THIS IS ONLY SAMPLE 1) WHAT is the major environmental .docx

** THIS IS ONLY SAMPLE
1) WHAT is the major environmental or resource ISSUE, HOW
is it caused, and WHERE is it occurring?
Issue: Increased temperatures in the city. The Urban Heat Island
manifests as warmer nighttime air temperatures in the city.
Urban materials like concrete and asphalt store heat energy
during the day and release it slowly at night, increasing
minimum temperatures (the lowest temperature of the night).
The Phoenix Urban Heat Island has higher air temperatures in
the city core (downtown Phoenix) as compared to air
temperatures in the rural locations (like Wickenburg and Queen
Creek). The temperature differences between the city core and
rural locations can range from 10-18°F, especially during the
warm summer season.
2) WHAT is the main RESOURCE involved and HOW is it
being impacted or
developed? Describe a consequence
Resource: Energy. In warm climates like Phoenix, not being
able to cool effectively at night has negative consequences for
human health and comfort. This drives an increase in energy
consumption as electric air conditioners are the main tool used
to cool buildings and structures. A feedback loop is then created
that helps perpetuates the heat island. Air conditioners expel hot
air as they operate, which in turn contributes to warmer air
temperatures, forcing even more energy usage.
3) WHO are the primary stakeholders or key players (people
and/or organizations) driving this issue (or attempting to

mitigate the issue) and WHAT are they doing?
Key Player: Phoenix Mayor and Council. The City of Phoenix
was named as a finalist in the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors
Challenge for their HeatReady proposal. The HeatReady
program will help Phoenix prepare their responses to dangerous
levels of heat. Additionally, the Phoenix Council is
investigating urban forestry as a mitigation technique. Trees
assist heat mitigation due to shade and transpiration
(evaporating water into the atmosphere, which is a cooling
process).
4) HOW is society (or individuals) being impacted by this issue
(positively or negatively)? Provide one example.
Society impact: Poor and homeless suffer. The people most at
risk from the Urban Heat Island are those that can’t cool
effectively at night. In the Phoenix area, the communities most
at risk are the poor and homeless. In warm climates like
Phoenix, not being able to cool effectively at night has negative
consequences for human health. On average, over 100 people
die from heat-related illnesses every year.
5) HOW does this issue affect extenuating environmental
situations or impact other natural resources? Provide one
example.
Other resource: Water. As the city warms, temperatures in urban
lakes increase. Warmer lake temperatures deplete dissolved
oxygen which affects aquatic organisms in the lake. Warmer air
temperatures also drive additional household water usage for
pools, lawns, evaporative coolers, and landscaping. Adoption of
urban forestry will increase municipal water usage, as well as
increase evapotransporation, increase infiltration, and decrease

runoff.
6) HOW does this issue relate to a learning concept, topic,
theory, or term presented in this class? Provide one example.
Concept: Urban population exceeds rural population. There is a
direct relationship between population and the Urban Heat
Island. Urban materials like concrete and asphalt store heat
energy during the day and release it slowly at night. Globally,
as more people relocate and settle in cities, the Urban Heat
Island will also increase. Urban sprawl, which is a problem in
Phoenix, spreads the heat island over a larger area so that larger
numbers of people are impacted.
Sourses:
Q1)
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-
environment/2017/10/19/heres-how-heat-discriminates-what-
phoenix-doing-help-those-risk/561116001/
Q2)
https://www.epa.gov/heat-islands/heat-island-impacts
Q3)
environment/2018/05/02/utilitys-tree-planting-program-
phoenix-brings-shade-city-need/511319002/
Q4)
environment/2017/10/19/heres-how-heat-discriminates-what-
phoenix-doing-help-those-risk/561116001/
Q5)

Q6)
Hybrid Power Generation System Using Wind Energy and Solar
Energy
Nowadays, technologies developing so fast, one of the most
necessary facilities for human beings is electricity. The
conventional energy sources are significant depleting day by
day. Many institutions and organizations have been raising
significant questions on how to produce or sustain energy after
the vital depletion. Furthermore, this requires the need to shift
from conventional energy sources to non-conventional energy
sources; for example, wind and solar energy. It also savages the
idea that renewable energy sources are not damaging to nature.
People can provide uninterrupted power by using a hybrid
power system. Such type of hybrid system integrates two energy
systems to give continuous power. Wind turbines are used to
convert wind energy, and solar panels are used to converting
solar energy into electricity. This energy can be utilized for
various purposes. Generation of electricity is done at affordable
cost by using hybrid energy sources. This is good for countries
rich in renewable energy.
The resources used for research purposes are listed with a brief
outline of what solution they provide.1. Akinboro, F.,
Adejumobi, I., & Oyagbinrin, S. (2011). Hybrid solar and wind
power: An essential for information communication technology
infrastructure and people in rural communities. IJRRAS, 9 (1).
This paper utilizes hybrid power technology for communication
infrastructures. The paper introduced the hybrid system can be

used to power up communication systems in the rural areas, and
the setup can also be used to power its neighboring community.
This
research paper provides essential knowledge on how to integrate
hybrid technology with different systems.
2. Haksar, P., & Sharma, K. (2012). Designing of hybrid power
generation system using wind energy- photovoltaic solar
energy- solar energy with Nanoantenna. International Journal of
Engineering Research and Applications, 5 (3).
The journal provides design analysis and component
information for designing hybrid power supplies. It also
explains the generation methods and how they work and how
they are integrated. The article can provide a lot of technical
data support, making the theory more credible.
3. Kumar, S., & Garg, V. K. (2013). A hybrid model of solar-
wind power generation system. International Journal of
Advanced Research in Electrical, Electronics and
Instrumentation Engineering (IJAREEIE), 2 (8).
This paper provides a hybrid model analysis of solar-wind
power systems. It detailed the project and explained the basics
of the project's working principle and the conditions and status
of the specific work.
4. Shivrath, Y., Narayana, P. B., Thirumalasetty, S., &
Narsaiah, D. L. (2012). Design & integration of wind-solar
hybrid energy system for drip irrigation pumping application.
International Journal of Modern Engineering Research (IJMER),
2 (4), 2947-2950.
The integration of the wind-solar hybrid system with different
types of loads is essential. So, this paper provides the type of
understanding required to power an irrigation system with a
hybrid energy source. It is a cheap and reliable method to power
up systems as electricity costs can be cut. Thus, power outages
are not of any worry too.

IN TOO DEEP
The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor,
sick, and stuck on coal
Gwynn Guilford
December 30, 2017
Nick Mullins didn't plan on working in the mines. But the
industry was nearly impossible to escape. (Roger May for
Quartz)
The first time Nick Mullins entered Deep Mine 26, a coal mine
in southwestern Virginia, the irony hit him hard. Once, his
ancestors
had owned the coal-seamed cavern that he was now descending
into, his trainee miner hard-hat secure.
His people had settled the Clintwood and George’s Fork area,
along the Appalachian edge of southern Virginia, in the early
17th
century. Around the turn of the 1900s, smooth-talking land
agents from back east swept through the area, coaxing mountain
people
into selling the rights to the ground beneath them for cheap.
One of Mullins’ ancestors received 12 rifles and 13 hogs—one
apiece
for each of his children, plus a hog for himself—in exchange for
the rights to land that has since produced billions of dollars
worth of
coal.
“I probably ended up mining a lot of that coal,” says Mullins, a

broad-shouldered, bearded 38-year-old with an easy smile.
There were other ironies to savor too. Mullins was a fifth-
generation coal miner. But growing up in the 1990s, his father
and
uncles—all of them miners—begged him not to get into coal
mining.
“No one wanted to see you in the mines,” he says. “And they
were all union miners too—had it good for a long time.” Those
protections were gone by the time Mullins was growing up. The
US government’s ongoing assault on organized labor through
the
1980s and 1990s meant that the mammoth energy conglomerates
that dominated the coal industry were free to open non-union
mines with increasing impunity. But mining was still just as
rough—replete with injuries, accidents, and black lung deaths.
During the coal bust in the 1990s, Mullins’ dad was laid off
from Bethlehem Steel’s mines. Mullins recalls living off the
green beans
his family had diligently canned during the good times, and
watching his parents grow desperate. Go to college, they urged
him.
Mining offered no future.
Mullins planned on following their advice. But he, like so many
of his friends, family, and neighbors, soon found that the
industry
that has wreaked havoc on the economy of central Appalachia—
composed of southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, and
eastern Kentucky—was also nearly impossible to escape.
Passing on the costs
Ask most Americans what they know about coal in central
Appalachia, and they’ll tell you it’s a dying industry—one that
US
president Donald Trump famously vowed to revive during the

2016 election. “We’re going to put those miners back to work.
We’re
going to get those mines open … I see over here a sign, it says
‘Trump digs coal.’ It’s true. I do,” he told a rally in Charleston,
West
Virginia, in May 2016. “You’re going to be working your asses
off.”
https://qz.com/author/gguilfordqz/
https://www.c-span.org/video/?409094-1/donald-trump-
addresses-supporters-charleston-west-virginia&start=2861
“Trump digs coal” signs at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia.
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
But the idea that the region’s coal industry is dying is not quite
true. For much of the hundred-plus years of its existence, the
industry has been on a kind of artificial life support, as state
and federal governments have, directly and indirectly,
subsidized coal
companies to keep the industry afloat.
The costs of this subsidy aren’t tallied on corporate or
government balance sheets. The destruction of central
Appalachia’s economy,
environment, social fabric and, ultimately, its people’s health
is, in a sense, hidden. But they’re plain enough to see on a map.
It
could be lung cancer deaths you’re looking at, or diabetes
mortality. Or try opioid overdoses. Poverty. Welfare
dependency. Chart
virtually any measure of human struggle, and there it will be,
just right of center on a map of the US—a distinct blotch. This
odd

cluster is consistently one of America’s worst pockets of
affliction.
A deeply cynical capitalist experiment has taken place, in which
coal companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they
incur to the public. At the root of these problems lies the ironic
insight that struck Nick Mullins as he mined coal deep in the
earth
his family once owned. The extreme imbalance of land
ownership in central Appalachia shifted the power over where
and how
Appalachians lived to corporations. The political and economic
impotence of Appalachian residents that resulted has permitted
a
deeply cynical capitalist experiment to take place, in which coal
companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they incur
to
the public. The many ways in which politicians and coal barons
have kept coal artificially cheap has, over the course of
generations,
devoured the potential of the area’s residents, and that of their
economy.
Central Appalachia’s problems stem from its distinctive history.
But the pattern of its struggles is not unique. Across America,
obscure clusters of misery are growing in number and
concentration—as people get sicker, poorer, and more isolated
than they
were just a few decades ago. Thus untangling the knotty
problems of central Appalachia holds lessons for the rest of the
country
about how imbalances of wealth and power, created generations
ago, can trap places and their people in the past.
The myth of coal jobs
The experiment underway in central Appalachia began with

