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Mountain People

In early January 2005, I received an email about a new campaign against strip mining from Bo Webb, a coalfield resident fighting mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia. I had first met Bo the previous summer, when I was trying to write about MTR and couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the hills and valleys of the coalfield landscape are similar in scale to those near the Coal River, where Bo lives, and I knew about the smaller-scale strip mining of decades past: My great-grandfather’s farm had been stripped half a century ago. When I read about MTR, I couldn’t make sense of how such huge mining operations could take place in such an intimate jumble of small and swervy mountains. I needed to see it for myself, and when I sought guidance from Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), a group of local people seeking to end MTR and sustain their community, Bo volunteered to show me around.

Bo was born in West Virginia, he later told me, as we sat by the river at his house, “in a coal camp house, near Whitesville, about eleven miles from here. My dad worked at a coal mine, and he got paid in scrip, and we used that scrip at the company store and paid grossly inflated prices for all the products.” When coal’s boom-and-bust cycle went bust in the mid-1950s, Bo’s dad went to work in Cleveland, but the rest of the family stayed in West Virginia. As soon as his father could come back and work at another coal mine, “he jumped on that, because he loved the mountains.” During another bust, in 1960, he went back to Cleveland and started working for General Motors. “So we moved to Cleveland. I was twelve years old.” After graduating from high school there, Bo joined the Marines, was sent to war in Vietnam in January 1968, and came back to Cleveland the following year. “I got an apprenticeship as a tool and die maker,” he says. “I had to have a career, and I didn’t want to be a coal miner.

“The whole time I was in Cleveland we always came ‘back home’ [to West Virginia] on the weekend and holidays. And I continued to do that after I came back from the Marines. I brought my wife right here, to this property—this was my grandmother’s property—and she sat on this rock right over here [by the river], and she fell in love with this place.” After his grandmother died, Bo bought the land. He put a mobile home on it, for vacations, in the mid-1980s.

Meanwhile, he and his wife, Joanne, had a son and a daughter. In 1981 he’d started his own machining business, still in Cleveland. After a fire in his shop in 1998, Bo decided, “Let’s move back to West Virginia and relax. I just want to fish and hunt, and I’m young enough to enjoy it. I’m not going to have any elaborate type of lifestyle, but we’ll be OK. We’ll be fine.” So they moved here in February 2001.

“That first summer, boy I enjoyed this place. Had a big garden. I kept hearing this thing about mountaintop removal, and every now and then I’d hear these little rumbles in the mountains. I started doing some research on the internet about it, and lo and behold I found out they were blowing my mountains away, and they were moving closer. And I heard about Coal River Mountain Watch.” Bo began helping them out from time to time.

Bo called the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) after a flood in 2001, asking for a water test at the river in front of his house, “because I was getting a funny smell, and all the smallmouth bass in this river—they’re gone. I used to be able to catch three-, four-pound smallmouth.” A few miles up the river, there’d been a blowout from an old underground mine, and all the mud and whatnot from that blowout came downriver to Bo. (Blasting for MTR often cracks previously stable abandoned underground mines and hillsides so that water that’s collected in the old mines comes gushing out.) Bo complained for three weeks before someone from the DEP came out. “That’s the response we get,” Bo says, “because we don’t count.” According to the guy from the DEP, the stream’s pH was a little low, “but he never explained anything,” Bo says, and of course three weeks earlier the reading might have been a lot different. “The bass are not back yet. Last year [2004] I saw a few fingerling. It killed the fish.” This got Bo riled up and ready to fight.

It never occurred to Bo not to fight MTR’s effects on his home place. “I think that’s because I got out of here,” he says. He moved to Cleveland when he was still young, “and shed the oppression, the atmosphere here. I guess the worst type of oppression is when you don’t know you’re oppressed, so you just follow along. I’ve heard it many times: ‘Well, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it always will be. The coal company’s gonna get the coal and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ I don’t come from that school—especially [after] being in the service and being in Vietnam, and thinking I was doing something for the country. And I come back and it looks to me like the country’s turned its back on its citizens, and it made me angry. I saw a lot of violations of human rights in Vietnam, and I started looking at this, and it reminded me of that. So I wanted to do something about it.”

