And Now, For Something A Little More Upbeat, From Appalachia

That headline might feel more than a little oxymoronic.  Appalachia is a name that has been associated with poverty for decades.  True, mining has provided a source of jobs and personal income for many of its residents.  But those jobs have been disappearing for a long time, due to concerns about pollution, and advances in renewable energy has accelerated the disappearance of those jobs.  Donald Trump can talk about bringing the coal industry back all he wants, but it's without a doubt the least substantial of his promises.  Coal simply isn't the future of energy; it can't be, because it's a non-renewable resource.

So there's no future for the families that have built their lives and personal sense of identity around extraction industries, right.  Wrong.  As it turns out, the land may have uses beyond the stuff that's underneath it.

You and I may not have seen the future of American farming as including abandoned above-ground coal mines, but that doesn't mean that other people haven't.  Here is an article about a unique project designed to reclaim land formerly dedicated to mining coal, and transform it into land that can produce food on a steady, renewable basis.  In other words, this project has the potential to transform Appalachia from a region of quietly increasing desperation into one that can be a strong, sustainable economic center for its impoverished residents, now and in the future.

The project at the moment is privately financed, and proceeding on a very small scale.  But one wonders what would happen if the Federal Government made a major commitment of resources--principally, money--to efforts like this one.  The possibilities here include much more than farming; they could also include solar and wind power farms, as well as factories that make products using renewable resources as raw materials.

I know that some of Hillary Clinton's thinking about economic development included projects like the one described in the article.  I will never be able to understand why she didn't go into states in Appalachia and the Rust Belt and talk about those projects.  How they would work.  How they would be funded  And, most of all, how they would directly benefit the people in these states, because they were and are far more real that Trump's promises about bringing back jobs that are never going to return.  Why didn't she do it?  What was she afraid of?

Well, next year is an election year, so it would behoove Democrats to pick up ideas like Refresh Appalachia, run with them, and show the nation how to build a new, sustainable, and even lucrative economy out of the ashes of the old one.  If they can't do that, they and the rest of us deserve a con artist like Trump.  And, at least for the moment, I refuse to believe that's true.