Though they don’t work with canaries and pickaxes anymore, Phillips and Burns are mining the same seams, the Pocahontas and the Pittsburgh beds, that were first developed generations ago in southern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. New technologies now allow miners to go deeper and extract coal faster. 

But with innovation comes new risks. The rock that sits above and below the ribbons of coal is rich in crystalline silica, a mineral which, when broken into small particles and inhaled, causes intense scarring and hardening of the lungs. As the coal beds are diminished, more surrounding rock is cut, kicking up more silica dust. Over the past two decades, black lung — an incurable illness that causes chronic cough and shortness of breath — has begun affecting not only a greater share of miners, but also many younger ones.

In West Virginia in particular, coal has brought in more jobs, more wealth, and more destruction and disruption over the past 200 years than any other element of mountain life. Since the 1980s, as mines across Appalachia closed, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, plummeting tax revenues have starved public services, and coal-operator bankruptcies have left aging miners without health care or pensions. 

But the struggling industry has been a major talking point of both of President Donald Trump’s administrations. In 2017, he signed an order directing the EPA to roll back a 2015 initiative to reduce carbon emissions from the electricity generation sector. This year, he went even further, announcing a nearly $700 million investment in coal. Many coal-fired power plants that were slated to be closed will be kept open indefinitely; funds have also been granted to build new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia. 

This move could be a response to the demand to power AI data centers, which use electricity around the clock and require large-scale cooling operations to prevent overheating. But burning the dirtiest fossil fuel always comes with consequences. A July 2026 report from the Energy Information Administration showed that carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector rose by 4 percent in 2025, which the agency partially ascribes to a relative increase in coal power generation. 

In July 2026, I traveled with photographer Stacy Kranitz through my home state of West Virginia to meet people whose lives are shaped by coal. We visited the newly reopened Greenbrier Smokeless mine, where a former lawyer, Amanda Hale, has come full circle back to the land that her father first developed more than a decade ago. We traveled underground into the metallurgical room and pillar mine with Burns, who comes from a multigenerational coal mining family. 

Outside of Wheeling, we visited Tunnel Ridge, a major longwall operation where, as a foreman, Phillips oversees a massive shearer that cuts along a 1,200-foot face of thermal coal. Along the way we met Junior Walk, who works with the Coal River Mountain Watch to ensure that mine operators follow Environmental Protection Agency regulations, and Regina Lynn Walker, who volunteers with the Boone County Community Organization’s nutrition program, providing meals in coal country communities that lack access to grocery stores. ●

Amanda Hale, 50, sold her law firm in Tazewell, Virginia, to purchase the Greenbrier Smokeless mine in Rupert, West Virginia, a decision she made because of what the mine meant to her 71-year-old father, Tommy Hale.

In 2006, Joe Turley, the original owner of the mine, hired Amanda’s father to construct it using local labor. “He put the slope down $3 million under budget two months ahead of schedule and he just stayed here and ran it until they sold it to Coronado,” Hale says, referencing the Australian company that bought the mine from Turley. “When they bought it, they brought their own people in and so they let Dad go. Third time in my life I ever seen my daddy cry.” Amanda purchased the mine from Coronado in early 2025 and now employs 104 people.

“I was never supposed to be running a mine. The thing about it is, I came in so naïve. I'm a studier, and I'm a nerd, so I can learn about the coal. And I can learn about the equipment and I can learn about the machinery,” she says. “But I never knew how stacked against me the odds were.”

Nathan Burns, 50, is the chief electrician at Greenbrier Smokeless. During the first year he was working underground, a roof caved in and killed a man on his crew. 

Nathan’s wife, Amy Burns, 50, remembers that day well.  She recalls Nathan’s aunt, who lives just down Burns Hollow Road, coming up to the house to ask if Nathan was OK. That was the first that Amy heard about  the accident. She waited for many hours before she received any news about her husband’s safety. 

