| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. By Chad Montrie. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xviii, 245 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2765-7. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5435-2.)
For most people, the mention of strip mining produces a mental image of environmentally ravaged mountains in central Appalachia and of the associated grass-roots protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Previous scholarship has concentrated on local protest groups and subsequent state legislative action, but Chad Montrie seeks to be both "comparative and comprehensive" (p. 5). Indeed, by providing an analysis of protest and legislation in seven states, this welcome study has provided a clearer historical understanding of the path to national regulation of surface mining.	1
Montrie points out that stripping became a generic term encompassing a variety of surface mining methods, including area, contour, auger, and mountaintop removal. All of these methods required removing earth and rocks to reach a coal seam, but the level of environmental destruction varied with both method and type of natural terrain. Early methods fit into the agricultural order as farmers mined local seams for family fuel or to supplement income. Subsequent expansion of the industry desolated the terrain, reducing both the tax base and available farm land. In an effort to regulate stripping, farmers soon turned to such organizations as the Ohio State Grange and the Ohio Farm Bureau.	. . .

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