Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have
plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease,
once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never
before recorded.
Digging Our Own
Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault,
begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of
America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the
heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy
and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and
political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged
by the state and coal industry.
Barbara Ellen Smith
's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion,
charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of
the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of
demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green
New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own
experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of
communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction
of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to
dig their own graves.