subsidizing coal by suppressing household wealth. To the local
politicians who sponsored this strategy, the idea was that
making conditions favorable to outside corporations would
develop the
local economy, creating jobs and enriching residents. How has
that played out?
Not great, according to the most recent data from the
Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), the economic
development
partnership between federal, state, and local governments.
Between 2011 and 2015, central Appalachia’s median household
income
was just over $34,000—around 63% of what the typical
American household earned. Fewer than 60% of working-age
adults had jobs
or were looking for work, compared with 77.4% at the national
level. At 8.6%, the unemployment rate in central Appalachians
is 1.7
percentage points higher that of the US. Nearly a quarter of its
residents were in poverty, compared with 15.5% nationwide.
Even
more remarkably, the region fares much worse on all these
measures when compared to Appalachia as a whole, a span of
country
that reaches from eastern Mississippi to upstate New York.
Throughout the last 125 or so years, West Virginia’s economy
and state budget has depended far more heavily on coal than
Virginia
and, to a lesser extent, Kentucky, making it a useful proxy for
the socioeconomic trends associated with the region’s coal-
reliance.
Though coal was first officially spotted in central Appalachia in
the 1700s, major commercial production began in earnest only
in the

1870s, after railroads finally burrowed through dense, rolling
heave of the Cumberland mountains. Output grew exponentially.
By
the late 1910s, West Virginia was producing around 90 million
tons of coal, and employing nearly 100,000 miners. US Steel’s
coal
operation was West Virginia’s biggest employer.
How things have changed: After peaking in 1940, at 140,000—
around a third of the state’s workforce—there are now only
around
11,600 working miners in West Virginia. That’s the lowest
number of coal miners the state has had since 1890, equal to
less than 2%
of its workforce. It’s very clear that coal has failed to create
jobs. It is, however, still the only way that many West
Virginians can earn
a decent middle-class wage.
Nick Mullins’ story illustrates that paradox—and how decades
of subsidizing coal profits over investment in human capital and
technology has led to a dearth of opportunities for young central
Appalachians.
Attending a high school so underfunded that many teachers paid
out of pocket to make copies of handouts, Mullins made the
National Honors Society. But in eighth grade, an administrator
had talked him out of taking the advanced-track classes, telling
him
his course load looked like too much work for him to handle.
Not that he needed much of a push—those classes were filled
with the
coal-boss kids, who bullied anyone whose dad actually entered a

mine.
”I wanted to be a proud, self-sacrificing guy who works two
miles underground, where most people won’t go, to provide for
my
family.” When Mullins asked his guidance counselor how to
apply to college as a junior, she told him that, without having
taken
advanced classes, it was pointless. For the next few years, he
bounced from southern Indiana to Knoxville and back to
Virginia in
search of a decent living, taking whatever work he could find—
a Christmas temp gig in Wal-Mart’s layaway department,
carpentry
jobs, night stockman at a grocery store, a janitor at a
chemotherapy complex, clerk at Magic Mart. Nine jobs later, he
finally caught a
break, landing an $18,000-a-year technician position at a call
center just opened by Crutchfield, a catalog and online
consumer
electronics retailer. After seven years, he was earning nearly
$30,000. But with two kids now, and health care costs at $300 a
month,
he and his wife had nothing left each month to save.
As a trainee coal miner, Mullins could earn what he was making
at Crutchfield—but with better health benefits and a retirement
plan with matching. Despite the ebbing of union clout, coal jobs
still offered a level of economic security unheard of in other
industries. There really wasn’t much choice to be made; just his
family’s fears to push aside.
Mullins talked himself into what he calls coal’s “cult of self-
worth,” built around following his forbearers into hard,
dangerous work.
“I wanted to be a proud, self-sacrificing guy who works two

miles underground, where most people won’t go, to provide for
my
family,” he says. Whenever he went into town, he made sure his
“Deep Mine 26” ballcap was pulled snug over his head.
Coal’s dominion has receded in West Virginia. Why, then, could
Mullins find no well-paying work in central Appalachia except
mining? Why has the structure of the central Appalachian
economy changed so little?
Henry Hatfield’s lament
Nearly 100 years ago, Henry Hatfield, who became the governor
of West Virginia in 1913, predicted this contemporary dilemma.
At
the time, West Virginia was producing nearly 70 million tons of
coal—a roughly 30-fold increase from 30 years prior. Coal was
making West Virginia rich.
But Hatfield saw trouble ahead.
“Rich as we are as West Virginians in our natural resources,” he
said in his March 1913 inaugural address, “more than 80% of
our
fuel and raw material is utilized outside the state.” As a result,
he said, low prices fixed “a standard of wages for the miner that
is an
injustice to him, by reason of the long railroad haul to market.”
Indeed, coal operators “extracted more work at less pay from
mountain miners, and this substantially lowered their cost of
production,” writes historian Ronald Eller, professor emeritus at
University of Kentucky, in his book, Miners, Millhands and
Mountaineers.
The coalmine owners were able to do this because central
Appalachian miners were mostly nonunion, unlike their fellow
miners in
Pennsylvania or the Midwest. “In those days, competition

almost universally took the form of competitive wage cutting,”
wrote
statistician Isador Lubin, the head of the US Bureau of Labor
Statistics under president Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1928 book
Wages
and Cost of Coal. “The operator sold his men rather than his
coal.” The resulting boost to profitability “has tended to
increase the
development of the nonunion fields more rapidly than the
country required.”
Governor Hatfield dreamed that his state’s endowment of coal
would lead to local investment, fuelling factories, and enriching
its
economy. Instead, its resource wealth chugged out of the state
by the train-load, along with the profits it generated.
West Virginia produced a lot. But it manufactured almost
nothing. And that’s still the case. Whereas US Steel once
employed droves
of West Virginians to gouge coal from inside mountains, for the
last two decades, Wal-Mart has usually claimed the title of the
state’s biggest employer.
Coal miners on the steps of a company store in West Virginia,
circa 1938. (Library of Congress/Marion Post Wolcott)
Since Adam Smith published his magnum opus The Wealth of
Nations, capitalist societies have taken as faith that the key to
prosperity is specializing in what they’re naturally good at.
Central Appalachia’s economy seems to rest firmly on this
logic. It has
some of the finest-quality coal on the planet, and so it has
sought to specialize in selling coal. Why, then, is it so much

poorer in both
wealth and well-being than the rest of the US?
Places with less economic complexity tend to grow more slowly
and have much bigger gaps between rich and poor. Perhaps our
assumptions about the scale of “specialization” are too
simplistic. A new field of research by Cesar A. Hidalgo, a
statistical physicist
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and
Ricardo Hausmann, an economist at Harvard University’s
Kennedy
School of Government, has begun probing that possibility by
measuring areas’ “economic complexity”—the mix of products a
country makes. It turns out that places with less economic
complexity tend to grow more slowly and have much bigger
gaps
between rich and poor, even after taking into account factors
like income and education levels.
Why is economic complexity good? For one thing, the
complexity and diversity of products made in a region tend to
be a proxy for
the knowledge and know-how of its workforce. This makes
workers more valuable and gives them a broader range of career
options,
upping their bargaining power. By contrast, countries—or
regions like Central Appalachia—that make relatively few
things tend to
constrain people’s opportunities to learn new skills, whether on
the job or at school.
The curse of weak institutions
Economic complexity illuminates one dimension of central
Appalachia’s struggles. Another source of insight comes from
research by
Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist. In Why Nations Fail,

which he co-wrote with University of Chicago political scientist
James A.
Robinson, the duo explore why some resource-rich nations are
rich while others remain poor. They argue that the fate of a
nation is
determined in large part by its economic institutions—its
financial systems, tax regimes, property rights laws, labor
institutions, and
markets, among other things.
When economic institutions are inclusive, they level the playing
field among businesses, create competitive markets, encourage
investment in new technologies, and enable people to acquire
skills to pursue their talents, according to Acemoglu and
Robinson.
The institutions are underpinned by a political system that
empowers a broad base of citizens to influence political
decisions,
preventing a single interest group from holding sway.
The fate of a nation is determined in large part by its economic
institutions—its financial systems, tax regimes, property rights
laws, and markets. Extractive institutions, on the other hand,
concentrate power among the few. This structure encourages the
elite
to warp institutions to enrich themselves and their political
allies, which tightens their stranglehold on institutions all the
more.
“Different patterns of institutions today are deeply rooted in the
past because once society gets organized in a particular way,
this
tends to persist,” Acemoglu and Robinson write. While
inclusive institutions drive “virtuous circles” of self-
perpetuation, extractive
ones fuel “vicious circles.”

Natural resource wealth can amplify these dynamics. Places
with weak institutions—Algeria or Nigeria, for instance—
typically
succumb to the “resource curse.” Those with strong institutions,
like the UK or Norway, tend to distribute that wealth more
broadly.
The destructiveness of extractive institutions can be hard to
discern when times are good. Even though wealth is unequally
distributed, the majority of people tend to be buoyed by
economic growth. The real trouble arises when growth falters.
Instead of
letting new sectors emerge to replace the struggling ones, the
elite protect the old guard, a key source of their power and
wealth.
This thwarts creative destruction—the concept pioneered by
economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe how the failure of
inefficient
enterprises frees up resources for more productive firms.
Though central Appalachia isn’t a sovereign state, Acemoglu
says that his and Robinson’s framework applies to the region’s
lo ng-run
problems. He points to research done by economist Robert
Tamura, of Clemson University, on the long-lasting effects of
slavery on
the economic development of the American South, as well as to
analysis by Melissa Dell, a Harvard University economist, that
shows
how areas of Peru and Bolivia subjected to forced mining labor
systems in the 16th through 19th centuries currently suffer from
lower education levels and investment in public goods and
services.

