By Amy Felegy for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

Each eight-by-eight feet, two giant paintings look almost like sun eclipses. Chunks of coal fill a circle in one; pigments smear the canvas.

You wouldn't know just by looking at them, but those paintings created by John Sabraw contain paint sourced from longstanding pollution in a nearby stream.

"Iron oxide sludge," says Sabraw an art professor at Ohio University. "All orange and crusty."

Gross ... for a water body. But, beautiful for oil paint.

Sabraw is part of a network of researchers, scientists, and artists cleaning up Sunday Creek in southeastern Ohio, reworking that sludge into usable paint.

The area is part of more than 6,000 miles of streams throughout Central Appalachia that are far from crystal clear, caused by historic acid mine drainage.

Though much of the mining happened more than a century ago, Michelle Shivley says Ohio is still dealing with their environmental legacies. She's a director at True Pigments, a 2018-founded company working to restore seven miles of clean water and welfare along Sunday Creek.

"We still have streams that run orange, coming out of these holes in the ground that are connected to abandoned coal mines," Shivley says.

This particular Sunday Creek segment sees more than two million pounds of iron each year (that's around 13,500 five-gallon buckets every month!), causing high amounts of acidity and metal content in the water.

"The fish, the bugs, all those things that are typically in a stream or river, those things just can't survive in those kinds of conditions."

A branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior partially funds the project, which starts with extracting stream pollution and ends with filling paint tubes.

In between, Sabraw tests pigment for quality and consistency, and frequently takes his students out to the creek. The pigments are a huge part of his art practice.

"As I'm working with these pigments ... I just feel more connected to these kind of primal materials that make up our earth."

Pollution into Solution

Still, Shivley says all this effort hasn't meaningfully improved Sunday Creek water quality. It's why her team is designing a full-scale acid mine drainage treatment facility-and a bonus pigment production facility-expected to open next year.

The goal: Increase jobs in the area and help local stream life thrive.

"How can we use these abandoned mine land spaces and reclaim them," Shivley says. "And then transform them into something that can help with the transition for coal communities from a very extractive industry, energy driven economy, to something different that will carry them into the future in a meaningful way?"

She thinks her team has the answer.

The Process

• Pump water from underground mine pool (some stretching as large as 23 miles)


• Aerate water/remove carbon dioxide at treatment facility


• Use hydrogen peroxide to oxidize the iron, iron falls off


• Clarify water and stabilize pH


• Discharge clean water back into Sunday Creek


• Bring iron sludge to pigment production facility to de-water and dry it


• Sell the pigment! Works just the same as any pigment you pick up in any art store

The U.S. military and a nonprofit environmental group are seeing success in a partnership that strengthens military readiness and conserves Indiana's natural resources.

Some military installations have compatible land uses around them, such as farms and forests, wetlands and grasslands. Sentinel Landscape, a federal initiative managed in part by the Department of Defense, works with nonprofits to manage those lands.

Emy Brawley, Midwest Region vice president at the Conservation Fund, said southern Indiana received a Sentinel Landscape designation in 2022, allowing her organization to work with bases across the region.

"That designation is supporting four Department of Defense installations, including the Lake Glendora test facility," she said. "All four of those installations provide a wide number of testing and training opportunities for multiple branches of our military."

Brawley said it's important to protect lands around military sites from encroachments that impact the military's ability to maintain mission readiness. She added that commercial developments near military bases can cause noise or light pollution that restricts training and testing drills.

Brawley's organization works in the new Busseron Creek Fish and Wildlife Area, the largest conservation project in Indiana in 20 years. The site serves as a buffer of undeveloped land near the Lake Glendora Test Facility, a military base.

Brawley said the area's natural resources are critical for certain species of wildlife in Indiana.

"This new Fish and Wildlife Area protects a five-mile segment of Busseron Creek, along with forests and wetlands and grasslands and streams and lakes," she said. "In fact, a nearby Fish and Wildlife Area documented over 250 different bird species using it."

Brawley said protecting the land in the new fish and wildlife area will make it more functional as a training and testing site. It also allows for public access and recreational activities such as fishing, hunting and camping.

West Virginia communities will see increased air pollution with little oversight under a new Trump administration proposal offering presidential exemptions from the Clean Air Act's requirements for hazardous air pollutants.

Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of healthy communities for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the move could affect more than 200 facilities, including 10 in the Mountain State, emitting toxic chemicals such as ethylene oxide and benzene.

"These are well-defined, highly hazardous chemicals, many cancer-causing compounds coming from a number of different industries, including the chemical and petrochemical industry," Vogel outlined.

A new analysis from the Environmental Defense Fund found more than 500 facilities across the U.S. eligible for pollution exemptions. Most are petrochemical manufacturing plants and coal-fired power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency has not made the requests for exemptions publicly available.

Vogel emphasized children and families who have no choice but to breathe the toxic air where they live will suffer the most.

"We're seeing this administration signal to companies that they can just continue to pollute in the name of either a so-called energy emergency or a national security issue," Vogel added.

Nearly 10,000 West Virginia children per year will suffer asthma attacks because of ozone from the oil and gas industry, and in 28 counties residents face higher cancer risks, according to the Clean Air Task Force.

The decades-long decline of Pennsylvania's coal industry could shift in another direction after a series of executive orders by President Donald Trump - although current market trends indicate it's unlikely.

Coal-fired power plants made up just over 16% of U.S. electricity in 2023. That's half what it was a decade ago.

Tom Schuster, director of the Sierra Club of Pennsylvania, said the coal industry is in irreversible decline that executive orders most likely can't change.

He said it's been outpaced by renewable energy, which has now surpassed coal in electricity generation over a 12 month period.

"Unfortunately," said Schuster, "what this order could do is expose people to higher electricity costs by keeping unprofitable plants online longer, and also jeopardize people's health by exempting them from environmental regulations."

The orders direct agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to ease restrictions on coal, which the president suggests could help meet rising energy demands of manufacturing and AI data centers.

Schuster said these actions are part of broader deregulation, and that Pennsylvanians know the risks of unchecked coal use.

He said in today's market, relying on coal to meet power demands is no longer viable.

One executive order claims mining and burning coal will bring back good-paying jobs, but Schuster said that's unlikely.

He pointed out that coal generated about half of Pennsylvania's electricity 15 years ago, but now makes up only 10% - and he said reopening retired plants isn't economical.

"There's only two conventional coal-fired power plants left in Pennsylvania," said Schuster. "There's a handful of smaller specialty plants that burn coal refuse, but it's a relatively small part of our energy generation today, so I don't think the economic impact in terms of coal-fired generation is going to be that much."

An executive order also aims to boost coal exports. Pennsylvania exports a fair amount of its coal, mainly to China - but the trade war and retaliatory tariffs could stymie that effort.