
America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs - dthal
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/12/beattyville-kentucky-and-americas-poorest-towns
======
mauvehaus
Beattyville is near/in the Red River Gorge area, depending on exactly where
you draw the boundaries. I've spent a lot of time nearby on climbing trips,
and yes, the area is astonishingly poor. Climbers rarely get that far south of
Mountain Parkway, but the whole area is in pretty rough shape.

I think one of the things that's interesting to consider about this is that
there is a large stream of people coming into the area, and it isn't just
climbers. The area is full of recreation opportunities. What isn't clear is
how to ensure that the money works its way out into the communities. In all of
the trips I've made, I've spent money in just a handful of businesses: 3
campgrounds, 1 pizza place (which also happens to be a campground), 1 other
restaurant, the much loved beer trailer, and the Shell station in Slade.

It's not clear that tourism is a viable replacement for resource extraction in
an area where there are established communities. Tourism, and eco-tourism
specifically, is something we see pitched as a way to save undeveloped land in
the developing world, but based on what I see in the Red River Gorge area, it
hasn't brought much prosperity to the region as a whole. Perhaps if there
isn't an established economy and population based on resource extraction it
can be made to work, but the hard reality seems to be that resource extraction
employs a lot more people.

I love getting outside, and the Red River Gorge area is a beautiful place to
do it. I want to see the country (and the world) make a shift towards
renewable energy. I work to reduce the amount of waste I generate. But when
you get right down to it, there are a lot of places where the economy is based
on resource extraction, and I have a hard time envisioning what the people
living in those places are going to do if the brighter, greener future comes
to pass.

Beattyville may be struggling because the cost of coal mining locally can't
compete with the cost of coal mining in Wyoming, but making a shift towards
greener energy is going to put a lot more communities in a similar situation.

~~~
lawstudent2
Rather than try to bring _coal mining_ back to this community as a form of
_social subsidy_ \- why not just institute a basic federal income?

These folks are not alone - they are just the canaries in the mine. They have
literally no useful modern job skills. And while they are the first to fall to
this trend, as coal miners in 21st century america, millions of jobs are soon
to follow, from fast food workers, to call center employees, to a huge number
of accountants, lawyers, salespeople, factory workers - jobs of all kinds.

Rather than struggle with trying to give jobs to people who have no skills,
and then trap them into working at these jobs in order to sustain themselves,
why not just give them a guaranteed basic income that keeps them above
poverty? Is that so hard?

~~~
smacktoward
We're talking about a government that hasn't even been able to get its own
annual budget in order for years now, remember. So a guaranteed basic income
might indeed be a big lift.

------
lionhearted
Last year, I had a half-day in a place that went through a similar transition:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raton,_New_Mexico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raton,_New_Mexico)

Made an impression on me. Wrote a poem about it on the train --

    
    
      Raton Station
    
      It’s flat
      Flatness rolls for miles around
      Mountains in the distance
      Flatness approaching the peaks
    
      Scenic clouds dot the sky
      Looking perhaps painted on
      The place is rather idyllic
      Except for, well, you know
    
      Every store is having a sale
      Of the stores still open
      If you want to lease a building
      The local Radio Shack is also town landlord
    
      The people are friendly enough
      7,000 of them are scraping by
      The waitress loves it here
      Despite saving money to move to Omaha
    
      We hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup
      To the stretch with restaurants and hotels still open
      I asked what had happened here?
      The coal mines shut down

~~~
sanderjd
Nice poem, but I thought the part about it being flat was strange, since
there's a mountain pass into Colorado just north of town, called Raton Pass.
Maybe that was symbolism?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
If you're not familiar with Raton, go check it out on Google Street View.
There's mountains in the distance, but not otherwise a whole lot of geography.

~~~
arethuza
I did have a look at Raton and surrounding roads on Street View earlier and
actually thought it looked rather pleasant.

------
Donzo
For those interested in learning more about the erosion of the American
heartland by the widespread use of prescription narcotics, particularly
Oxycontin, I strongly recommend the book "Dreamland," a nonfiction text
weaving together the narratives of the opiode boom in American medicine and
the spread of Xalisco black tar herion cells throughout American cities that
had seldom seen heroin: [http://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-
Epidemi...](http://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-
Epidemic/dp/1620402505/)

