It isn’t news that Appalachia is struggling economically. If you’ve followed the boom-bust cycle of the coal industry, you know that we’ve been here before. Coal production in Appalachia fell by almost half between 2005 and 2015. During the same years, coal industry employment fell by around 27 percent, and most of those losses were in central Appalachia. In the past year, the coal industry has rebounded a little, but most economists agree, coal alone is not the answer to the region's financial