“I write stories, mostly on environmental issues, a specialty of mine going back 40 years with The Providence Journal.”
Thanks for joining us, Bob. We will get into your latest book shortly, but first please give us a summary of your background. Many of our readers will remember you as a staff writer and editor at The Providence Journal, where I was your colleague for many years.
Thank you, Wayne, and thanks for having me here. Yes, we both go back many years, back when The Providence Journal was often considered one of the best newspapers in the country. I joined the Journal in 1974, covered Providence City Hall and Buddy Cianci, before taking over a beat focusing on energy and environment beginning in 1984. On the side, I began teaching a newswriting class at Rhode Island College in 1980 and that would lead to my leaving the Journal in 2002 to teach journalism fulltime at the University of Connecticut. I carved out two key niches there, one a series of classes and programs on environmental journalism. Closely tied to that was my multidisciplinary work with faculty in the sciences to teach graduate science students how to better communicate to the public.
OK, now your latest book, Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal. https://www.amazon.com/Black-Gold-Rise-Reign-American/dp/0520391780 What prompted you to write it?
More than a ten years ago I discovered a newspaper investigation undertaken in 1940 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that won a Pulitzer Prize. The newspaper successfully campaigned with city officials to reduce the city’s air pollution which was being caused each winter from burning coal. It has been acclaimed as the first major journalism award for an environmental subject. What especially fascinated me were the stories I began to uncover not only from St. Louis but other major cities. For more than a century those communities were often choked by smoke from burning coal. Despite the inconvenience as well as the health and environmental consequences, the pollution was allowed to persist for decades because society needed to burn coal both for industry and to heat homes. I began to explore why coal was so all powerful and is still making an impact today.
The advance press describes “coal’s significant and lasting impact on American culture and industry, as well as the worldwide environment and economy.” Can you elaborate?
Coal was the central energy source in American from the post-Civil War to post-World War II. It was instrumental in America’s economics, politics and culture. The fuel built the American railroads, was instrumental in creating the steel industry, heated virtually every hearth in the country, and fueled the American empire. It was also deadly. Coal mining was the most dangerous job in America. The CDC, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, reports that beginning in 1839 when it began keeping records there have been 726 major coal mine accidents that killed over 15,000 workers. And that’s just the major accidents, not the one’s involving a single individual. But it wasn’t just the coal miners who faced dangers – the coal smoke was very unhealthy. Autopsies performed 150 years ago on longtime urban dwellers showed lungs that were significantly blackened and shriveled from a lifetime of breathing toxic air.
Advance press also states that “two centuries of carbon combustion now endangers American lives and safety in the form of climate change—a threat remaining unresolved today.” Again, an elaboration.
Air emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, especially from coal, are a significant contributor to climate change. What the book attempts to show is that our heritage of burning coal means that we have always ignored the dangers in that practice. Jobs and the economy were more important in 19th Century America than health or safety. We no longer burn coal in our homes, the arrival of natural gas and other energy sources has vanished the black smoke that hung in cities for days each winter. Instead, the dangers are less obvious but even more insidious. The last 10 years have been the hottest on record annually since we began keeping records more than a century ago. And we are all seeing the consequences, be they longer and dryer droughts, more fierce forest fires, or stronger hurricanes.
Over the years, untold numbers of coal miners and their families were negatively affected by coal. How so?
Thank you for asking that question because it allows me to explain that this book is not as much a history as it is a collection of stories of individuals and events tied to coal. I am a storyteller and one chapter describes Whipple, West Virginia. The coal industry was characterized by communities like Whipple, which were called coal towns. They were made necessary by the fact that coal mines were often in very rural areas. Everything in a coal town was owned by the coal company operator, including the company store which only took what was called script, a form of pay to miners instead of cash. Prices were always elevated, sometimes at outrageous level. So were the rents on slum housing where families lived, the medical care, the education, the police, everything was controlled by the bosses. Now imagine the wife and the kids, living every day knowing the sole breadwinner could have an accident any day that would cripple or kill him. What drew me to Whipple was the work others had done to uncover abuses inflicted on widows of coal miners. They were mistreated in a number of ways and it just highlights the terrible exploitation not just of the workers but their entire families at times.
We are in the first year of the second Trump Administration. How have its policies affected the production and use of coal and other fossil fuels?
President Trump has called climate change nothing but a con job and is promoting an energy policy that attempts to revive what he calls “clean and beautiful coal.” He wants to increase exports of coal internationally and revive coal-fired electric generation. We ship about 10 percent of all coal produced in the U.S. to other nations, primarily through ports on the East and Gulf Coast. But the biggest markets are in Asia and so far, West Coast cities have refused to permit any new ports to allow a practice many believe is immoral. As to electricity, we are down to about two dozen remaining power plants that burn coal. Coal-powered electricity is more expensive than any other source while renewables, which the Trump administration fights, is the cheapest. There is no way electric generators are going to gamble to build new plants that will not come online until years after Trump is gone.
You have written three previous books and edited an anthology. Can you please give us a summary of those?
I write stories, mostly on environmental issues, a specialty of mine going back 40 years with The Providence Journal. I wrote The Man Who Built the Sierra Club, A Life of David Brower, about the man who transformed the environmental organization in the 1950s from a small hiking club in California into a massive international environmental advocacy organization before he was fired. It sounds like a straight biography, but it primarily focused on the characteristics that made him fight even with his friends. Brimfield Rush, The Hunt for the Big Score, is about a massive outdoor annual antique market in central Massachusetts that follows a young couple who are art dealers hunting for prizes in a cut-throat field. I have also written a textbook about environmental journalism.
You have scheduled signings at several bookstores in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Washington state. The list is below. Will you be speaking, too?
I will sign books, but my main goal is again, to tell stories from Black Gold. I especially want to talk about a woman, Corrine Adams, in Salt Lake City a hundred years ago who led the Ladies Literary Club to fight the city’s coal smoke pollution. Corrine had a secret she did not talk about, but which I believe clearly drove her to take up the fight for cleaner air. You will have to come to the talk or read the book to find out Corrine’s secret.
Editor’s note: Wyss also edited an edition of “How I Wrote the Story: The Works and Ways of the Staff of The Providence Journal-Bulletin.“
Signings in Rhode Island:
— Symposium Books, Providence Oct. 16 6 p.m.
— Charter Books, Newport, Oct. 17 6 p.m.
Signings in Connecticut:
— RJ Julia, Middletown Ct Oct. 15, 6 p.m.
— BN Books, Storrs Ct. Oct. 21, 6 p.m.
Signings in Washington:
— Third Place Books, Lake Forest, WA Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
— Paper Boat Booksellers, Seattle Oct. 9 6:30 p.m.
— Village Books, Bellingham, Nov. 7, 6 p.m.
