Word: coaling
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...central Tennessee or western West Virginia, no one sees the poverty but the poor. There are no growing industries in these regions--no biotechnology, no computer software developing, no international banking. The economy still relies on the vanishing coal and steel industries. As natural resources evaporate, so do livelihoods. Viewed by outsiders as "white trash", the people of Appalachia are not the most apt to be defended by average concerned citizens. But without a voice, these people can only suffer the indignity of leaving their homes for cities in a simple effort to survive...
...first five playlets embrace 90 years from the Revolution to the Civil War, during which the families stave off outside forces and live independently. The second half concerns the coming of coal mining and company towns, the rise and decline of the union movement, the exhaustion of the old industrial base and the redemptive efforts of the environmental movement -- all outside forces that the locals are helpless to resist. The rhetoric begins with assertions of rampant individual freedom and evolves into a more mature recognition of individual responsibility...
Theater-trained, he quickly found a niche in films and TV. He could play thugs with dumb cunning, in Jackson County Jail and as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, or frog consorts to movie divas (Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars, Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Kathleen Turner in the recent House of Cards). He approached both avant-garde stage work (Ulysses in Nighttown, Sam Shepard's True West) and high movie schlock (The Betsy, Rolling Thunder) with energy and respect. "It's no mean calling," he says, "to bring fun into the afternoons...
...which forced companies to downsize and the states -- notoriously overreliant on natural resources ever since the silver rushes of the 1870s and 1880s -- to diversify. Idaho also continued to help small companies grow larger while encouraging the new high-tech industries around Boise. Wyoming revived its moribund coal fields with the world's most highly automated mining processes. Colorado financed an ambitious drive to make Denver an international hub with a new $3 billion airport. Utah restructured its copper and steel mills and absorbed their laid-off workers into gleaming new aerospace, computer-software and financial-services facilities. "The Rockies...
Back east, out of the hills of West Virginia and Virginia, endless strings of coal hoppers of the Norfolk Southern and CSX roll toward the gargantuan coastal terminals where the cars are grabbed and rolled upside down, spilling their cargoes onto belts that pour the coal into ship holds. Those trains travel on lines first plotted and built to rush the troops of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson into Civil War battles. Confederate General William Mahone, an engineering genius, felled trees so skillfully in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp before the war that today's trains still rush over...