The vicious circles cementing central Appalachia’s extractive
institutions don’t go back that far. But they do predate the
region’s coal
boom by a century.
Land bonanza
Why has the coal industry been permitted so much free rein
over central Appalachia, despite the obvious toll it has taken on
Appalachian residents? For one thing, the people responsible for
devastating the area don’t actually have to live there and
experience the consequences of their actions. By the time
America won its independence, central Appalachia had already
been
carved into estates owned from afar.
The British crown and colonial authorities granted huge tracts
to court favorites, Virginia planters, and eastern capitalists,
according
to historian Wilma Dunaway’s book, The First American
Frontier. From there, land accumulation by distant capitalists
snowballed. In
the 1790s, Virginia—followed by Kentucky—began selling
cheap warrants for frontier land. By 1810, absentee investors
owned
around 93% of what’s now West Virginia and at least three-
quarters of eastern Kentucky, according to Dunaway.
Central Appalachia’s extractive institutions allowed the
region’s natural wealth to be redistributed to shareholders in
faraway
metropolises. It wasn’t just far-flung fat cats cashing in. Local
merchants, lawyers, judges, and politicians also snapped up
land.
Largely through control of state governments, this homegrown
political and business aristocracy bent policy to enhance that
land’s

value, says historian Lou Martin, history professor at Chatham
University in Pittsburgh. “Central Appalachian states were
anxious to
get outside investment and took steps to protect capital, making
taxes more favorable to large companies,” he says.
After the railroads finally bore through central Appalachia’s
mountains, in the late 1800s, the coal industry followed a
similar
development path. At first, smaller coal operators abounded.
But by the early 1900s, big, out-of-state companies gobbled up
small,
locally-owned companies, according to Eller, the University of
Kentucky historian.
We typically think of “wealth redistribution” as shorthand for
taxing corporations and the wealthy to give money to the poor.
Central Appalachia’s extractive institutions allowed exactly the
reverse—for the region’s natural wealth to be redistributed to
shareholders in faraway metropolises, and in a sense, to
America’s emerging middle-class consumers who benefited
from artificially
cheap energy, at the expense of ordinary Appalachians.
Typically, tax policy would be used to offset the profiteering of
absentee corporations. Not in central Appalachia. In 1902, West
Virginia’s state tax commission observed that coal “is being
mined from and transported beyond the State, and continuously
subtracted from the State’s property values without paying to
the State one cent of tribute.” The report’s author warned that
“when
wholly exhausted, nothing but a comparatively worthless shell
will be left behind… the kernel having been removed without
the
requirement of contribution to the State’s support.”
Political bosses often doubled as coal operators, and “company

men” were frequently elected to state senate. Had West Virginia
moved to change its tax system, it might have used coal
companies’ taxes to fund public investments that could have
given residents
more economic freedom and better quality of life. But
supporters of the extractive regime were vastly more powerful.
Political
bosses often doubled as coal operators, and “company men”
were frequently elected to state senate, typically serving as head
of
the mines and mining committee. Through the vast tentacles of
its influence, the coal lobby tied up lawmakers’ efforts to tax
coal
and pass mine safety laws, despite persistent efforts by
Progressive politicians. Only in the 1970s did states pass laws
that claimed
any share of the earnings on coal extraction on behalf of their
citizens.
But even with plum tax laws, central Appalachia’s remote
coalfields still couldn’t easily compete with the coal mined in
Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and elsewhere. To compete—and
to reap profit—companies made their coal cheaper not only by
suppressing miners’ pay, but also their purchasing power and,
therefore, their standard of living.
As demand for central Appalachian coal boomed in the late
1800s and early 1900s, displaced farmers and landless sons
filled the
new ranks of wage laborers entering the mines. To supplement
their ranks, companies—sometimes using coercive tactics—
recruited
poor workers from the American South and even Europe. The
region’s population exploded.

With few existing settlements to house this new laboring class,
the vast majority was housed in coal camps. A Senate report
found
that around four-fifths of West Virginia miners lived in
company-owned coal camps, and more than two-thirds of
Kentucky miners,
according to Eller. That compares with 9% of miners in Indiana
and Illinois.
This wasn’t normal small-town America, or even something
resembling other “company towns” around the country. All of
these
were privately-owned, privately-governed communities
designed to give the mining companies maximum control not
merely over
mineral resources—but over human ones too.
Nada White’s story
Nada White witnessed the power of the coal camps firsthand.
Now in her late 60s, White is a medical assistant who lives with
her
son, Dustin, outside Charleston, the capital of West Virginia.
Her early girlhood was spent with her parents on a farm in the
family
hollow, tucked up against the belly of Cook Mountain, in
southern West Virginia, where ten generations of Cooks had
grown up.
Those early days were spent swinging on mountain vines,
collecting mollymoochee mushrooms in the spring, and
picnicking in the
glade where all the Cooks before her were buried. Then it came
time to go to school, which was two hours away, longer in
winter.

However, the school bus came right to Wharton, a tiny town a
few miles away, where her grandparents lived. So White moved
in
with them.
Back in the 1950s, her granddad did the same thing as all the
other men in Wharton: he mined coal for Eastern Gas and Fuel.
And
like all the others, the Cooks’ lived in one of the 50 or so
houses that sat in a double row near the mouth of the hole in th
e hillside
into which White’s grandpa disappeared each day to gouge coal
from the guts of the mountain.
Nada White photographed in Dawes, West Virginia. (Roger May
for Quartz)
Just as it had powered America’s staggeringly swift
industrialization during the previous 50 years, the tar-black ore
that came out
was now fueling America’s postwar boom. At the edges of
Appalachia, mighty factories churned out steel to make Fords
and Chevys.
The coal needed to smelt that steel came from Wharton and
elsewhere in Boone County and throughout the central
Appalachian
region—as did much of the coal burned to power industry and
the new Frigidaires and television sets filling the homes of
America’s
burgeoning middle class.
The people of Wharton and other coal towns weren’t part of this
mass-consumption metamorphosis, however. One problem with
town planning by plutocracy is that the coal camps suffered the

ugliness of industrialization—disease, squalor, poverty. But it
did not
experience the benefits of a diversified economy and public
services that typically accompany industrialization—affordable
transportation, easy access to food and markets, job
opportunities, newspapers, recreation.
Since they were privately owned, the camps enabled mining
companies to govern not only production, but services and all
means of
consumption too: retail, recreation, education, medical care,
worship, you name it. Each town was its own mini-monopoly—a
phenomenon embodied in the company store.
Flouting state laws, mine operators forbade miners from
shopping anywhere beside the company store. Flouting state
laws, mine
operators forbade miners from shopping anywhere beside the
company store. White’s grandfather and the others didn’t even
earn
the same kind of legal tender as factory workers in Pittsburgh
and Toledo. He and the other miners were paid in little metal
tokens
notched in the middle and stamped with the Eastern logo. Scrip,
it was called—and it could only be used in one place: the
company
store.
On payday, White’s grandpa filed with everyone else into the
Eastern company store to pocket a little mound of scrip, most of
which
he’d hand right back to pay for pinto beans, potatoes, rent, coal
for home-heating, and any replacement mining gear he needed.

(Workers supplied their own.) “Mostly you spent all your
money on pinto beans and hoped your fridge didn’t break,” says
White.
The scrip system worked because there were no other stores.
“There was just nowhere else to go.”
Up and down the Chesapeake & Ohio rail line that rattled
through Wharton two or three times a day were plenty of other
small
settlements—Robinhood, Twilight, Greenwood, Prenter. Each
had its own company store too, but they wouldn’t take Eastern’s
scrip. Those took only the scrip of Bethlehem Steel or Armco or
whatever other coal company owned the town. And they were
all
overpriced.
“They could charge double or triple the price because they knew
you had to come to the company store,” says White.
Coal miners buying groceries in a company store in West
Virginia in 1938. Library of Congress/Marion Post Wolcott.
“The greatest drain on the miners’ wages was the company
store,” explained historian David Alan Corbin in Life, Work,
and Rebellion
in the Coal Fields. “Coercion, the scrip system, and the physical
distance often combined to force the miners to deal at the
company
store, and through the monopolistic control of food and clothing
and tools and powder, the coal companies were able to render
wage rates and wage increases meaningless.”
“Through the monopolistic control of food and clothing and
tools and powder, the coal companies were able to render wage

rates
and wage increases meaningless.” Ordering from the catalogues
of Montgomery Ward or Sears was much cheaper than the
company store. That’s where White’s family got new shoes for
school. But raising hard cash was tricky. The few folks with
family
tending farms in the hollows, like White’s, sold chickens or
eggs to raise money—or hogs when times got really tough. In
the winter,
White’s dad also earned cash by driving coal around in his
pickup, delivering it to families that needed it for heat (which
few coal
companies provided). Most people didn’t have pickup trucks or
chickens, though. This made it easy to fall into debt, which
many of
White’s friends’ families did.
There were other dangerous dependencies that were simply facts
of life in Wharton. White recalls the day the four company men
marched into the house next door, where Fred and Bobbie York
lived, emptied all their things into the small soot-specked yard,
and
left. It was threatening to rain, and there sat Bobbie’s piano.
White, her grandmother, and Bobbie hauled it up onto the Cook
s’
porch, just missing the downpour. The Yorks gathered their
damp belongings into a borrowed car and left. A week later, a
new miner
and his family moved in. White learned later that Fred’s leg had
been badly broken in the mines and Eastern was fed up waiting
for it
to heal. After a while, someone came for Bobbie’s piano. Where
the person took it, or what became of the Yorks, White never
heard.
“You didn’t want to talk bad against them—our whole existence

depended on the coal companies.” The company could do that,
of
course, because Eastern owned the Yorks’ house. They owned
everyone’s house, in fact—and everything else in Wharton from
the
church to the clinic, except the post office. There was no other
employer. Those who complained found themselves not only
jobless
but blackballed, leaving them nowhere to work or live.
People kept themselves in line, and quiet, says White. “You
didn’t want to talk bad against them—our whole existence
depended on
the coal companies.”
For hundreds of miles in any direction, almost all of the towns
were privately owned, privately operated settlements almost all
owned by companies like Eastern. There was only the faintest
hint of public services—or, even, for that matter, representative
government.
Mind you, by the 1950s, coal camps were comparatively
comfortable compared to what they’d been like before the
1930s, when the
passage of the National Labor Relations Act granted central
Appalachian miners the right to organize.
Because coal companies owned most of central Appalachia’s
towns, “mine guards”—essentially private paramilitary forces—
policed the region. In the early decades of the 1900s, because
coal companies owned most of central Appalachia’s towns,
“mine
guards”—essentially private paramilitary forces—policed the
region. These forces were broadly supported by the West