When I met up with Bo in the summer of 2004, our first stop was Marsh Fork Elementary School, a short drive downriver from Bo’s home. There we saw a coal silo looming over the school, close to the edge of the schoolyard, part of a coal processing operation run by a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Coal dust and the toxic chemicals used in this facility’s method for processing coal settle on the playground and seep in through the school’s ventilation system. Several children and teachers have contracted unusual cancers, Bo tells me, and headaches, respiratory problems, and other illness are far too common among the schoolchildren there. All this is hard enough to believe. What were the government officials who allowed this to happen thinking? What were the coal company executives and their lawyers thinking? But worse still, right behind the processing plant, just a few hundred yards from the school, a 385-foot-high earthen dam holds more than a billion gallons of slurry, a black, chemical-laden liquid waste from coal processing. (Julia Bonds, founder of CRMW, calls this “waste holding back waste,” as the dam itself is made from MTR rubble.) If the dam were to fail—and Bo tells me local workers who helped build the dam say its construction is faulty—the wall of escaping slurry would roar downstream right over the school.

Bad as all of this is, at first look it seems like a limited and manageable problem: Relocate the processing plant, drain the slurry, remove the dam, and the school and the valley below should be safe. A stranger driving through the valley might think that the school problem is the worst of MTR effects here. You can still see mostly forested mountainsides on either side of the road that runs along the river. Coal facilities and little towns that look rather down-at-the-heels appear at intervals along the way—but this is southern West Virginia, deep in Appalachia, and you might well expect to see evidence of both coal mining and poverty here.

But veer off from the valley a few miles downstream from the school and head up into the hills to Kayford Mountain, and there you’ll see the true enormity of MTR’s effect on this landscape and its natural and human communities. Kayford is the lone hilltop in its neighborhood that’s not controlled by mining companies. All around Kayford, as far as the eye can see, the giant machinery of MTR is dismantling the mountains. In their place, wherever the coal is gone and the machines have moved on, heaps of rubble support either no life at all or thin monocultures of exotic grass, with patches of scrub here and there. The view from Kayford shows that the forested mountainsides along the Coal River are no more than a narrow beauty strip. The river itself has lost most of its headwater streams and is choked with sediment. Miners have been replaced by machinery. The hollows that feed into the valley have been emptied of families who’ve lived there for generations and stripped of the abundant animal and plant life that coevolved there for millennia. The mountains themselves have been blown up and are forever lost.

The Coal River valley is by no means the only place where this is happening, nor is it the only place where local activists are trying to fight it. The email Bo sends me in January has a link to a call for action against MTR throughout Appalachia’s coalfields—in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and southwestern Virginia as well as southern West Virginia. “Mountain Justice Summer [MJS],” Bo writes, “is going to be the campaign that ends the destruction of Appalachia!”

Over the next few weeks, Bo fills me in: “We realize that we are not going to stop MTR in West Virginia without outside help. We envision MJS as a movement that will bring in a broad spectrum of people from all walks of life. We are committed to nonviolent direct action.” However, he adds, “I also know for a fact that when we do a direct action here in the coalfields, we will be met with violence. It is the history of the coalfields and I see no reason why it will be any different this time.

“As long as we stay focused, and on message, we will be OK. Let’s all hope and pray that America listens and demands an ending to this insanity.”

Neither Bo nor his fellow activists see “this insanity” as being limited to MTR. Now that the easiest and best sources of coal and other essentials have been depleted, here and elsewhere, across America and around the world, and returns on efforts to extract them are diminishing, it’s increasingly urgent that we stop blindly squandering resources needed to create and sustain the new ways of life we can now see we’ll need in the not-so-distant future. “I am hoping that our movement will bring attention to the big picture,” Bo writes. “I know that a world with a growing population of over 6 billion people is headed for chaos when it continues to rely on finite fossil fuels. When we resort to blowing up a mountain to extract a ten-inch seam of coal, we definitely have a glaring problem.

“I think Martin Luther King summed it up pretty well when he said, ‘This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.’

