Coal Miner's Slaughter
In the final scene of How Green Was My Valley, a boy cradles the body of his dead father as the two are lifted out of a collapsed coal mine. Audiences wept as the Welsh lad mourned everything the coal industry had taken from him: his father, his innocence, his once beautiful hometown.
The film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1941. Today, with its black-and-white scenery, old-fashioned score, and crude editing, it looks like a relic from a bygone era. Watching the film, we might imagine the exploitation blighting the South Wales coal town has been left in the distant past.
That kind of reverse nostalgia—pretending we’ve solved all our grandparents’ problems—is a major obstacle to continued progress.
Case in point: Recently, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection reported that mining in coal counties had damaged half of nearby streams and polluted groundwater. The report triggered this response from a local government official: “No one wants to see a repeat of non-responsible resource extraction as it happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s.... Companies today must not and cannot get away with what they did 100 years ago.”
In other words, let’s not go back to the days of How Green Was My Valley. Take a brief tour through the epidemiological literature, though, and you’ll see that the coal-town problem exists very much in the present.
more
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/living-in-a-coal-town-is-hazardous-to-your-health
= new reply since forum marked as read
