It’s a spring morning at Marmet Elementary school in West Virginia. The sun strikes the front sign — “Kindness, Respect, and Accountability” — as Helen Southall’s second-grade file into the classroom.

Each student is wearing a fluorescent yellow t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a tree, its flowering branches stamped with the names of various products — lipstick, plastic, medicine, soda water, varnish — all growing from a thick trunk labelled “Coal.” At the bottom of the t-shirt is printed “West Virginia’s Coal Tree.”

Today, the students are in for a treat. Southall distributes two dozen chocolate cupcakes among them, each topped with a slick layer of green frosting. She instructs the children to pierce their cupcakes with a long, transparent straw, drawing it back up again to slowly extract the marbled layers of yellow and brown sponge and green frosting.