just above Whitesville. There you can look down at what remains of mountains that used to cast shadows on the cemetery; see the earth turned upside down, a treeless wasteland, forever useless; see the future for the Mountain State if this beast isn’t stopped.

Almost Heaven, West Virginia, has become, in the Coal River Valley and other little valleys and hollows, an Almost Hell, West Virginia.