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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia is caught in a coal trap that’s causing it to miss the clean energy revolution. As a result, the state faces substantial economic obstacles and serious environmental and public health concerns.

That’s the case made in a new book by James Van Nostrand, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University.

"The Coal Trap: How West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution" (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on the years between 2009 and 2019.

Van Nostrand argues that is when the state’s politicians placed the interests of the coal industry above the economic and environmental health of the state and the planet. 

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A decade ago, West Virginia University law professor Charles DiSalvo published the first in-depth biography of Mohandas Gandhi’s life as an attorney.

“The Man Before the Mahatma: M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law” was released in 2012 by Random House in India and a year later by the University of California Press in the rest of the world. 

“I continue to be humbled by the acceptance that the book has received,” said DiSalvo, the Woodrow A. Potesta Professor of Law and a member of the WVU faculty since 1979. 

DiSalvo’s work on “The Man Before the Mahatma” required that he gain access to, among many other sources, over 10,000 issues of newspapers in archives in India and South Africa.  He was assisted by a number of research assistants, including WVU law and history students, as well as other Gandhi scholars in India, Australia, Britain and Africa.