For Appalachia to recover from the decline of coal, the region might need to look across the Atlantic and learn from the Welsh experience. The economic transition, however, won’t be easy, as ...

Elaine McMillion Sheldon writes, directs and narrates a documentary film about the cultural hold of coal in West Virginia, part of so many families’ histories, including her own.

To West Virginia, and Appalachia more broadly, coal is what tea was to Chinese politics and culture in the mid-19th century. Wealth, identity and labor wars spun around plant matter carbonized ...

This story was originally published by The Conversation. Central Appalachia is home to the third-largest concentration of forest carbon offsets traded on the California carbon market. But while these ...

Explore the legacy of coal and its enduring influence on culture, industry, and regional identity.

In West Virginia, where 7 in 10 voters supported Trump last year and coal mines employed about 14,000 workers in 2023, the delay in new silica standards and worries about mine safety programs are ...

By comparison, all the mines in Central Appalachia produced just 17 percent of U.S. coal in 2011.

At the facility, drainage from a one-time coal mine — now closed and covered by a grassy slope — emerges from two pipes, and dumps about 800 gallons per minute into a retention pond.

In Pennsylvania alone, drainage from coal piles and abandoned mines has turned waterways red from iron ore and turquoise from aluminum, killing life in more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of streams.