Virginia
government, which declared martial law four times in the early
1900s to put down miner strikes. (Facing a worker revolt that
saw
thousands of miners join together to oust a particularly brutal
sheriff in Logan County, the governor went so far as to dispatch
bomber planes.) Thanks to this system, southern West Virginia
was home to some of the bloodiest fights in the history of
America’s
labor movement.
To put it most simply, coal camps were economic institutions
built to deny people agency. Of course, miners weren’t slaves.
But
there were parallels. In a 1920s US Senate hearing, a Logan
County miner named George Echols who had been fired for
heading up
the local union explained the combination of chronic
underpayment, coercion, and violence prevalent in the coal
camps. “I was
raised a slave [in antebellum Virginia],” he told the committee.
“My master and my mistress called me and I answered, and I
know
the time when I was a slave and I felt just like we feel now.”
Much has changed since the 1950s. As federal labor laws
improved the job security and wages of miners, rising
electricity demand in
the 1960s pulled the coal industry out of a postwar lull. Soaring
oil prices resulting from the formation of OPEC a decade later
spurred another coal boom.
At the same time, a lot hasn’t changed at all.
The legacy of coal camps
“A manufacturing town may count upon a reasonable degree of

permanency. A mining town in a region not suited to other
industry
is sure to have only a limited life,” a 1923 Congressional report
investigating coal-camp life explained. “It is this feature that
differentiates the company-owned mining community from the
company-owned manufacturing community.”
That fatalistic approach to community planning seems to have
played out in the coalfields. Through the coal slump of the
1950s and
early 1960s, companies razed thousands of coal camp homes to
cut their tax burden. Though some companies sold their land
holdings, it was often to other big companies—not residents.
Others continued charging existing occupants rent, refusing to
sell. “I
could go up and offer $100,000 for this house and they’d laugh
in my face, even if I had it in $100 bills,” a mine safety
inspector living
in a Logan County company house—whose roof had a gaping
hole—told ARC in the late 1970s.
“For many Appalachian people, coal camp life is not a bygone
era,” said the 1980 ARC report. “Facing no alternative, people
remain,
often dependent upon the will and wishes of the company
landlord. In staying, they face insecurities of tenure, dilapidated
housing,
and fear of the company’s power.”
Coal tipples at Toms Fork, Cabin Creek, Kanawha County, West
Virginia. (Roger May for Quartz)
As of 2013, of the 10 largest landowners in West Virginia, none
is headquartered in the state, according to a 2013 study by

historian
Lou Martin and economists at the West Virginia Center on
Budget and Policy. In six counties, the top ten landowners
control at least
half of private land. Five of those six—Mingo, Boone, Logan,
Wyoming, and McDowell—are in the central Appalachian
coalfields.
Jim Justice—who in 2016 ran and won West Virginia’s
governorship—is also the state’s sole billionaire, and one of its
bigger
landlords. The political power of coal hasn’t faded either. As it
happens, Jim Justice—who in 2016 ran and won West Virginia’s
governorship on the same “bring back coal jobs” promise as
Trump—is also the state’s sole billionaire, and one of its bigger
landlords. At the time the WVCBP study was conducted, Justice
owned 2% of McDowell County, as well as 2% of Greenbrier
and 3%
of Monroe counties. He also boasts a fortune invested in several
Kentucky coal mines, timberlands in West Virginia, and a resort
that
has catered to coal barons for more than a century (and now
fetes the New Orleans Saints).
http://www.wvpolicy.org/who_owns_west_virginia_in_the_21st
_century_2
This pattern of land ownership and extractive institutions, the
legacy of policies set centuries ago—set the stage for a new way
of
passing on the costs of cheap coal to the public.
The tragedy of Buffalo Creek
Much of the mining in central Appalachia wouldn’t be
profitable if companies shouldered the true costs of this
environmental

blighting. Instead, companies pass those costs on to the public.
For one, there are the costs to human safety. Strip-mining and
mountaintop removal have been linked with cataclysmic floods
that,
a few times a decade, destroy tens and even hundreds of
millions of dollars in property. The worst floods have killed
dozens or even
scores of residents.
Though few today have heard of it, one of the ghastliest
industrial disasters in US history took place in a coal camp-
specked hollow
in Logan County called Buffalo Creek. One rainy February
morning in 1972, a dam holding 157 million gallons of coal
waste gave out,
sending a 15- to 20-foot tsunami of black gunk ripping through
the hollow, according to Everything in Its Path, a study of the
disaster
by Kai Erikson, a Yale sociologist. The flood killed 125 people,
damaging around $50 million in property (about $300 million in
current dollars) and leaving four-fifths of residents homeless.
The raging flash flood in Buffalo Creek hollow, West Virginia,
February 27, 1972. (AP Photo/Harry Cabluck)
Pittston Coal Company—a Virginia-based company that owned
the dam—claimed the dam’s sole problem was that it was
“incapable
of holding the water God poured into it.” But earthlier
explanations exist. Raw coal must be bathed of impurities
before being
burned. Each day, Pittston’s Buffalo Creek mines produced
around 4,000 tons of market-ready coal and 1,000 tons of

refuse. From
the refuse, Pittston built dams to hold the 500,000 gallons of
coal-dirtied water it ran through each day—an engineering feat
that
Appalachian writer Harry Caudill likened to “a pool of gravy in
a mound of mashed potatoes.”
Though the federal government had in 1969 outlawed this
particular type of impoundment, state officials ignored both the
law and
local residents’ complaints about the dam’s shoddy state.
Pittston did eventually foot some of the bill for the Buffalo
Creek disaster, settling a class-action lawsuit from residents for
a total of
$13.5 million (about $13,000 per person). The state sued
Pittston for $100 million, half of which was to cover cleanup
and damages.
Then the extractive institutions swung into action. In 1977,
then-governor Arch Moore settled with Pittston, accepting $1
million—
less than a fifth of what West Virginia taxpayers spent on
cleanup.
Moore wasn’t alone in helping keep coal operators profitable in
the face of soaring environmental costs—particularly as the
easy-to-
reach underground seams tapped out, and companies turned to
strip-mining. States had passed laws overseeing strip-mining;
however, these were so toothless and little enforced, notes
Eller, that in both Kentucky and West Virginia, the practice
increased
after those laws’ passage.
In 1977, the federal government finally weighed in.
Paradoxically, though, the new law created an above-board way

of shifting the
astronomical costs of mountaintop removal’s destruction onto
taxpayers, with a devastating impact on the lives of central
Appalachians.
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was supposed
to require that mined land be restored to something
approximating
its original shape. However, a loophole in the law let coal
companies ignore that expensive requirement if the reclaimed
land could
be put to “a higher and better use.”
Coal companies instantly saw their opportunity, as Ron Eller
recounts in his modern history of Appalachia, Uneven Ground.
What if
the now-flattened mountaintops they were creating could be
pitched to government officials as a way to attract outside
factories
and create more jobs?
Higher and better use
Almost overnight, strip-mining underwent a hypertrophic
mutation, as mining companies turned to blowing up mountain
peaks and
deploying hulking, 20-story machines to claw open coal seams
below, replacing replace verdant ridges with moonscape mesas
of
lifelessness.
The land area of southern West Virginia scarred by active
mountaintop removal leapt more than threefold between 1985
and 2005
and has stayed steady since then, according to GIS analysis by

SkyTruth, an environmental nonprofit. As of 2015, some 8% of
Boone
County was being actively mined, compared with 2% in 1985.
Today, the biggest mine sites exceed the island of Manhattan in
size. It
is impossible to restore the land to its former state. And the new
law made it so they didn’t have to try. A recent Duke University
study found that coal companies had left the area they studied
40% flatter.
Mineral rights let coal companies tear off mountaintops—
ruining the land permanently—to get at the coal beneath it. The
scale
of environmental carnage is possible, at least in part, because of
the land-grab legacy: corporate control of enormous land
parcels
has meant residents lack the legal clout to object. It’s also been
possible thanks to the signing away of mineral rights that
happened
in the late 1800s and early 1900s—that saw Nick Mullins’
ancestor part with a hoard of coal wealth for 12 rifles and 13
hogs. This
wasn’t merely a matter of swindling farmers out of subsurface
riches. Since mineral rights legally trumped surface rights,
corporate
ownership let coal companies clear cut forests for mine
supports, build roads and railroad spurs, pollute and divert
streams—all
without having to pay taxes on the land they defaced, as Erikson
explains. Strip-mining, however, pushed this bait-and-switch to
a
whole new level. Mineral rights let coal companies tear off
mountaintops—ruining the land permanently—to get at the coal
beneath
it.

The Middle Ridge surface coal mine, which cut off part of Coal
River Mountain in Raleigh County, in southern West Virginia.
(AP
Photo/Michael Virtanen)
Then there are the costs that come with trying to find some
higher and better use. Desperate to show they’re creating jobs,
local
politicians have spent many millions in taxpayer funds
recruiting out-of-state factories to the “flat land” created by
mountaintop
removal, according to Eller. Few have panned out. The region’s
manufacturing sector was about the same in 1992 as it was in
1967,
according to a study commissioned by ARC. It still suffered
from low wages, low productivity and over-reliance on branch
plants.
Meanwhile, a super-max penitentiary built atop a leveled
mountain in Virginia struggles with a cracked foundation (the
locals
dubbed it “Sink-Sink”). Mingo County recently unveiled a new
airport on one such dusty tableland; its major industrial park,
which
sits on a former mine site, remains mostly empty.
“Coal creates employment for some, wealth for a few, and sucks
oxygen out of the room for the other people.” There are lots
more mountaintop removal sites than there ever will be airports
or shopping centers,” says Peter Hille, head of Mountain
Association for Community Economic Development, or
MACED, an economic development group in Kentucky. “Most
of these sites
are in places where it doesn’t make any sense to build anything.
Coal creates economic activity for a period of time but not

