Fighting to Save the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund

Citizens from six states traveled to Washington D.C. in late November 2018, to urge their legislators to uphold the fees supporting the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, and to pass the Reclaim Act. One in 5 miners in our region have Black Lung, and that rate has doubled in the past decade. And yet, as […]

Save Black Lung Benefits

One in five veteran coal miners in Central Appalachia now has black lung disease. But the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund which provides critical support to miners and their families is at risk of disappearing. In this episode of WMMT’s Mountain Talk, retired miners Bethel Brock and Jimmy Moore, Patty Amburgey who lost her husband […]

Who Owns Appalachia, Then and Now?

The success of efforts to rebuild the Appalachian economy may well depend on getting access to land for development. This episode of WMMT’s Mountain Talk includes discussion from a September 2016 meeting at which Shauna Scott, Joe Childers, and Susan Williams shared memories of their involvement in the 1981 Appalachian Land Ownership Study.  The study […]

From Social Haunting to Community Healing

In this episode of WMMT’s Mountain Talk we explore the idea of social haunting, or how the troubles of the past might be playing a role in community problems of today. We hear from Dr. Geoff Bright who is leading a participatory research project based around the theory of social haunting in formerly industrialized areas […]