As a young man, writer Jeff Biggers wanted to get far away from the southern Illinois coalfields where his ancestors first put down roots 200 years ago. But when he found out that his family homestead had been sold to a coal company and strip-mined, he decided it was time to return and revisit a family legacy at risk of being lost. In his new book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek, Biggers traces how coal has helped shape many aspects of American cultural history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to slavery to the labor movement. Journalist Sarah Schmidt talked to him as he was driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains recently after meeting with Appalachian coal miners to discuss the future of their livelihood in the wake of a disaster that cost the lives of 29 men in West Virginia earlier this month.

When most people think about reducing their carbon footprint, they usually think about their cars or air travel and forget about what's used to power their homes. Why do you think that is?

People take for granted where their electricity comes from -- I know I did until about 10 years ago. I was working as a journalist in Mexico when I received a letter that my family's 150-year-old farm had been strip-mined. We had a beautiful, American Pastoral plot of land tucked into one of the most biologically diverse forests in the country. The coal company took a million tons from our old homestead -- which I figured out is just enough to power the entire country for four and a half hours. Four and a half hours! I decided to make it my mission to look at the true cost of coal. I spent 10 years researching my book, and it's staggering to realize what we've given up -- not just my family, but our whole country -- over the past 200 years since coal power became widespread.

Has the coal industry changed much in that time?

Not really. So many decisions today are based on the same sort of mentality that shaped the country along with the coal industry.  Profits and productivity were valued over safety, community, and the environment during America's early decades, too. You can see this all the way back to Indian Removal Act of 1830, when Native Americans, including the Shawnee that once lived near Eagle Creek, were forced to relocate so that Americans could have access to mineral deposits. And just like tobacco, the coal industry was launched on the backs of African American labor. Even in Illinois, a union state, a legal loophole was created to allow slaves to work in the salt and coal mines. It's a sad reminder that profits and revenue have too often been put above democracy and human rights. And that's a recurring theme in the coal industry.

Did you find anything encouraging in the history you dug up?

I did. I found that people like my family, who were anti-slavery Baptists, were part of an incredible culture of resistance. My ancestors stood up to mine owners. We've been fighting coal for centuries, and there's a very resilient culture of putting human rights and the environment first.

Has coal mining gotten any safer?

In some ways, technology has improved safety, but obviously, as the recent explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine shows, it's still not safe enough. Altogether, 104,000 people have died in mining accidents in the past century, and another 200,000 have been killed by black lung disease contracted from working in the mines. We finally need to have a reckoning of the true cost of coal. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the external costs of coal add up to $60 billion a year in health care and environmental damage. That's just one example of what we can quantify. What is the human cost? What is the environmental cost? Coal has a reputation for being cheap, but it's incredibly costly if you look at the human, cultural, and environmental costs.

What did "clean coal" mean in the past?

"Clean coal" is a marketing slogan and it goes back to the 1890s when [coal baron] Francis Peabody took out a newspaper ad for "smoke-free clean coal," and every 10 years or so, the coal industry trots it out again. It's been used to refer to other schemes, like the experiments using coal-to-liquid to power cars during the oil crisis in the 1970s, and then sulfur dioxide scrubbers when acid rain emerged in the 1980s. 

Could the U.S. have developed such a strong economy if we had given safety and environmental concerns more consideration during the coal boom?

Yes, I think we could have -- maybe even stronger. Coal put a stranglehold on other types of development-and now here we are with a lot of our infrastructure, resources, water use, etc., devoted to it. And we're chained to this boom/bust economy. A tremendous amount of wealth was frittered away. If we'd looked at things differently then, we'd be in a very different place than we are today regarding energy independence and clean energy.

So what can we learn moving forward?

I'm a proponent of a "just transition" for the coalfields. We need former mining regions to transition away from coal jobs. Reforestation, rebuilding, infrastructure, energy efficiency training, weatherization, can all be a part of this, so that we can train miners for new work, involving real clean energy. We need to bring good manufacturing jobs to old coal towns. For example, even if we can't produce much solar or wind power in Illinois, we can manufacture solar panels and wind turbines in our factories.

Coal miners and environmentalists haven't always been on the same side. Can they find common ground?

People like my grandfather, who survived a cave-in and suffered from black lung disease, always understood that abuse of the coal miner and abuse of the land go hand in hand. And now, even many diehard coal supporters admit that there's less than 20 years worth of supply that's available in an economically feasible way. We really need to prepare.  Miners know this too, and they want their fair share of good jobs from the green revolution. We have to make a commitment to go coal-free by 2020 or 2030. If we continue to bumble our way and leave it in the hands of market forces, we'll be blindsided by politics and "clean coal" proponents.

What does your family's old homestead look like today?

After the mining company finished with it, it was supposed to have been reclaimed, but it was left as unmanaged grassland. Reclamation is still one of the biggest jokes. Less than three percent of "reclaimed" land is ever returned to economic productivity. Mining removes all the topsoil, all the nutrients, so it's really hard for anything to grow there.  But I was back last week with my two boys, and we did a little guerrilla reclamation -- we planted native plum trees. We'll have to see how it goes, but we've been working to undo the damage of coal for two centuries and we're not going to stop now.