development. It creates employment for some, wealth for a few,
and sucks oxygen out of the room for the other people.”
This spending might temporarily boost the area’s GDP. But in
the long run, that money isn’t being spent on self -sustaining
investments in upping the skills and knowledge of local workers
and businesses. Lou Martin, the Chatham University historian,
notes, “You can still see state governments worried about losing
jobs and trying to help corporations, at times at the expense of
employees and residents.”
https://www.skytruth.org/2017/03/mountain-top-removal-in-
appalachia-whats-in-your-backyard/#toggle-id-1
https://today.duke.edu/2016/02/mountaintopmining
The false promise of more jobs
Despite the state support it’s enjoyed, the shift to mountaintop
removal hasn’t created much in the way of jobs. They require
far
less labor than underground mines. For instance, coal
employment in West Virginia fell by three-fifths between 1983
and 2000; 94%
of those lost jobs were underground, according to research by
Downstream Strategies, an environmental consulting group.
In fiscal year 2009, West Virginians paid a net $42.2 million to
support coal companies. Nowadays, taxpayers subsidize the coal
industry directly too. In fiscal year 2009, West Virginians paid
a net $42.2 million to support coal companies, according to
a study (pdf) by WVCBP and Downstream Strategies, an
environmental consulting firm. The report noted that “this value
fails to
capture the significant legacy costs resulting from past coal
industry activity that have yet to be funded. These costs, which

include
damages to roads and bridges and funding needs for reclaiming
all abandoned mine land and bond forfeiture coal mine sites in
the
state, amount to nearly $5 billion.”
Even those data ignore the human toll, however.
As it happens, that is what finally convinced Mullins to leave
coal mining behind. In the mid-2000s, a freak fire burned down
his
home. He and his family lost everything. But they gained a
modest homeowners insurance check and some good advice—
that
maybe they should see the fire as an opportunity instead of a
tragedy.
Nick Mullins in Berea, Kentucky. (Roger May for Quartz)
“My brother put it to me: ‘Do you want to be a coal miner for
the rest of your life?’” says Mullins. “All these things started
weighing
on me—I had a few run-ins with some of the management that
month and realized exactly where we stood as people, as human
beings, to the mining company. And I saw how they pitted us
against each other and realized I couldn’t stay on that path.”
It took him about a month to quit his mining job. A year later,
he and his family moved just outside of central Appalachian
Kentucky,
where he attended Berea College and finally got his degree. He
now runs his own public relations firm aimed at bridging
political and
cultural divides surrounding Appalachian issues.

Greater economic opportunity was part of why they left. His
biggest concern about staying, however, was their two kids.
Eroded by
dwindling budgets, local schools were even worse than when
Mullins had attended them. He worried about his kids’ health,
too.
Mountaintop removal sites and underground mines engirdle
Clintwood, creating untold volumes of toxic waste buried in
unnamed
patches of ground. The backyard creek that ran past his house
did so increasingly in Technicolor hues. That impetus to leave
gained
new urgency, however, when a public health scientist named
Michael Hendryx began publishing his research.
Dark waters
Blowing off a mountaintop releases naturally occurring poisons
like arsenic, selenium, lead, and manganese. These poisons then
seep into streams and groundwater. Meanwhile, the blasting
fogs the air with a toxic cocktail of dust that settles on roofs
and
windows in the valleys below, and cakes the lining of lungs.
The displaced soil and vegetation from mountaintop removal is
plowed
into valleys, creating enormous detritus piles and choking off
waterways.
Between 1985 and 2001, mining operations buried some 724
miles of rivers and streams, according to the EPA. And since
2002—
when the George W. Bush administration redefined “fill
material” in the Clean Water Act to include mining waste—the
rubble
plugging up central Appalachian waterways is laced with toxic
muck.

For a decade now, peer-reviewed research produced by
Hendryx, now a professor of applied health science at Indiana
University,
exposed a consistent link between mountaintop removal and a
broad range of health problems and rising mortality rates.
According
to his research, since 1990—when amendments to the US Clean
Air Act inadvertently stoked the growth of mountaintop
http://www.downstreamstrategies.com/documents/reports_publi
cation/memorandum_of_response_to_kent_memo_final_11-10-
10.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S14629011163
01137
removal (registration required)—parts of central Appalachia
with mountaintop removal have had about 1,200 extra deaths
per year,
adjusting for age, smoking habits, and other factors.
Rates of birth defects are 26% higher in areas with mountaintop
removal. In addition to all-cause mortality, self-reported rates
of
some forms of cancer and mortality from diseases of the heart,
lung, and kidneys are significantly higher in places with
mountaintop
removal, compared with places in Appalachia where it doesn’t
occur—even when adjusted for age, gender, smoking, work and
family history. Rates of birth defects are 26% higher in areas
with mountaintop removal than in the non-mining regions of
central
Appalachia. These findings are ominous because birth defect
rates are unusually sensitive to exposure to toxic chemicals,
even
though the specific mechanisms are little understood.

Though it’s hard to put a dollar sign on the human toll, Hendryx
estimates that costs associated with the higher mortality of
Appalachia’s coal-mining regions between 1979 and 2005
totaled $50 billion a year (in 2005 dollars), compared with the
$8 billion
contributed by the coal industry in 2005. A 2011 study
(registration required) put the health, environment, and other
economic costs
of coal-fired electricity at $345 billion, and possibly more than
$500 billion, doubling—and possibly tripling—the costs of
coal-
generated electricity. “These and the more difficult to quantify
externalities are borne by the general public,” they write.
Despite the data, the effect of mountaintop removal on people’s
health remains a topic of much debate. The coal companies,
unsurprisingly, dismiss Hendryx’s research, as do a long roster
of West Virginia politicians. Instead, you often hear that central
Appalachians are sick because they’re poor and because they
make bad choices.
This is the way America commonly understands ill health and
early death: that it’s a matter of cigarette drags, cheeseburger
bites,
and other spasms of feeble character. It’s true that, because
towns were developed based on their proximity to coal mines
rather
than commercial centers, residential communities are often
more than an hour’s drive from grocery stores. Gas stop fare of
buffalo
wings and pepperoni rolls are the quick meal options available
to most.
But part of coal’s legacy in central Appalachia is that, as with
their economic opportunities, individuals often don’t have much
control over whether they are healthy or not. Between drugs,
poverty, social isolation, and lack of educational opportunities,

there
is any number of hazards that can derail, or even end, a person’s
life. With so many possible pitfalls, it’s difficult to avoid
encountering some.
The media and lawmakers are increasingly drawing connections
between economic stagnation and destructive behaviors like
opioid
abuse and other “deaths of despair”—a term coined by Monnat
and popularized by Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton,
which
includes suicide and alcohol-associated liver disease as well as
drug overdoses. And economically battered central Appalachia
leads
the pack. In 1999, rates of these “deaths of despair” among
those aged 15-64 were the same inside and outside Appalachia,
according to a recent report commissioned by ARC. By 2015,
the combined mortality rate from these deaths was nearly 95 per
100,000 in central Appalachia, versus 49 per 100,000 in non-
Appalachian US.
That’s appalling, of course—but what might be even more
disturbing is the larger context of that disparity. It’s not just
that central
Appalachians are doing worse with opioids than everyone else.
They’re dying at higher rates from other causes too.
Between 2008 and 2014, heart disease killed nearly 250 people
per 100,000 in central Appalachia. Though mortality rates for
most
major causes of death have improved in the region since the late
1990s, they’re still far higher than the rest of the country.
Between
2008 and 2014, heart disease—the leading cause of death in the
US—killed nearly 250 people per 100,000 in central
Appalachia,

42% higher than the rest of the nation, according to ARC
research. Cancer claimed 222 lives per 100,000 in the region,
around a third
more than the US as a whole. Rates for chronic pulmonary
obstructive disease exceeded national rates by more than 80%;
diabetes
deaths were 40% higher.
They’re also dying younger. Between 2011 and 2013, the nation
averaged 6,658 “years of potential life lost”—the cumulative
number of years a region loses per 100,000 people when its
residents die before reaching age of 75, according to ARC.
Central
Appalachia lost 11,226 years of potential life.
But the words typed on a death certificate don’t tell us much
about the quality of people’s lives. Central Appalachian
residents also
have higher rates of disability and chronic disease (pdf, p.86).
This may have something to do with the economic
precariousness that is a fact of life in central Appalachia. A
growing body of
scientific evidence links “allostatic load”—basically, chronic
wear and tear on the body caused by repeated triggering of
stress
hormones—with chronic disease and premature death. Many of
the maladies strongly associated with allostatic load are
problems
in central Appalachia, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart
disease. Allostatic load is also linked to depression and
impaired mental
functioning. Some scientists hypothesize that the system’s
inability to balance its brain chemistry caused by chronic stress
may also
encourage addiction.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S14629011163
01137
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2693168/#B20
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-
6632.2010.05890.x/abstract;jsessionid=1FE2967EEE7C7719F0
A6D2EEFF304B7D.f02t03
https://www.arc.gov/assets/research_reports/Health_Disparities
_in_Appalachia_August_2017.pdf
https://www.arc.gov/assets/research_reports/DataOverviewfrom
2011to2015ACS.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/allostatic-
load
https://www.nature.com/articles/1395603
Central Appalachia’s brutally low living standards certainly
bring with them plenty of stress. And the economic realities of
the region
mean that a sense of community, which might alleviate the
effects of stress, is hard to come by.
Marlene Spaulding’s story
Marlene Spaulding grew up in a Kentucky town called Beauty
during the 1970s. “I’m not really sure there’s a whole lot of
beautiful
there,” she says.
The town was once known as Himlerville—the home of the first
cooperative coal-mining company in the country. Founded in
1917
by Hungarian immigrants, each employee in Himler Coal
Company owned company stock and received a share of its
profits,
according to Eller’s Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers. The
houses in Himlerville were nice. Each had two fireplaces, gas

and
electricity, a tub and shower, and a vegetable garden, among
other amenities. Miners could choose to buy their home or even
b uild
their own. Himlerville had a library, an auditorium, a modern
school open 10 months out of the year, a local newspaper, as
well as
commercial developments that included a bank, a hotel and a
bake shop. Miners elected by their fellow employees sat on the
company’s board of directors.
The company and the town prospered throughout most of the
1920s. But in 1928, private capitalists bought its assets. They
renamed it Beauty a few years later.
By Spaulding’s count, there are only two members of her
extended family who have never been to prison. By the time
Spaulding
was growing up in the town, life in Beauty was hard. Her
biological mother was 14 when she gave birth to Spaulding and
her twin
sister, and a local family adopted the girls. Her adoptive mom
came from a family with 18 children, her adoptive dad had 12
siblings.
By her count, there are only two members of her extended
family who have never been to prison.
Drugs were a big problem. Spaulding’s older brother got hooked
in high school, and was in prison before long. Back then, they
let
prisoners out on furlough over the weekends. Her brother would
usually run off with his friends. Spaulding recalls awakening
one
night to her mom calming her as policemen filed into her room
to search for her brother under her bed. “And that was normal t
o
us,” she says.