“I don’t know if MJS will be successful or not. I don’t know what results we will get. I just know that it needs to be done. Time is short, and I think the time is right.”

Resistance to strip mining in Appalachia did not, of course, begin with MJS in 2005. It’s been going on for decades. For most of that time, Jack Spadaro’s been involved. “I came out of a little mining community in southern West Virginia, near Beckley,” Jack says. “My father worked for a mining company for about twenty years. My grandfather worked in the coal mines for forty-five years. I have an uncle who worked in the mines for thirty-some years. I got a degree in mining engineering thinking that I wanted to go into the industry and make a lot of money. But what happened was, I saw what was going on and I couldn’t be part of it.

“In 1972 I was teaching in the engineering program at West Virginia University, and I got sent for the spring and summer down to a place called Buffalo Creek, in Logan County, where a coal waste dam failed and killed 125 people and left 4,000 people without homes and wiped out 17 communities. From that point forward—I wasn’t born an environmentalist, but I certainly became one.” Jack joined forces with others who were fighting the ill effects of strip mining, including Ken Hechler, then a congressman and now, more than three decades later—in his nineties—still fighting.

According to CRMW’s Julia Bonds, part of what enabled the 1970s movement against strip mining to arise in Appalachia was that prior to that, in the 1960s, volunteers with such federal “war on poverty” programs as VISTA and other outsiders came to Appalachia to do social service work. “When they did,” she says, “they brought their cameras and tape recorders with them. And they sat down and they talked to these people, and listened to these people who lived up in these hollers. And then these people didn’t feel so alone and so oppressed.” Together, the locals and the outsiders began to organize to address problems in Appalachia. When the government “figured out what was going on and who was coming in (they called them ‘outside agitators’) and helping people organize, they pulled the funding” from the programs that had brought the outsiders here. “But the movement had already started.” Today, she adds, “we’re not dependent” on Washington for funding that start-up wave of organizers. “We’re doing it ourselves.

“Back in the ’60s and ’70s the women led the charge [against strip mining]. They’re the ones that lay down in front of the bulldozers and stood up in front of the coal trucks.” Women, especially older women, are generally perceived as less threatening than men, who in tense coalfield confrontations are apt to get into fights. “It’s less violent with women in the front line. But it seems as though women are more apt to get things rolling, too.

“Of course we didn’t accomplish what we were setting out to do, or we wouldn’t be” fighting MTR today. They did manage to persuade Congress to pass the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), in 1977. But just before the final version of SMCRA was passed, fatal flaws were added to the bill.

Jack says that he and Ken Hechler “agreed, in 1977, when [SMCRA] was signed into law, that it was probably a mistake. In the first versions of the law [MTR] wasn’t allowed, but then Congressman [Nick] Rahall from West Virginia, who had replaced Hechler, and Senator Wendell Ford from Kentucky got language put into the act to allow mountaintop removal. They at that time sold it as something that would only happen occasionally, it would only be for something special like building a school or some other use that would be of benefit to the community.” But no restriction to that effect was actually written into the law. “To get the variance on [the requirement that reclaimed land be returned to its] ‘approximate original contour’ and allow mountaintop removal you had to demonstrate that you had the plans to use it for something other than just a mine. The states, then, when they were given authority under the act to be the regulatory authorities, they always granted the permits no matter what the intended use.

“That’s been part of the problem all along. The way the law was written, the states could get authority to enforce the federal law. And nearly every mining state did that.” Tennessee is the lone exception in southern Appalachia. It still has direct federal enforcement of SMCRA.

“So we went back to the same old system and the same old people who’d been failing to regulate for the twenty-some years before. Since 1981 there hasn’t been any true enforcement in the field, on the ground, at mine sites. All the [MTR] mining operations in West Virginia are illegal. They’re operating contrary to the federal law. Not one is legal.”

SMCRA “was supposed to be a solution,” Jack adds, “but instead it became the vehicle for the industry to legitimize what it was doing. And they’ve done now, on a massive scale, what the law was intended to prevent, the dumping of spoil onto mountainsides in steep-slope areas.”

