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Monday, January 24, 2000 Page: 8A
Celebrate it, revile it or just ignore it, the legacy of our anthracite
mining heritage is inextricably bound to Northeastern Pennsylvania. Coal built
this region’s economy and later became an albatross around its neck.
Forty-one years to the very week that the Susquehanna River flooded Wyoming
Valley’s mines and swept away an already ailing industry, the culm banks,
strippings and pollution that anthracite left behind remain high on the
regional agenda.
Today, the U.S. House Resources Committee will hold a field hearing in
Scranton to tour mine-scarred areas and discuss an initiative that could
finally remove anthracite’s final insult to our environment.
U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, has proposed an innovative
program under which bonds that earn federal tax credits instead of interest
would be issued to fund a 30-year land reclamation project in 12 counties of
Northeastern Pennsylvania. The program would raise $2.4 billion for land
purchases and improvements, while costing the federal government just $50
million in tax revenues over 30 years – small change in federal terms.
Considering that anthracite was an industry with national implications,
fueling the railroads and the factories that drove the Industrial Revolution
in an era with virtually no environmental regulation, such a program would be
totally appropriate. The companies that did the damage are long gone and under
current federal programs and appropriations, it could take up to 200 years to
rehabilitate lands and waterways left polluted by mining.
The program could have vast advantages too for the local economy, which has
never really recovered from the collapse of anthracite coal. It could draw
developers to land that private industry now finds too expensive to reclaim
and restore our woodlands and streams to the pristine condition they enjoyed
before mining transformed the landscape.
As the nation enters what promises to be a second, cleaner Industrial
Revolution based on the information, communication and computing industries,
it ought to dedicate the small sum necessary to repair the damage caused here
in Northeastern Pennsylvania by the first.
Kanjorski’s proposal, if the financing and concept pass muster in Congress,
would allow future generations to appreciate the heritage of anthracite in our
museums, histories and collective memory without having to live with the
consequences of the industry’s refuse.