Marlene Spaulding in front of Able Families in Kermit, West
Virginia. (Roger May for Quartz)
After a life spent shuttling in and out of prison, her brother died
of cancer when he was 48. Six weeks before he died, police
busted
him for selling morphine “off his deathbed,” as Spaulding puts
it, most likely to exchange for something stronger. “One of the
hardest parts about him is I really can’t name anything good he
did in his life,” she says. “He never carried a job, never had a
contributing role in society, was never a productive person.”
But her childhood could have been much worse. As an adult,
Spaulding tracked down a biological sister who had been born
three
years after Spaulding but hadn’t been adopted. The two met up
at the local Dairy Queen, where she learned that her biological
sister
had drug problems and was essentially homeless. At that
moment, she happened to live eerily close by—beneath a bridge
on the
Tug River that Spaulding could see from her office window.
“That very easily could have been me,” says Spaulding.
Long before the rest of the nation noticed, the opioid crisis took
root in central Appalachia. By 2015, West Virginia’s rate of
opioid-
related overdose death for those aged 15-64 was more than three
times higher than the non-Appalachian US, while Appalachian
Kentucky’s was more than twice the rate. McDowell County, in
West Virignia’s southern coalfields, has the highest opioid
overdose
rate in the country.

It’s probably no coincidence that coal-mining towns emerged in
the 1990s as the epicenter of the opioid crisis. It’s probably no
coincidence that coal-mining towns emerged in the 1990s as the
epicenter of the opioid crisis, says Shannon Monnat, sociology
professor at Penn State University. Of course, injuries abound
and surgery is common, leading to prescriptions for heavy-duty
painkillers. To keep injured miners working—and from claiming
disability insurance—some companies had doctors prescribing
pain
drugs on the job.
It’s not just miners who rely on painkillers. Ask central
Appalachian residents about addiction, and people will just as
casually
mention waitresses or hospital workers who dose themselves to
keep their jobs. The 2008 ARC study reported that in coal
country,
women, unemployed people, and those whose households earned
less than $35,000 a year were more likely to be admitted for
substance abuse treatment in the coalfields than in other parts of
Appalachia.
Part of the problem may be that high unemployment levels
create a ready workforce of traffickers. Central Appalachians
themselves
will tell you that boredom has a lot to do with it: In a place
where movie theaters, restaurants and skating rinks have mostly
shuttered, recreational drug use doesn’t have much to compete
with.
Spaulding escaped opioids, but not teen pregnancy—another
problem common in central Appalachia. Kentucky, along with

West
Virginia, has among the highest rates of teen birth in the
country, concentrated in central Appalachian counties. “The day
I walked
through the [high school] graduation line, I already had a one-
year-old,” she says.
A few years later, she heard about a family wellbeing charity
called Able Families, based in Mingo County, from another
young
mother. For a while, she participated in its programs, such as
playgroups organized for mothers of young children. Then she
was
asked to join as a home-visit worker. Spaulding is now the
director of Able Families, and is completing her masters in
social work.
In addition to coaching mothers on childcare, Able Families
sponsors an after-school program. It used to be that they’d
prepare a
light snack—until they realized it was often the child’s last
meal of the day, and raised money to provide hot meals. On the
first day
of the new meal program, Spaulding and her staff had planned
to let the kids loose on the playground before the meal. But the
kids
weren’t interested. “The first thing they got off the bus, they
were at the fence like, ‘Where’s our food?’” More than a third
of
central Appalachian children live in poverty, compared with
21.7% nationwide, according to ARC.
The even bigger worry is that addicts with needy children aren’t
coming forward for help at all. “There’s children starving over
the
weekend. And we don’t know who they are,” says Sandra
Justice (no relation to the West Virginia governor), who works

with
Spaulding at Able Families.
“You go to the suboxone and methadone clinics, and you’ll see
pregnant women in line.” The problem could start even earlier,
though. “You go to the suboxone and methadone clinics, and
you’ll see pregnant women in line,” says Spaulding. The local
hospital—where around two drug-dependent babies are born
every hour—now has a separate nursery tailored to help infants
to
undergo the excruciating month-long withdrawal. The infants
are treated with methadone, which relieves opioid-addiction
symptoms but is itself a powerfully addictive narcotic.
It’s not just material needs that local kids are missing out on.
When the children put on performances, Able Families pulls out
the
stops to help parents and grandparents come to watch. It’s hard
to get anyone to come, though. Spaulding recalls an episode
when,
just as the children were about to take to the stage to begin a
play they were putting on, she and her staff spied out the
window one
of the little boy’s mothers driving up. The boy was excited, and
the staff stalled while they waited for her.
But after a few moments, Spaulding saw the mother pull out
again and drive off. She hadn’t been parking to see the pe
rformance,
but lining up at the drive-through pharmacy that abuts the Able
Families lot. Getting painkillers, Spaulding suspects.
Graduation events are similarly crushing. At a recent junior
high ceremony, besides them, only one mother and one
grandmother
showed up. “Can you imagine your life if no one ever does that
for you?” says Spaulding.

“Thinking you could move away to a university—that’s not
even in the realm of possibility.” Spaulding’s own daughter was
one of
only a few kids in her high school graduating class of 106 to
leave the area. She graduated from Alice Lloyd College in
Kentucky last
year and now lives in Nashville, working as a paralegal. (She
told her mother she would go anywhere that had at least one
stoplight.)
Her middle child has wanted to be a chef since early elementary
school. She had to explain to him that, with no real restaurants
in
the area, he would have to leave too. This fall, he started in the
culinary program at Fairmont State, West Virginia. “I don’t
think
there’s anything wrong if they wanted to live here,” she says,
“but I want them to know there’s opportunity in other places.”
Most kids in Kermit don’t get to glimpse those kinds of
opportunities. Driving the ancient white Able Families van
along Route 52,
Spaulding recounts a recent field trip to Cleveland she took
with her students. For nearly all of them, the trip to Hard Rock
Café was
the first time they’d been to a sit-down restaurant. In fact, many
had never before left Kermit.
Spaulding was worried that the kids would be bored and
disruptive when they toured Case Western Reserve University.
However,
the campus proved dazzling and exotic—especially their visit to
a dorm. “So I could live here?” one girl asked.
https://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/about/alt-text/map-county-
text.htm
http://hoopschildrens.org/facilities-programs/neonatal-

intensive-care-unit/neonatal-therapeutic-unit/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/saving-babies-opioid-
epidemic
“I was thinking, well, probably not—this place is really
expensive,” Spaulding says. “But I told her, ‘Yes, you could go
to school here
and this could be your room.’ And they were all like, ‘To live
in?’” she says. “They come from where even a community
college is
mostly unheard of. Especially thinking you could move away to
a university—that’s not even in the realm of possibility.”
In this kind of environment, it’s perhaps unsurprising that
residents of central Appalachia report feeling mentally
unhealthy 25%
more frequently than the average American. Nearly 20% of the
area’s Medicare beneficiaries suffer from depression, compared
with
just over 15% nationwide. In May, a metastudy found that social
isolation upped a person’s risk of dying by 29%.
Perhaps it’s not simply the unhealthy habits and pollution
endemic to central Appalachia that are sickening residents and
killing
them prematurely. Rather, the wear and tear on the body from
prolonged social and economic stress could be making people
far
more vulnerable to their harmful effects.
The problem we’re solving for
Nada White’s son, Dustin, is now 34. He says that growing up
in the 1990s, the most exciting event of the year was the Coal
Festival
of Boone County. The multi-day coal-themed carnival featured
music acts, fireworks and tilt-a-whirls—a much bigger affair
than the

county fair.
Nada White and Dustin White in Dawes, West Virginia. (Roger
May for Quartz)
Dustin’s great- great-grandfathers would have looked forward to
something very different. Back then, the biggest festival of the
year
in central Appalachia was election day—a state fair, market
day, and political convention rolled into one, as Altina Waller, a
University of Connecticut historian, recounts in Feud: Hatfields,
McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. That
disappeared in the coal camp era, as coal operators controlled
political machines and, often enough, the votes of their
employees.
Nowadays, West Virginia frequently has the lowest voter
turnout in the US: In 2008 and 2012, rates undershot the
average by 11
percentage points.
Last year, however, that gap actually narrowed a little—
shrinking to nine percentage points—thanks to enthusiasm for
Trump. The
central Appalachian coalfields were one of his biggest
strongholds of support.
It’s not hard to guess why. Trump promised to revive central
Appalachia’s coal jobs, a feat that would defy market trends.
Central
Appalachia’s remaining seams are harder to get at, making the
coal generated uncompetitive with that mined elsewhere in the
US.
Environmental regulations have lessened demand from coal
plants, though the far bigger factor is the abundance of natural
gas,

which has undercut coal prices.
As a result, the region’s coal industry is in the worst shape it’s
ever been. In the last few years, companies have been winding
down
operations—some by choice, and many by way of bankruptcy.
But coal is still the best-paying job around, and in many towns,
the
only one. Bringing those jobs back, it’s true, would save
thousands of families and whole communities.
It turns out, Trump’s campaign promises weren’t just talk. In
August, the Trump administration halted a comprehensive
study,
launched by the National Academy of Sciences in early 2017, to
assess the health effects of mountaintop removal, citing cost
concerns. Meanwhile, Trump appointed as head of the federal
Mine Safety and Health Administration a former CEO of a coal
company with a record of repeated safety violations, including
at a mine where a preventable accident killed a miner in 2011.
His
energy department is investigating ways to force utility
companies to subsidize coal company profits, reported Slate in
Oct. 2017.
Whether or not this will be enough to postpone the long overdue
creative destruction of central Appalachia’s coal industry
remains
to be seen. But for all the fanfare it’s received, Trump’s appeal
to central Appalachians is neither original nor populist. It
follows the
same values and reasoning championed by a century of
Appalachian politicians.
Trump, like generations of Appalachian politicians, says that
he’s trying to save coal for the sake of the people. But the
problem that