“The fears have always been real. I always pray every morning before he leaves, because I watch him leave and go around the curve and I never can know if he’s coming back,” Amy says.  “It’s a scary, scary thing.”

Mingo Central Comprehensive High School in Delbarton, West Virginia, was constructed on a post-mine land-use site, known as a PMLU, locations converted into areas for recreation, schools, prisons, or agriculture. Mingo County, where this high school is located, is situated in the historic heartland of the early 20th-century West Virginia Mine Wars, which culminated in thousands of coal miners marching to protest abusive working and living conditions — one of the largest armed uprisings in the United States since the Civil War. In 1921, President Harding dispatched the U.S. Army to quash the protest, and support for mining labor unions fluctuated dramatically over the course of the next century.

Junior Walk, 36, has been working with the Coal River Mountain Watch since 2009 and is now a permit monitor; he says it is the last remaining explicitly anti-coal mining organization in southern West Virginia. When Walk was in high school, he worked in general maintenance at a coal processing plant: “Sitting there and watching all that equipment move and watching them tear that mountain apart,” Walk says, “it felt like that money that was going into my wallet was blood money because I knew what them people that lived down below that mines was going through.” 

“I decided to start coming around Coal River Mountain Watch, and over the years we've done anything we can to be a thorn in the side of the coal industry and make it more difficult for them to keep destroying our mountains and poisoning our communities,” Walk says. “We’ve done everything from lobbying in D.C. and in Charleston to providing standing for lawsuits and litigation, to gathering scientific data and water quality information, and getting arrested, doing direct action. We've done tree sits and blockades. And these days, what we mostly do is go out and monitor these coal mining operations a lot of times with a drone to find things that these coal operators are doing that goes against the regulations that are on the books. Then we have to force the [West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection] to actually step in and do their job, which can often be the most difficult part of it.” 

Regina Walker, 75, grew up in Sylvester, West Virginia, and her father was the superintendent at a nearby mine. She now volunteers with the Boone County Community Organization’s nutrition program, which serves meals to county residents who are homebound due to illness, disability, isolation, or lack of transportation. 

Boone County faces severe food access challenges driven by high poverty rates and geographic isolation. Over the past 40 years as coal mines have either closed or mechanized, the population in towns like nearby Whitesville have dropped by as much as 30 percent. As the population has decreased, it has become harder and harder for grocery stores to remain open. 

Casey Phillips, 35, has been working at Tunnel Ridge mine since 2017. He has two daughters, Willow, 2, and Paisley, 7. The first mine Phillips ever worked in was in Tucker County, West Virginia, where he grew up. Later, Phillips briefly worked as a heavy equipment operator on a pipeline but went back to mining to avoid having to travel for work. 

Recently, the mine in Tucker County shut down and the men Phillips grew up with who still worked there were laid off. But he’s not worried about his own job, given his prior experience: “If I were to be laid off, I’m confident I would be able to find something, especially coming from a foreman background,” Phillips says. “If I was back home where I grew up, it’d be a different story.”

Toddy Reynolds, Casey’s mom, says everything Casey does, he does for his girls: “He loves them so much,” she says. “He’s always wanted the finer things in life, and he wants to give those girls everything.”

The Mountaineer Power Plant, a 1,300-megawatt facility in Mason County, West Virginia, is one of many destinations for coal from the Tunnel Ridge mine, transported via barge down the Ohio River. 

The plant began operating in 1980 and was built around a single boiler feeding two turbines, a configuration capable of producing enough power to supply a large city. It has operated through decades of changes in the electricity market and its enormous smokestack is among the tallest in the world. In 2009, American Electric Power, which owns the plant, undertook an effort to test carbon capture and storage at the facility; after capturing thousands of metric tons, however, the pilot program wrapped and plans to expand the initiative were abandoned in 2011 amid changes in its political and economic backing.

Funds from Trump’s $700 million investment in coal will be used to keep some aging coal-fired power plants open indefinitely and to build new coal-fired plants, including one in West Virginia.