Very readable and educational. I couldn't put it down, and it tied together a
lot of disparate threads that I have noticed over the past two decades but
which I was unable to connect myself.

~~~
wil421
The erosion is not just isolated to the heartland. Grew up in a suburban area
and the epidemic was just as bad. Highschoolers were getting hooked at a very
young age and some elderly people were selling their Oxycontin as well.

This has since changed as the laws/regulations regarding filling Oxycontin
perceptions changed. Now Heroin is becoming an epidemic. Some friends in law
enforcement have told me there is a big increase in high schoolers and young
20s using Heroin, which causes an increase in them becoming thieves or
prostitutes (15 and 16 year olds from somewhat well off families running away
from home).

------
NiftyFifty
Try any mining town in the south west - Trona comes to mind. That was a town
ruled by meth, with mining as its main bread winner.
[http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-city-addicted-to-
crystal-...](http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-city-addicted-to-crystal-
meth/)

------
chris_wot
Australia needs to learn this lesson. Eventually coal will be phased out
significantly enough that mass mining don't be economical. In the meantime we
ruin our ecology in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

~~~
barney54
Mining coal in Australia in the 21st century is not lawless. It does not "ruin
the ecology." It has CO2 impacts to be sure, but does not ruin the ecology.

On the plus side it provides indispensable, low-cost, electricity for poor
people in Asia--people who wouldn't have electricity if not for coal.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Coal's only cheap when you don't bother to count all it's negative effects,
which will predominately be borne by the poor people you're (slightly
bizarrely) claiming to serve.

Coal isn't something worth celebrating, it should be phased out as quickly as
possible. Every unit of coal not burned will let us burn twice as much natural
gas in terms of CO2, and with far less pollution. And we have more gas than we
can burn without blowing our carbon budget anyway.

------
cjbenedikt
On that note: [http://www.twodollarsaday.com/](http://www.twodollarsaday.com/)

------
blisterpeanuts
I find this kind of "in depth" news series frustrating. The problem here is
not lack of coal business; it's lack of ability or motivation for these people
to pull up stakes and move to a better area.

I would suggest North Dakota, or would have up until a year or two ago when
the price of oil dropped drastically. The jobs up there were paying crazy
wages, truck drivers pulling six figures, restaurant dish washers making
$15-20/hour etc. It's a temporary boom but the fact is, that's where the jobs
are, or were. Still better economy up there than in Kentucky, even now.

Thus, what's really missing from these backward areas is education. With good
education, even just K-8, people will have the ability and resources to
understand that they can vote with their feet and move to where the economic
opportunities are. Someone with mining experience might do OK as a roughneck
in west Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota. If you're a hard worker and have
been in the mines, or driven trucks, or done back breaking work outdoors,
you're going to be able to find something.

But as for people who just sit around their cabins, the classic backwoods
hillbilly stereotype, addicted to opioids or other chemicals and unable to or
unwilling to do something about their situation -- sorry if this sounds hard
hearted but it's hard for me to dredge up a lot of sympathy. Someone who's
_not_ sitting around feeling sorry for himself and abusing drugs -- that's the
one I have sympathy and respect for.

~~~
beat
The thing is, people _do_. That's part of the problem. Who leaves? The most
able, the most motivated. Those left behind? Less able, less motivated. Which
makes it worse.

This was my own father. He came from a little west of that belt, the tobacco
farms of south central Kentucky. He got up and left as soon as he could. He
never even graduated high school. When I was a kid, we'd visit my
grandfather's farm. I thought it was heaven - Kentucky is extraordinarily
beautiful. But they didn't have electricity or running water. Not really
something a five year old notices, but an adult remembers.

Incidentally, the exact same problem has happened to inner city black
neighborhoods. In the pre-civil rights era, blacks simply weren't allowed to
live in white neighborhoods, so the doctors, lawyers, business owners, and
other talented and determined black leaders lived in the same neighborhood as
the poor. Once they got the ability to live somewhere nicer, they left,
leaving ghettos full of addicts, gangs, the uneducated, the disabled,
basically people unable to leave.

It's really difficult for people who have grown up with the privileges of
middle/upper class to comprehend what it's like to live in poverty. It's not
just that you're poor. It's that you're surrounded by losers, because all the
people with talent have already left. When I was a kid, I didn't know _anyone_
wealthy, except those men my father worked for, whom he hated. I didn't know
anyone well-educated, except teachers. The most successful adult I knew owned
a motorcycle dealership, and not a very big one.

And as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, I left. I went to a great
college and met a whole new class of people. But mostly, I was running. I got
up and ran, and kept running until the stupid racist redneck bikers were long
behind me. Because when you have talent and you live in crap, that's what you
do.

~~~
pnathan
I don't come quite from your background, but my social circle growing up
overlapped with that world a bit. There's a _huge_ gap between the bone-in
poverty world and the "rest" of the US; ambition, expectations, mobility,
money, interactions with authority, etc.

It's the case that able and motivated people _leave_ , and they _better_
themselves, and the people left behind are, sadly, less able, less motivated,
less _something_. This accelerates the cycle. It's not just city/country
(although that seems to be a big part of it): out West there is still a lot of
money in industrial farming of wheat, potatoes, etc. Those communities are
chugging along. It's the communities which have no industry that fail.

