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Sunday, December 03, 1995     Page: 8B

Some lessons for China from miners who know
   
Hard work and killing conditions in deep underground mines. Landscapes
turning to moonscapes as stripping pits sink and culm banks grow. Whole towns
covered with soot and shrouded by fog, as chimneys and smokestacks belch smoke
from burning coalSound familiar?
    You have no idea.
   
In China, history is repeating itself as that nation fuels its industrial
revolution almost entirely on coal, The New York Times reported last week.
   
China’s amazing growth holds tremendous potential to lift its citizens out
of poverty. But it also carries tremendous cost: The voracious demand for coal
is pulling untold numbers of Chinese workers and their families into the mixed
blessing of coal mining, and changing the mining regions’ landscapes forever.
   
It’s also threatening world climate, if global warming prophets can be
believed. China will be the world’s leading producer of carbon dioxide — the
villian in the global-warming drama — by the early decades of the next
century, the paper reported.
   
And all this happening with very little regulation, either environmental or
safety or child labor or otherwise.
   
How sad.
   
How truly, truly sad — that so many millions in China seemed doomed to
repeat the mistakes we thousands in Northeastern Pennsylvania made not so long
ago.
   
And how we wish a Chinese delegation could visit Northeastern Pennsylvania
to learn what residents here already know.
   
The delegation could meet with miners, environmentalists, regulators, and
historians. They could visit active mines and abandoned mines, and drive to
the top of one of the region’s more massive culm banks. They could see the
laborers’ tiny houses in Eckley … the sites of the Avondale and Knox mine
disasters … the mine fire in Centralia, and the black lung victims in
therapy.
   
And here is the lesson we wish the delegates would learn:
   
Regulate.
   
How much better off Northeastern Pennsylvania would have been, had modest
regulations checked a few of the mining industries’ excesses. And how much
better off China’s mining regions will be, now and forever, if regulators
there did the same.
   
Think of it: What if China’s mining companies got told to reclaim the land
they disturb, as modern American mining companies do today? Chinese children
would inherit landscapes without black mountains of coal waste sullying their
views, or 400-foot-deep stripping pits tempting the kids to their deaths.
   
What if safety regulations cut the grim fatality rates that likely haunt
Chinese mining families? Future generations there would boast more upbeat and
positive attitudes, and feel less beaten down by impersonal forces of abuse.
   
What if pollution regulations check the forces that treat China’s
environment so carelessly? The Chinese people would enjoy cleaner air, cleaner
water — and mining-region streams that didn’t rival Coca-Cola in raw acidity.
   
Of course there are economic factors to be considered. Regulations of any
sort would make Chinese coal more expensive.
   
But it’s hard to say we in Northeastern Pennsylvania were better off
without regulations, when you look at the lasting scars the long-dead mining
companies left on our landscapes.
   
Mining regions pay the cost of lax attitudes for generations to come.
China’s billions will learn that lesson the hard way, unless they listen to
those of us who learned it too well.