Daily Climate: It didn’t start that way: His land was once a low hill in a rugged hardwood forest — cherry, oak, hickory — skipping from ridge to ridge across one of the poorest, most rural areas of the Lower 48. Then came the mining companies with their dynamite and their trucks. They clear-cut the forest, blew the tops off the ridges and scraped the rocks into the hollows, pushing hundreds of feet of mountains into the valleys below. They came for the coal — energy that provides half of …