Under SMCRA, valley fills were supposed to be small and of limited use. “The justification [for allowing them at all] was they needed a place, for their first few cuts onto the mountainside, to put the overburden material. That’s [all] the valley fill was supposed to be, and everything else would be returned to ‘approximate original contour.’

“When they got into mountaintop mining where they took off the top 400 or 500 feet of the mountain, they [decided that they] needed larger valley fills. So they created a rule allowing something called a durable-rock fill. And they got a prostitute engineer named Arthur Casagrande (he was from Harvard, a geotechnical engineer) to write the justification for durable-rock fills. Unfortunately, some people in the Carter administration fell for it.

“So they wrote into the rules [by which SMCRA is administered] something that allowed them to do it. All through the Reagan-Bush years the MTR operations proliferated. Rules became weaker and weaker. All through the ’80s the sizes of the [valley] fills grew, the sizes of the operations grew, and no one checked them. Nobody had the courage or the will or the knowledge, really, to check them. Even through the Clinton administration, in the ’90s, the fills and mountaintop removal operations proliferated.

“The valley fills in this region are the largest earth structures in the country now,” Jack says. “They are sometimes 500 or 600 million cubic yards of material—in one fill. Some are as long as six miles long—one fill.”

By the mid-1990s, “citizens had just had enough. They were literally being run off their land by these operations. At Blair Mountain, the site of the famous labor struggle, a man named James Weekley was going to have his hollow filled in by a huge operation operated by Arch [coal company]. And Mr. Weekley came to Charleston [West Virginia] and hired a lawyer named Joe Lovett.” In August 1997 Joe Lovett, just starting out as a lawyer, met Jim Weekley, who gave Lovett his first tour of MTR and persuaded him to try to stop the permitting of a huge MTR operation slated for the hollow where Jim and his family had lived for more than two centuries. Joe started to research mining law and discovered a whole host of ways in which MTR violates provisions of federal laws still enforced by federal agencies. (Lovett was aiming to bring this case to federal court, not West Virginia state court, where he knew he was likely to lose.) Presiding over these violations is the Army Corps of Engineers, which, under the Clean Water Act (1972), has responsibility for determining how much environmental damage will be caused by activities that fill in streams, and granting or denying permits for such activities accordingly.

For example, Section 404 of that act specifies that “fill material” placed in waterways must be chosen to avoid “adverse effect” and achieve some desirable purpose, such as making it possible to build on or farm a patch of wetland. Calling coal waste “fill” doesn’t make it fit Section 404’s definition, nor is simply finding somewhere convenient to put that waste a permissible purpose. Nonetheless, the Corps has routinely issued permits allowing the filling in of streams with waste from MTR operations, contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the Clean Water Act—and contrary to the way land users other than coal companies are treated. (Farmers and construction companies, for example, are not allowed to fill in streams just because they need somewhere convenient to put waste material.)

In addition, the National Environmental Policy Act, which passed in 1969, requires that federal agencies study a project’s likely effects thoroughly and compile an environmental impact statement (EIS) based on that study before approving any project that could significantly harm waterways or their environment. The Corps had never required an EIS during the permitting process for any MTR operation.

Furthermore, the Corps had routinely been violating several provisions of SMCRA for which it, rather than individual states, retained responsibility. SMCRA requires MTR sites to be restored after mining to “approximate original contour”—that is, a mining company that blows up a mountain is supposed to pile the rubble back up into something approximating that mountain’s original size and shape. SMCRA also bans mining within 100 feet of a stream (known in legalese as the “stream buffer zone”) without careful study verifying that that stream would not be harmed by the proposed mining activity. The Corps routinely granted variances that let mining companies off the hook for these provisions.

In short, Joe Lovett discovered plenty of grounds for suing the Corps for failing to enforce laws governing mountaintop removal. He lined up several more plaintiffs to join Jim Weekley, secured the legal and financial help of the Washington, D.C.-based organization Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, and in early 1998 filed a letter of intent to sue both the Army Corps of Engineers and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. The resulting case, Bragg v. Robertson, led to a settlement in December 1998 that compelled the federal government to complete a two-year study leading to an EIS on the cumulative effects of MTR on the entire multistate coalfield region of Appalachia. Meanwhile, the settlement also forbid the Corps to grant any “Nationwide 21” permits for new strip mines that would have valley fills covering more than 250 acres. (Under the Nationwide 21 process, the Corps grants permits for valley fills without public notice and with no EIS on the presumption that they will cause “minimal adverse” impact.)

