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CHAPTER 2

Gender and Anti–Mountaintop Removal Activism: Expanding the Environmental Justice Framework

One of the things that’s really, really hard for the coal industry to accept is that a lot of us are still here . . . and we refuse to leave, and we tell. The things that we see here, we tell. . . . It would be a lot easier for them if we weren’t here, if we would just die or disappear or move away.

—Lorelei Scarbro

Introduction

Lorelei scarbro, former member of the coal river Mountain Watch, is one of many coalfield women who bear witness to the harmful impacts of coal operations on their communities and the natural environment. She is also among many women who work tirelessly for social, economic, and environmental sustainability and the future of the coalfield region of Appalachia. Women like Scarbro stand their ground and refuse to leave their mountain communities, despite the potential health hazards that have prompted many residents to relocate to safer areas in West Virginia. Scarbro, who joined the CRMW in 2007, is a proud West Virginian with Cherokee ancestry who was raised in rural Lincoln County. Her father was a coal miner and her mother a stay-at-home mom. Growing up in central Appalachia, Lorelei’s family raised animals and grew vegetable gardens, harvesting and preserving food from their mountainous environment. In the summer the family made annual recreation treks to nearby rivers where they spent their vacations. She is deeply connected to the Appalachian environment and coalfield communities.

Shortly after graduating from high school, Scarbro married a California man and moved to Arizona, where she lived for nine years. During her years in Arizona, Scarbro never adjusted to desert surroundings and was always homesick for the mountains of West Virginia. When her marriage ended in 1989, she boarded a plane “with thirteen suitcases, three children, and my fourth on the way,”¹ to begin a new life in her familiar mountain environment. Over the years, this return to West Virginia life included raising her children, remarrying, and becoming vigorously active in public school initiatives.

Scarbro says, “When my kids went to school, I went to school.” She engaged in local education politics and was a particularly vocal advocate for small, rural schools in the coalfields. Lorelei served on the PTO board as well as various “parent-school governing boards,” and was a member of the Local School Improvement Council. In 2001, when the state threatened to close rural schools in her community, including Clear Fork and Marsh Fork High Schools, she joined the Citizens Preserving Marsh Fork and Clear Fork Committee, where she met anti-MTR activist Judy Bonds. Because public schools are central institutions in rural communities, some residents highlight the links between mountaintop removal coal mining, depopulation in the coalfields, public health, and the fate of local schools in their campaigns for environmental justice. When considering the population decline in some coalfield areas, Scarbro claims that in the early days of MTR, coal companies offered buyouts to residents, but today they just “poison the air and the water,” making it difficult for residents to remain in their homes and to stay healthy. She links the increase in MTR, the population decline, and the fate of local schools by asserting: “As we depopulate the communities, enrollment declines; and when the enrollment declines, they can justify closing the schools that are not right in town. There’s a social engineering thing that’s going on here.”

Once her children graduated from school, Scarbro became active in the anti-MTR movement, applying her experience in educational advocacy to this environmental justice movement. She says, “The more you become aware of what’s going on around you, the more outraged you get. . . . I learned very, very quickly that if you see something that’s wrong, if you dig long enough, and if you look in the right places, and talk to the right people, there’s a good possibility that there’s something you can do about it. That you’re not totally powerless.” She turned this recognition into political action by bearing witness to the social and environmental destructiveness of mountaintop removal coal mining and fighting for coalfield justice.

Women like Lorelei Scarbro who organize or join grassroots efforts to end MTR in Appalachia are representative of the larger social phenomenon of women’s participation in environmental justice activism. Around the country and worldwide, poor women, working-class white women, and women of color respond collectively to threats on their homes and communities. Too often the tireless efforts of these women go unnoticed by environmental justice analyses. This is a troubling omission considering the sheer numbers of women involved in such campaigns, and that most EJ organizations emerge because women make these issues public in their communities.² Environmental justice has, over its thirty-five-year history, highlighted the ways in which human differences based on race and class are connected to the environment, but EJ has done a less than adequate job of highlighting the role of gender in both the effects of and the responses to social and environmental injustices.³ This chapter reviews the historical environmental justice focus on race and class, and expands the EJ framework by centralizing gender in this analysis of women’s involvement in the movement to end mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. My analysis focuses strictly on environmental justice in the United States. Global connections to EJ, including women’s participation, are explored in chapter 5. In examining the gendered articulations inherent in campaigns to end MTR in rural, largely white, coalfield communities, I strategically situate this evolving movement within environmental justice praxis.

Race, Class, Gender, and Anti–Mountaintop Removal Activism: Expanding the Environmental Justice Framework

In 2007, environmental scholars and practitioners debated the merits of the controversial Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, which poses a reenvisioning of environmental thought and practice to confront problems related to climate change. The book, born from the 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” ignited a firestorm in environmental circles upon its release. Authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, career Washington strategists for mainstream environmental organizations, argue that the old environmental paradigm of regulation and conservationism is insufficient in addressing climate change: “The challenge of climate change is so massive, so global, and so complex that it can be overcome only if we look beyond the issue categories of the past and embrace a grand new vision for the future.”⁴ For some environmental justice advocates, this text appeared a welcome critical examination of the shortcomings of the regulatory approach of mainstream American environmentalism, which EJ has consistently critiqued, along with its failure to link social justice and environmentalism. However, the promise of Break Through is ultimately negated by its dismissal of environmental justice thought and practice, which the authors place in the category of special interests.