Coal: a Human History

Natural History, March, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Barbara Freese Perseus Publishing, 2003; $20.00

The history of coal, of course, spans time on a geologic scale. Yet Barbara Freese, a former assistant attorney general of Minnesota, brings welcome brevity to that history in this readable book about the black stone Emerson called "a portable climate." The thesis of Freese's book, not startling by any means, is that coal is a mainspring of the modern world: love it or hate it, it is here to stay. It generates most of our nation's electric power, and will continue to do so as other fuels become depleted. But the use of coal poses urgent challenges for the quality of life on our planet.

It was in Great Britain that the use of coal first took hold, perhaps because of its abundance in readily accessible out-crops. As London and other great population centers burgeoned in the fourteenth century, forests began to vanish, and coal became the fuel of choice. Yet as early as the thirteenth century, royal commissions had been set up to deal with pollution from coal burning. Apparently their efforts were to no avail, for in a seventeenth-century book with the apt Latin title Fumifugium (from fumus, "smoke," and fugo, "to chase away"), a minor government official named John Evelyn described atmospheric contamination that blotted out the Sun, resulting in a capital city that resembled "the Suburbs of Hell" Four hundred years of official concern had led only to a worsening of London's smog problem--and that was before the Industrial Revolution!

Even royal worry could not stop the use of coal, it is clear, because its immediate value as a fuel far out-weighed the inconvenience of soot-stained sheets and acrid breezes. And if coal had been essential to the emergence of urban England from the Dark Ages, it was even more important as mercantile and agricultural societies in the West began to transform themselves into industrial powers. Freese sketches the impressive role of coal in feeding the forges of England and in transforming the virgin continent of North America into a nation of railways and manufacturing centers.

These examples from the great sweep of history highlight the deep and abiding chasm between the power of coal to create wealth and the enormous costs that unleashing such power exacts from society. Although Freese shares the wonder of the Victorians at the accomplishments of industrialized civilization, she doesn't skimp on describing its dark side. The coal that powers our industries--bringing cheap textiles, central heating, and fresh fruit into our lives--also causes black lung disease, mine disasters, and acid rain. In her penultimate chapter Freese describes a visit to China, which seems to be reprising the Industrial Revolution in fast-forward. There, coal still plays the central role it once played in the West, despite growing competition from nuclear, natural gas, and hydroelectric energy sources. At an accelerating rate--and with a population greater than that of Europe and North America combined--China is making the same mistakes.

But today the stakes are higher, as coal consumption continues to rise. It's not just London, Pittsburgh, or Beijing anymore; the planet as a whole suffers when fossil forests burn. Cities in the eastern United States feel the stinging breath of Midwest power plants. The smoke from Shanghai wafts over Los Angeles. And global atmospheric' concentrations of carbon dioxide threaten to alter the climate in ways that, though still uncertain in their details, will undoubtedly be momentous. As this human history of coal makes clear, there are no easy answers. But books as lucid as Freese's make a welcome contribution to the search for a sustainable energy economy.