The settlement deal did not, however, block the proposed MTR operation threatening Jim Weekley’s hollow. In January 1999, Joe Lovett filed for a restraining order with federal Judge Charles H. Haden II, who put the mining on hold until Lovett and Weekley could bring the case to trial. Settlement deals and other legal maneuvering before the scheduled trial date led to a block on moving forward with the proposed mining as well as an agreement that the Corps and the DEP would tighten up most aspects of enforcement of mining regulations, specifically including the “approximate original contour” requirement. (You who are reading this should not at this point become hopeful. Settlement notwithstanding, enforcement remained just about nonexistent.)

One issue that was not resolved by the settlement was enforcement of the stream-buffer-zone rule. Coal-industry lawyers refused to compromise on this, so Joe Lovett asked Judge Haden to compel the DEP to enforce it. On Oct. 20, 1999, Haden ruled not only that the buffer-zone rule must be enforced—but also that MTR valley fills were all, by definition, violations of that rule. The judge forbid the DEP to allow any mine permits that would result in mine waste being dumped in permanent or seasonal streams anywhere in West Virginia.

For those opposed to MTR this was a terrifically hopeful ruling. That hope didn’t last long, though. Judge Haden soon agreed to suspend his ruling while state and coal-industry lawyers appealed it to the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. On April 24, 2001, that court overturned Haden’s ruling on the grounds that the state DEP must be sued in a state court, not the federal court system. Pursuing this in West Virginia’s state court system, where judges must regularly stand for reelection and are highly vulnerable to coal-industry pressure, would likely meet with failure. Joe Lovett instead worked around the jurisdictional problem by filing suit against the Corps, a federal agency, in Judge Haden’s federal court, for the Corps’ own failure to enforce the stream-buffer-zone rule. On May 8, 2002, Judge Haden ruled in Lovett’s favor. In December 2002, the 4th Circuit struck down Haden’s ruling as “overbroad.”

Meanwhile, following George W. Bush’s inauguration as president in early 2001, when he replaced Democrat Bill Clinton, incoming Republican appointees set about tailoring mining rules and regulation, and their enforcement (or lack thereof) to better suit the coal industry.

For example, Jack Spadaro recalls, “there was a requirement [in the 1998 settlement of Bragg v. Robertson] for an environmental impact statement on the overall effects of this type of mining. And the draft statement, under Clinton, said yes indeed this is a severe problem and we have to curtail this mining, we have to get control of it. But it was just a draft statement. When the Bush administration came in, the guts of the statement remained the same—they couldn’t change the science. But the conclusion under the Bush administration was that the solution to the problem would be to streamline the permitting process and make it go faster. The conclusion of course didn’t match the science. And that’s where it stands now [in 2005], pretty much. The Bush administration is allowing, in their oversight role over the states, the permitting process to accelerate. No holds.”

As a result of this, Jack says, “what we’re seeing now is, more than ever before, a true grassroots movement in the coalfields. In West Virginia a poll done by a conservative newspaper showed that about 70 percent of the people in West Virginia would be in favor of abolishing mountaintop removal.” Jack agrees that most of that 70 percent wouldn’t stick their necks out and advocate this in public, but he thinks they’d vote for it if they were given the chance.

“People are fed up. There is now a real populist movement, the people from mining communities joining environmentalists, and labor in some instances, and forming coalitions that can do some good. The problem is now, on a national level, we have a conservative government and a corrupt government, the most corrupt in the history of the country perhaps.”

Jack confronted that problem directly in connection with an enormous coal slurry spill in Inez, Kentucky, where on one night in October 2000 more than 300 million gallons of sludge burst from an enormous “pond” similar to the one that looms over Marsh Fork Elementary School. Most of the sludge went into two streams that overflowed and flooded nearby homes. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska released 10.8 million gallons; the Inez spill was 30 times as big. Nonetheless, it received almost no media attention until the spill reached the Ohio River, days later.