he’s solving for isn’t how to invest in making people healthier
and better educated. Nor is it how to make their children’s lives
better
or to expand their families’ opportunities.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161456835
2
https://slate.com/business/2017/10/it-turns-out-he-was-serious-
about-salvaging-coal-plants-after-all.html
At a national level, US politicians, corporate chieftains and
other civic leaders continue to ignore the flaws riddling their
own
growth model. Rather, the problem Trump is intent on solving
is how best to give vast, distant corporations more
opportunities. To
revive an old oligopoly, instead of innovating new work. To
subsidize producing more coal, instead of spending on making
the
region’s people more valuable. To stake the region’s future on a
finite resource, at the expense of the ultimate renewable one—
human potential.
This isn’t just a Trump thing. At a national level, US
politicians, corporate chieftains and other civic leaders continue
to ignore the
flaws riddling their own growth model. Like the coal-backed
politicians counting on boom to follow bust, the nation’s
leaders
continue to expect the business cycle to buoy growth, failing to
grasp how years of increasing inequality in wealth, income,
opportunity, and health have cannibalized the very demand
needed to sustain it. While they dither on investing in
infrastructure,
technology, education and health care, the country’s reliance on

welfare continues to climb as labor force participation slides.
Taxpayers are subsidizing companies to underpay retail
workers, just as they’re paying for coal companies to lop off
mountaintops.
And though central Appalachia’s health and economic problems
are unusually pronounced, the phenomenon certainly isn’t
anomalous. According to a recent county-by-county analysis by
the Economic Innovation Group, a entrepreneur advocacy and
policy
group, the number of jobs and new businesses in distressed
communities in the US—central Appalachia among them—
haven’t
grown at all since 2000. Half have suffered net losses of both.
Meanwhile, two years ago, national life expectancy in the US
fell for the first time in decades. It dropped again last year. It
could be
an anomaly—two years hardly makes a trend. But it could also
mark a shift in its people’s fortunes that is all but unthinkable
in a
country that has grown to be the world’s richest and most
powerful.
It’s a blow that hit many central Appalachian counties a decade
ago, the grim conclusion of the great cynical experiment played
out
upon its people. Americans, like central Appalachians, are told
that problems of health and poverty stem from the moral
failings of
individuals, not of society. Meanwhile, their country’s
institutions are embracing the same ideology that laid waste to
the
coalfields—that profit equals prosperity, regardless of its true
costs.

https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-
keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/
Our Love Of 'All Natural' Is Causing A Vanilla Shortage
June 16, 2017 7:31 AM ET
Dan Charles
Workers spread "red vanilla" (vanilla that has been treated by
special cooking) in the sun to be dried near Sambava,
Madagascar, in
May 2016. Madagascar, producer of 80 percent of the world's
vanilla, has seen huge jumps in the price. It's one of the most
labor-
intensive foods on Earth.
Rijasolo/AFP/Getty Images
Gerry Newman buys vanilla by the gallon. He's co-owner of
Albemarle Baking Co., in Charlottesville, Va., and vanilla goes
into
everything from his cookies to pastry cream.
A few years ago, each 1-gallon bottle of organic, fair-trade
vanilla set him back $64. Today, it's $245, more than Newman
can
comfortably stomach.
It's a global phenomenon, hitting pastry chefs and ice cream
makers alike. Some have changed their recipes to use less
vanilla.

Newman has switched suppliers to find a cheaper product.
"It's not certified organic. It's not fair trade," he says. "There's a
guilt I have over that, because we're talking about something
that's
all hand labor, and if these people aren't being treated fairly, it's
really sad."
To understand the current vanilla crisis, this is the first thing to
understand: It's one of the most labor-intensive foods on Earth.
Vanilla beans are the seeds of an orchid. It grows wild in
Mexico, where its flowers are pollinated by birds and insects.
Most of the
world's vanilla now is grown in Madagascar, though, where
those native pollinators don't exist. So it has to be done by
hand. "Every
flower of this orchid has to be fertilized by hand, with a little
stick," says Jürg Brand, who runs a small vanilla business in
Madagascar
called Premium Spices.
And that's just the start of it.
After you harvest the seed pods, you soak each one in hot water,
"and then you wrap it in woolen blankets for about 48 hours,
and
then you put it in a wooden box to sweat," Brand says. Later,
the pods are laid out to dry in the sun, but for only one hour
each day.
The whole process takes months. It's so time-consuming and
labor-intensive that during the decade that preceded the recent
run-up
of prices, some farmers simply gave up. Prices for vanilla were
so low, it just wasn't worth the effort. "A lot of farmers
abandoned

their plantations during this time," Brand says.
This brings us to the second factor in today's vanilla crisis.
During that period of low prices, a lot of food companies were
content to
use a synthetic version of vanilla. This factory-made version is
composed of a single chemical compound, vanillin, which is the
main
flavor compound in natural vanilla.
Synthetic vanillin is much cheaper than natural vanilla. On the
list of ingredients of, say, packaged cookies, it may show up as
vanillin
or simply "artificial flavors."
The vanilla market began to flip when food companies noticed
that consumers were avoiding foods with artificial flavors.
http://albemarlebakingco.com/
http://pronatec.com/en/Origins/premium-spices-2.html
"Consumers are reading the labels much more, and they're
demanding all natural, and even organic," says Craig Nielsen,
co-owner
of the company Nielsen-Massey, which makes vanilla the
traditional way, from beans.
About three years ago, several huge companies, including
Nestle and Hershey's, announced that they were shifting to
natural
ingredients. That means they now want vanilla from orchid
seeds, not factories.
The problem is, there aren't enough vanilla-producing orchids.
"We don't have the supply to meet the demand right now," says

Nielsen.
Nielsen-Massey isn't taking orders from any new customers at
the moment, because the supply of vanilla beans is so limited.
Food
companies — and small-town bakers like Gerry Newman — all
are trying to secure a piece of that limited supply, bidding up
the
price. A bag of vanilla beans in Madagascar now costs more
than 10 times what it did five years ago.
Bad news for bakers, though, is great news for vanilla-growing
farmers in the coastal regions of Madagascar. "There's really,
really, a
lot of cash around in these coastal towns now," says Jürg Brand.
So much cash is going to pay farmers, in fact, that an odd thing
happened during the last vanilla harvest season.
"The national central bank ran out of cash," says Brand — at
least the large bills that vanilla traders use to pay farmers.
Farmers
don't trust banks, so they were hoarding that cash at home. "All
the money was somewhere on this coastal strip, under
mattresses
or locked in houses or I don't know where," he says.
Brand, who's been living in Madagascar for the past 25 years,
expects the craze to end eventually. Farmers in Madagascar now
are
rebuilding vanilla plantations as quickly as they can, but it
takes four or five years before those orchids start producing
seeds.
This past March 2017, there was a big setback: A cyclone hit
Madagascar, destroying perhaps a third of the crop, pushing

prices up
even more.
Vanilla pods are so precious, theft has become a major problem.
Farmers are so worried about their crops being stolen directly
from
their fields that they are harvesting the beans much too early.
For vanilla lovers, it's doubly bad news. Not only are vanilla
beans
scarce and expensive, the quality is generally quite poor, too.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/06/16/527576487/our
-love-of-all-natural-is-causing-a-vanilla-shortage
Your Passion for Fancy Vanilla Ice Cream Is Creating World-
Wide Havoc
With the price skyrocketing, farmers in Madagascar, the
industry’s epicenter, are sleeping in their fields, hiring guards;
‘there are many
vanilla thieves here’
Gérard Mandondona on his vanilla plantation in
Ambodiampana, Madagascar. PHOTO:ALEXANDRA
WEXLER/THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
By
Alexandra Wexler
Dec. 14, 2017 10:18 a.m. ET
http://www.nielsenmassey.com/
http://www.nielsenmassey.com/downloads/nmv-crop-report.pdf

AMBODIAMPANA, Madagascar—Just before the sun dips
below the tree-covered hills around the Malagasy jungle, Gérard
Mandondona treks up the near-vertical slope of his 5-acre wild
garden. He’s there to inspect his most valuable crop of some
2,500
vanilla orchids.
Earlier this year, he hired a guard to keep watch over the vine-
like plants, which intertwine among coffee, banana and clove
trees.
Some nights, Mr. Mandondona joins the guard at his post under
a makeshift tent of blue tarp, with a fire going nearby to
frighten off
potential thieves.
The process of making vanilla has become anything but plain.
Driven in part by Americans’ increasing taste for natural
products, the
price of vanilla has grown sixfold over the past three years.
That’s wreaking havoc on Madagascar, the Indian Ocean island
about
9,000 miles away that’s at the center of the approximately $1.75
billion market for the world’s most popular flavor.
Vanilla bandits are plundering pods, which at about $600 a
kilogram are now more valuable than their weight in silver and
come
second only to saffron in the spice price rankings.
Farmers, who must hand-pollinate each orchid on the single day
it flowers, are responding by harvesting early, reducing the
quantity
and quality of the vanilla.

Vanilla beans are sorted at Sahanala, a vanilla exporter, in
Vohemar, Madagascar. PHOTO:ALEXANDRA WEXLER/THE
WALL STREET
JOURNAL
Some, like 50-year-old Mr. Mandondona, who had thieves steal
vanilla from his vines in April, have hired guards or spend their
nights sleeping in their fields. On at least four occasions this
year, farmers have killed thieves caught stealing vanilla from
farms or
houses, according to a local government official in
Madagascar’s vanilla-growing region of Sava.
“There are many vanilla thieves here. Before, they’d steal one
plastic sack, now they steal on a bike” stacked high with sacks,
said
Mr. Mandondona, who has spent the past three decades farming
vanilla. “It is a big problem. If there’s no security, we can’t
make
vanilla work.”
Some communities, including Ambodiampana, whose neat
wooden-slat houses materialize out of the thick, green jungle on
either
side of a wide tar road, have created village defense forces,
which are staffed by the strongest men. They are trained by the
local
gendarmes to guard access to the area and bring thieves in to
the authorities.
The mayhem in the Malagasy jungle, where about 80% of the
world’s vanilla is grown, is spurred by some of the world’s
largest

packaged-foods companies, which are increasingly using
natural—rather than artificial—vanilla flavor in chocolates, ice
creams and
baked goods. Natural vanilla flavor is now used in products
including Nestlé SA’s Crunch bars, McDonald’s Corp.’s vanilla
soft serve
and HersheyCo.’s Hershey’s Kisses.
In 2017, the market for U.S. vanilla imports jumped to $402.4
million through October, from $232.8 million during the same
period
in 2016, after more than doubling in 2016 from the previous
year, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission and
the U.S.
Department of Commerce.
This year, the increase in price for natural vanilla was
compounded by a March 2017 cyclone that hit the northeastern
vanilla-
producing region of Madagascar, which fueled buyers’ worries
about shortages.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fragrance-and-household-product-
makers-hunt-for-exotic-vanilla-1413913161
https://www.wsj.com/articles/recipe-cherry-coppetta-with-
vanilla-gelato-and-amaretti-cookies-1500487284
http://quotes.wsj.com/HSY
Inside Hershey Co.’s Chocolate World visitor center in Hershey,
Penn. PHOTO: LUKE SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Food manufacturers “have mostly forgotten that the production
of vanilla in Madagascar is a craft work that cannot withstand a

