Interview, Mitch Troutman's Blog

The Past and Present of Mining—Featuring Mitch Troutman and Jamie Kneen on Project Censored

Project Censored
September 20, 2022

Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on September 20, 2022

This week, Eleanor Goldfield digs into mining – past and present. First, author and organizer Mitch Troutman discusses his latest book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners who Seized an Industry. Mitch shares the importance of remembering and sharing a radical past, as he puts it: nothing was ever inevitable and that history is taught best when it gives us agency in the present. He also explains the role of media in uplifting the miner’s struggle, something more difficult to recognize in today’s media landscape. Next, Eleanor talks with Jamie Kneen from Mining Watch to discuss the fallacy of green growth vis a vis lithium – a metal that many are saddling with utopian hopes for the future while the reality screams of neocolonialist extraction in line with other precious metals in a global capitalist market. Kneen highlights the importance of scale in discussing a livable future as well as the dirty fallout from lithium mining.

The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942