People living in Appalachia’s coalfields sometimes wonder how it is that environmentalists across America can be so passionate about Alaska but apparently indifferent to the ongoing environmental catastrophe wrought by strip mining in Appalachia. Perhaps it’s because Appalachia, though spectacularly biodiverse and wildly productive of flora, fauna, and fresh water, isn’t pristine wilderness. Perhaps also it’s because Appalachia is inhabited by “hillbillies,” denigrated for generations by American popular culture.

In their response to the Inez disaster, government authorities apparently relied on both the national media’s lack of interest and the reputed ignorance of Appalachian locals. When local people went to public meetings after the big sludge spill, they expected at least some action from the environmental agencies, Inez resident Nina McCoy recalls. Instead, “the EPA, when they had one of their first meetings with the people [whose water supply and land were poisoned], they told the people that there was nothing harmful in the sludge, that it was fine because everything in it was on the periodical table of the elements. And then they went on to say: ‘You can ask your biology or your chemistry teacher.’” As it happens that’s Nina, who teaches at the local high school. And her students did ask her what that meant. They’d just studied the periodic table, and of course what the EPA was saying made no sense.

“So then what happens,” she says, “is [that most local people] just kind of give up. They’re not drinking the water—they know better—but they just don’t know how to fight it. So many times I think that is what we really need to focus on, not necessarily shooting everybody who runs the coal companies [she’s joking here—a joke with a bitter edge], but actually getting back our [government] agencies, to make the people feel empowered.

“We have corporations that think there should be no rules, and the people just think: ‘Well, uh, OK, no rules’—I guess. They’re afraid that the company will leave if [it has] to follow the rules.” At the same time, miners and their wives are telling their neighbors “that EPA was shoving them around: Do this! Get out of here!,” even though at public meetings, “we saw an EPA lawyer and coal company lawyer patting each other on the back.”

At the time of the Inez spill, Jack Spadaro was still director of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, which trains the nation’s mine inspectors and is run under the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). “Because I had years of experience regulating coal-waste dams—that had been my specialty for a long time—I was asked to be part of a [federally appointed] team to go to Inez and investigate the coal slurry spill. I was put in charge of the engineering aspects, the geotechnical investigation to determine the cause. And we were doing well. We went down in October, November, and December of 2000 and began investigating, doing a drilling program at the site of the spill to find out what had happened, interviewing people.”

They found that “a reservoir of slurry about 100 feet deep and about 70 acres failed by breaking into [abandoned] underground mine workings beneath the reservoir and spilling out into Coldwater Creek and another watershed, Wolf Creek. If it had all gone down Coldwater Creek, people would have drowned.

“In January 2001 when the Bush administration came in—honestly, on Inauguration Day of 2001 our investigation was halted. We were told to wrap it up in a few days and begin writing our report. Well, we had thirty-five, forty more people we wanted to interview. And we had a whole lot of evidence that the company, which was a subsidiary of Massey Energy, had submitted documents to the government six years before, when there had been another [slurry pond] breakthrough—those documents were essentially lies about what was underneath that impoundment.” The breakthrough six years before had been “the same sort of failure. Into Wolf Creek. So they submitted a plan to rectify the situation in 1994. But the plan showed that there was fifty feet of cover between the [underground] mine workings and the bottom of the reservoir, and a hundred-foot coal barrier. In reality we found, through this drilling program, about fifteen or eighteen feet of coal barrier and less than fifteen feet of cover over top of the mine workings. We discovered in the investigation, in interviews, that people at the mine knew that there was only fifteen feet of cover. But they submitted a document showing a fifty and a hundred-foot barrier. So they lied in their submittals to the government.

“I felt that the company should then have been cited for that, and for knowing and willful negligence at least, if not outright fraud for what they’d submitted to the government. But the Bush administration didn’t want to do that. So they had people tampering with the writing of the report.” Jack’s team would send drafts in “and they would be rewritten. The head of [MSHA], appointed by Bush, a guy named Dave Lauriski, started poking his fingers into this investigation, and I felt that was inappropriate. So I withdrew, I resigned publicly from the investigation and stated my reasons.

