ded to be an eagle and took ﬂight down the hill, rose above the forests, and soared beyond the Ohio River and Kentucky, which lay only twenty miles away.
"I can't believe this," my mom whispered.
We could see the route of destruction. The ﬁrst explosions had taken place in the summer of 1998. The coal company had set off the ammonium nitrate-fuel oil blasts in the surrounding Eagle Creek valley, gnawing away at the edges of our family hill. One thousand six hundred pounds of explosives sat in each hole like a land mine, set to ripple across the valley with enough thunder to bring down the walls of Jericho.
The Wisconsin glaciers that had encamped on the Midwest never reached our boot-heel range of southeastern Illinois. The dense forests crowning our hillsides and hollow, like most of the Shawnee hill region from the Mississippi to the Wabash River, once rivaled Appalachia or the Ozarks for plant diversity. Some even called it the Illinois Ozarks. It was that rare main chain of mountains and hills to stretch east to west. Over 1,100 plant species, 270 birds, two score of mammals and reptiles.
Then came the reckoning on our hillside along Eagle Creek. After harassing and intimidating our last remaining cousin on Oval Hill, a coal mining company had bought most of the hollow where my extended family had lived for two centuries and blasted away the old homeplace.
The throttle of machinery, an industrial cocktail of explosives, and a handful of large equipment drivers removed our Oval Hill farm and leveled the ridge by the end of the fall. Flattened the knoll to its knees, and then to ashes. The old pond, the four native plum trees, the sorghum and cornﬁelds, the garden, the barn, and the 150-year-old log cabin were buried in a crater formed before the Paleozoic era.
Despite all of the laws and regulations on the books for stripmining and reclamation obligations, a 2006 study in the International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environmental examined 80 years of reclamation efforts and came to this conclusion: The forests and the fertile farmlands are not coming back. The report found: "Mined land cropped for bond release commonly becomes unmanaged grasslands. Scant mineland is returned to trees, with survival and growth poorer than on reclaimed minelands pre-regulation. Problems include high soil strength, poor water relations and excessive ground cover. Sustainable plant communities have not developed."
My little boys planted the first trees in the ruins of Eagle Creek.
An estimated 960,000 tons of coal were stripped from our ancestor's original farm and adjoining areas. Shipped to a medium sized coal-ﬁred power plant, it would have generated roughly 2.06 MWe of electricity, based on typical estimates of burning coal. That would have been enough electricity to supply American demands for approximately four and half hours.
That was the exchange rate of our dirty energy policy for my family, like tens of thousands of Americans besieged by stripmining in 24 states and several Native American reservations: 200 years of history, for four and half hours of coal-fired electricity.
This Earth Day, however, those four and a half hours marked the beginning of reclaiming our land, and heritage, from the coal industry.