Most of the storefronts are boarded up in Keystone, W.Va. Coal and the industries it feeds no longer dominate as they once did in the state. Katherine Frey/The Washington Post/Getty Images

A retired coal miner in eastern Kentucky recently sent me an early Christmas card warning. “Whatever you do,” he wrote, “I prefer dirty coal from Santa Claus instead of the annual drivel of ‘Christmas in Appalachia’ pity.” Pity, poverty, depravity, coal despair, even the picturesque — name your favorite Appalachian or hillbilly caricature of the Mountain South over the past century. But for a region that once served at the forefront of the American Revolution, the anti-slavery movement and labor and civil rights struggles and that gave us our first American female Nobel laureate for literature (Pearl S. Buck), among other cultural innovators, I think it is time to turn the page on nostalgia and grant Appalachia what it deserves: a regeneration fund. Looking past the hand-wringing, the finger-pointing, the wars on coal, everyone can agree that coal-mining communities in central Appalachia perennially rank at the bottom of well-being indexes and need some form of economic renewal.



“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” the famed visionary R. Buckminster Fuller reminded us decades ago. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” But the obvious fulfillment of Fuller’s new model — clean energy jobs — is sorely lacking in central Appalachia. In a recent assessment, West Virginia ranked 49th in the country for a “clean energy edge.” This is wrong, and this oversight must change. The time has come for our nation to pay its debt to Appalachia.

A GI Bill for coal miners?

After shouldering the health costs and powering our nation’s industrial rise to fortune over the past two centuries, don’t ailing and polluted coal-mining communities in Appalachia and elsewhere deserve their fair share of a transition fund for retraining and investment to jump-start reforestation and abandoned mine projects, clean energy manufacturing and energy-efficiency campaigns? Small, decentralized, homegrown and growing economic diversification and sustainability projects abound in central Appalachia. In Williamson, W.Va, unemployed coal miners drew national attention two years ago for a solar-installation jobs project. Two weeks ago, the Energy Savings Action Center was launched as a website to help Appalachian residents save money and energy by promoting energy-efficiency loan programs through local electric utilities. Thanks to longtime transition efforts by citizens’ groups such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, eastern Kentuckians gathered Dec. 9 for a high-level government-sponsored summit on economic diversification. The following weekend, the Alliance for Appalachia hosted an Economic Transition Summit in West Virginia. As historian Ron Eller noted last week, “Appalachia has never suffered from a lack of creative ideas.” But such ingenuity must be paired with startup funds, public and private investors and long-term support.

If President Obama and Congress are serious about climate change, they must make Appalachia the front-line showcase for our nation’s clean energy agenda, not the backwoods of denial.

If we can pump out billions in federal subsidies for natural disasters and subsequent repairs, can’t we do the same for regenerative endeavors amid man-made ruin? Call it the Coalfields Regeneration Fund — or even a GI Bill for Coal Miners and Coal Mining Communities. Make it part of President Barack Obama’s climate mandate: Carbon sequestration begins with keeping the carbon in the ground.



If Germany can produce nearly 60 percent of its electricity (as measured on Oct. 3) from largely decentralized sources of wind and solar and once coal-laden Scotland (where black lung disease from coal dust was first diagnosed in the 1830s) can set out an ambitious road map to become 100 percent free of fossil fuels by 2020, why won’t the U.S. prioritize clean energy in a similar manner? Indeed, if Obama and Congress are serious about climate change, they should make central Appalachia and other coal-mining areas the front-line showcase for our nation’s clean energy agenda, not the backwoods of denial.

We all live in Appalachia