Jeff Biggers, the activist, leapt towards the audience with one finger pointing and clear tenor voice booming.He launched into a story about President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address after reading aloud the poem “Reckoning,” by Jeff Stills.

“My son was quite excited because he loves Obama,” Biggers said. “As (Obama) spoke, I kept hearing another voice. I kept hearing something else. I kept knowing there were some kids in a tree in West Virginia, freezing their butts off to stop the blasting of mountaintop removal.”

His thoughts were with Eric Blevins and Amber Nitchman, who sat in trees on Coal River Mountain for nine days to stop blasting by Massey Energy, which would have endangered an earthen impoundment holding back 8 billion gallons of coal slurry from the communities below. If preserved, the mountain could become a “wind farm.”

Biggers thought of this as he heard Obama use the term “clean coal.”

“Diego, I said to my son, he just said clean coal again. My son, who is 7 years old, looked at me and said ‘Dad, coal sucks,'” Biggers paused for the audience’s laughter. “That’s my boy.”

In his most recent article for The Huffington Post on Jan. 1, Biggers called mountaintop removal coal mining “the most egregious human rights and environmental violation in our nation.”

This stance is why the ETSU environmental student group Initiative for Clean Energy brought Biggers to speak to a crowd of around 40 people in Brown Hall Monday night.

“Hopefully with enough awareness and buzz around campus we will push [ETSU] President [Paul] Stanton to sign the President’s Climate Commitment,” said ICE President Lance Lewis.

ICE hopes to see ETSU join the ranks of 666 other universities and colleges that are committed to one day becoming sustainable and carbon neutral.

David McGuinn, a sophomore student and member of ICE who introduced Biggers, urged students to sign a petition addressed to President Stanton.

“We do not have a commitment as an institution towards environmental sustainability,” McGuinn said. “There are very specific commitments that are made through the PCC.”

Biggers supported ICE’s efforts to end the practice of burning coal on campus.

“Somehow, someway we can have a future without coal,” Biggers said. “But until we commit to a coal-free future, this anatomy of denial will continue, and will continue to block the progress towards clean energy in Appalachia.”

During the State of the Union, Biggers said 115,000 tons of coal were burned, 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions were released into the earth’s atmosphere, three Americans died prematurely from coal-related deaths and one coal miner died from black lung disease.

“And coal kills,” Biggers said. “And coal is costly. And coal is never cheap. And our president was talking about clean coal in a very matter of fact way, and it broke my heart.”

Biggers is the author of “Reckoning at Eagle Creek,” “The United States of Appalachia,” and “In the Sierra Madre.” He’s been published on National Public Radio, in The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and on The Huffington Post. Biggers has won awards for journalism, and is considered a cultural historian; but at heart he calls himself a storyteller.

Stories are what he told the audience, his voice rising and falling, “Reckoning at Eagle Creek, The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland,” splayed in one hand.

Eagle Creek, his family’s homestead, was once a part of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois; 200 years of his family’s history was destroyed by strip-mining. In the book, Biggers tells his own stories, as well as some of the unknown history of coal mining in Appalachia. In his speech Monday night he mentioned the removal of Native Americans and the legally sanctioned black slavery in coal mines. He stressed that this is not just a “good story,” it’s a look at the anatomy of denial that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson.

This area is the largest consumer of mountaintop removal coal in the nation, Biggers said, adding, “That’s a reckoning we need to have.”

His speech ended with one request. When you flip a light switch, he said, imagine that switch is an explosive, detonating mountains, communities and history.

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