high world demand,” says Jean Christophe Peyre, director
general of Flor Ibis Sarl, a vanilla producer, processor and
exporter based
in Vohemar, Madagascar.
Vanilla orchids first arrived on Madagascar, more than 250
miles off the coast of southeastern Africa, in the early 1800s,
brought by
the French from the plants’ native Mexico. But Madagascar
lacked the native bee that facilitates pollination in the
Americas. It took
several decades until a slave boy on the neighboring island of
Réunion figured out how to hand-pollinate the vanilla plants
using a
technique that farmers still employ to this day.
Vanilla is now the island’s top export, though Madagascar
remains one of the world’s poorest nations, ranking 158 out of
188
countries on the United Nations Human Development Index.
Packaged-foods companies are increasingly using natural—
rather than artificial—vanilla flavor. PHOTO: ISTOCK
Vanilla plants are the only fruit-bearing orchid and it takes
them about three years to start producing beans—one reason
why supply
is lagging demand. The orchids must be watched closely, not
only because of theft but also because each flower blooms for
only one
day. If it isn’t pollinated during that narrow window, the flower
wilts and dies. About nine months after pollination, farmer s
pick the
green pods and dry them in a complicated process that includes

blanching the beans, sweating them and drying them in the sun,
generally over another three to six months.
“Think about trying to keep your house orchid alive at home,”
says Benjamin Neimark, a lecturer at Lancaster University in
the U.K.
“Now try keeping that alive in the middle of a fairly difficult
rain forest.”
Vanilla farmers receive a fraction of the jump in prices for their
produce, with much of the profits staying with middlemen, who
buy
the pods and then sell to exporters. Farmers in Ambodiampana
said they get about $200 a kilogram for their beans, about one-
third
the market price. In the hope of shielding them from thieves,
farmers have been picking their beans before they’re ripe,
which
drastically reduces the amount and quality of the vanilla that
they yield.
“We are afraid to leave our vanilla in the field,” said Gaspard
Kola, a farmer from Ambodiampana who has been growing
vanilla since
1958, when he was 17 years old. Earlier this year, as the harvest
was ramping up, Mr. Kola fell ill and had to go into the regional
capital, Sambava, for treatment. While he was there, thieves
stole dried and freshly picked green vanilla out of his house. He
plans
to hire guards to watch his crop next year.
It normally takes 5 to 6 pounds of green vanilla beans to make 1
pound of cured beans, says Craig Nielsen, vice president of
sustainability at Nielsen-Massey Vanillas Inc., a family-owned
manufacturer in Waukegan, Ill. If they are picked early, it can
take 8 to

10 pounds.
Vanilla beans are dried on tables in the sun in Vohemar.
PHOTO: ALEXANDRA WEXLER/THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
The surge in prices isn’t unprecedented. In 2004, a cyclone
made a direct hit on the vanilla-growing regions of Madagascar,
causing
extensive damage to the crop and driving the price from about
$25 a kilogram to more than $500 a kilogram. Once the crisis
passed,
prices fell back to below $50 a kilogram.
For now, smaller retailers like artisanal bakeries and gourmet
ice-cream makers are feeling the pinch more acutely than their
mass-
market peers—they require higher-quality vanilla and the beans
make up a much higher percentage of their costs.
Katie Burford, the owner of ice-cream shop Cream Bean Berry
in Durango, Colo., estimates the price she pays for vanilla has
quintupled from a few years ago. To cut costs, Ms. Burford
scaled down on the number of vanilla beans she puts in her ice
cream.
She hasn’t raised prices, because she worries they’re already at
the high end of the market: A regular-size cup costs $3.78,
excluding
tax.
“We’re really hostage to the prices, because it’s so intrinsic to
what I do,” she says. “I just don’t feel like I could not offer
vanilla ice

cream.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-passion-for-fancy-vanilla-
ice-cream-is-creating-world-wide-havoc-1513264731
ADDITIONAL SUPPORTING ARTICLES
https://www.delish.com/food-news/news/a53817/vanilla-
shortage/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vanilla-bean-shortage-
madagascar-drives-up-us-prices/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/market-
forces-buffet-plain-vanilla-as-global-dearth-drives-
skyrocketing-prices/article38268619/
https://www.delish.com/food-news/news/a53817/vanilla-
shortage/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vanilla-bean-shortage-
madagascar-drives-up-us-prices/

One By One Big Hydropower Dams Disrupt Mekong River’s
Free Flow
August 2, 2017/in Asia, Water & Energy, Water News /by Keith
Schneider
In unfolding global energy revolution, expensive and
ecologically risky dams may not be right choice to generate
more electricity.
Plans by Laos to build big hydropower dams on the Mekong
River are seen by many villagers, the region’s environmental
organizations, and some officials in neighboring countries as
making a mockery of the river’s natural beauty and its central
value as a
source of fish, irrigation, and commerce. Photo © J. Carl Ganter
/ Circle of Blue
By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
The bend in the Mekong River where Laotian authorities want
to build the Pak Beng hydropower dam is described as one of
the
most beautiful stretches along all of the 4,000-kilometer (2700-
mile) river. High bluffs tower above farm fields and tropical
forests.
Fishing villages lie along the shoreline. The deep and dark
waters teem with fish and birds soar above the shallows.
Laos’ plan to build the 912-megawatt, $2.3 billion dam is a step
in one of the world’s most aggressive hydropower development
programs. The tiny landlocked nation of 7.1 million people is
setting out to build 350 hydropower projects and add 26,000
megawatts (26 gigawatts) to the 6,300 megawatts of electrical

generating capacity that Laos currently produces from its 42
operating hydropower dams. Along with the Pak Beng dam, two
are under construction downstream, and three more are planned
to
cross the Mekong River.
“The Department of Energy has the ambitious plan to raise the
electrification ratio to 95 percent of families across the
country,”
Xaypaseuth Phomsoupha, a director general in the Laos
Ministry of Energy and Mines, told an international water and
hydropower
conference last year. “This plan is amongst the priorities of the
government to eradicate poverty in the country.”
It is also a plan that is seen by many villagers, the region’s
environmental organizations, and some officials in neighboring
countries
as making a mockery of the Mekong’s natural beauty and its
central value as a source of fish, irrigation, and businesses that
better fit
conditions of the 21st century. On the bend of the Mekong
designated for the Pak Beng dam and along other big bends
upstream in
China, and downstream in Laos and Cambodia, one of the
world’s great river basins is steadily being hemmed in, and not
just by
dams.
The Mekong River’s regular cycles of low water during dry
seasons and floods during monsoons influence the lives of
people in six
nations that count on the river for food and their livelihoods.
Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

http://www.circleofblue.org/2017/world/one-one-big-
hydropower-dams-disrupt-mekong-rivers-free-flow/
http://www.circleofblue.org/category/asia/
http://www.circleofblue.org/category/water-energy/
http://www.circleofblue.org/category/world/
http://www.circleofblue.org/author/keith/
The Mekong and a good number of the more than 60 million
people in four Southeast Asia nations that rely on the river are
being
pushed around by what they view as obsolete electrical
generating priorities. With surprising speed, Southeast Asia has
emerged as
the latest testing ground for competing theories about the scale
and expense of relying on water for electrical energy. The 20th
century idea of building immense and expensive hydropower
dams is rushing headlong into a wave of less expensive and less
disruptive alternative energy technologies and development.
Boiled down, the issues are globally momentous. On one side
are long-standing practices in project financing, engineering,
and
economic development theories about the usefulness of big
hydropower dams. On the other side are cleaner and less costly
generating technologies, civic opposition to big dams, and
erratic water supplies caused by climate change that make
managing
dams much less certain. The outcome will decide how much of
the Mekong and the last untouched stretches of the other great
rivers in Asia, Africa, and South America will continue to flow
freely.

Along big bends upstream in China and downstream in Laos and
Cambodia, the Mekong River is steadily being hemmed in by
hydropower dams. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
“The energy revolution is evolving around the world,” said Carl
Middleton, an assistant professor of political science at
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and a scholar on Mekong
River development. “This region is resisting the shift, though,
because of the economics of building big new projects. But it
seems inevitable that the shift will happen here. It raises
questions
about continuing to build so many big dams.”
A Big and Important River
Historically, from its source on the Tibetan plateau, the
undammed Mekong gathered water and energy as it flowed
through China,
Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand before dropping its rich silt and
sediment in a rice-growing delta in Vietnam. The Mekong
Basin’s
water supported one of the world’s largest freshwater fisheries.
Its regular cycles of low water during dry seasons and flooding
during monsoons influence the lives of people in five nations
that count on the river for food and their livelihoods.
Historic texts reveal that constructing big Mekong Basin
hydropower dams dates to the early 1950s. The Bureau of
Reclamation, the
water supply manager for the U.S. Department of the Interior,
recommended extending its dam building prowess to the region.
The
idea faded in the conflicts that engulfed Southeast Asia over the
following 30 years.

Historically, from its source on the Tibetan plateau, the
undammed Mekong gathered water and energy as it flowed
4,000-
kilometers (2,700 miles) through China, Myanmar, Laos,
Thailand, and Cambodia before dropping its rich silt and
sediment in a rice-
growing delta in Vietnam. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of
Blue
By the mid-1990s China had replaced the United States as the
leading dam-building nation, and the Mekong became one of its
principal targets. The Mekong’s natural water flows began to
change when China built the first of six big hydropower dams in
the
river’s upstream reaches. In 1995, recognizing the value of the
Mekong’s waters to their wellbeing, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos,
and
Vietnam formed the Mekong River Commission, a research and
planning organization. The four countries formed a pact and a
process to consult each other and reach agreement on
constructing big dams.
There are 286 river basins in the world that encompass
boundaries of multiple countries, according to the Institute for
Water and
Watersheds at Oregon State University. The Mekong River
Commission is one of 121 transboundary river organizations in
the world.
The commission’s research divisions, regarded as highly
competent internationally, have published incisive findings
about the largely
deleterious effects that dam building will have on water flow,
fisheries, and farming communities.

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