“It came time to do a public release of the report, and Lauriski called me several days before the release and essentially ordered me to sign the report. And I refused to do it. Twice. The report was issued without my name on the report.

“I fought with the Bush administration for the next two years about this. It was mainly about the government aiding and abetting a company that had violated the law and put people at risk. Because when that thing failed, it killed 1.6 million fish, wiped out water supplies to seventeen towns, killed everything for a hundred miles, all the way to the Ohio River.” In June 2001, federal officials changed the locks on Jack’s office and placed him on administrative leave, accusing him of abusing his authority as director of the mine inspectors’ academy. After that trumped-up charge failed to stick, Jack was ordered transferred to Pittsburgh, far from his family and home in West Virginia. He opted to negotiate an early retirement and has continued to fight against abusive mining practices ever since. (His nemesis Dave Lauriski himself resigned as head of MSHA in November 2004, shortly after a government report questioned the propriety of contracts he’d awarded to corporate cronies.)

Jack believes that “there’s still a lot that could be done [against MTR] in litigation. I think we can revisit some of those same issues that were brought up in the late ’90s in federal court on a state level. And then also go back in federal court and hammer away at the same issues, since nothing was really ever resolved on things like approximate original contour, the illegality of mountaintop removal and the valley fills, the Clean Water Act—none of it’s been really resolved.” The absence of such clear judicial resolution enabled the Bush administration to continue to use regulatory directives and redefinitions allowing mining companies to violate the laws’ apparent intent on these issues. For example, in May 2002, the Bush administration redefined “fill” for the purposes of the Clean Water Act as anything that would have the effect of filling in a streambed, thus gutting the act’s requirements that fill placed in waterways must be chosen both to avoid “adverse effect” and to achieve some desirable purpose.

Supporting litigation is currently the main focus of Jack’s current efforts against strip mining. “I’m in for the long haul. I think we can win this. Because I think what is happening is not only illegal, it’s just plain wrong.”

As of 2005, Jack says, MTR in West Virginia has “removed close to 400,000 acres; 320-some thousand in Kentucky; 150,000 total strip mining in Ohio; about 90 to 100 thousand acres in southwestern Virginia. It’s up to close to a million acres that have been completely wiped out.” (Reliable data on the extent of strip mining is hard to come by. These figures are from research Jack did in the early 2000s, through government contacts. Since then, the acreage affected has grown considerably.)

“About fourteen people have died in flash floods in the last three years,” Jack adds to the reasons why MTR is “plain wrong.” Hundreds of homes have been flooded “from rapid runoff from mountaintop removal operations.

“When I first started in the mining industry, in the 1960s, there were hundreds of thousands of miners working. We’ve produced more coal in the last few years in West Virginia than we ever have in history—with the fewest number of miners, because of mountaintop removal. It’s put people out of work. A handful of people are making a profit from this. There’s a handful of people controlling the corporation who are really making the money. And the rest of us are suffering for it.”

I catch up with Bo again in West Virginia in mid-February, where he introduces me to his daughter Sarah and son-in-law Vernon Haltom, and Patty Sebok, a fellow CRMW activist who’s married to a disabled underground coal miner. Together we drive down to Blacksburg, a pretty little college town in western Virginia, for a meeting of about three dozen people aiming to organize MJS. One person has traveled here from Atlanta, the rest from around the region—West Virginia, western Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky.

In addition to the crew from Coal River, West Virginians at the meeting include Larry Gibson, the one person still living up on Kayford Mountain. Larry rode down to Blacksburg with Abraham Mwaura, an organizer with Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) in Huntington, West Virginia.

From Tennessee come Amanda Womac and john johnson, a big bearish fellow in plaid flannel shirt and camouflage pants, with a long ponytail and long brown beard. (john says he doesn’t believe in capitalism.) Both are affiliated with Katuah Earth First! in Knoxville. So are Paloma Galindo and her husband Chris Irwin, a law student, who is intense, fast-talking, impatient, and very much attached to his laptop computer, on which he makes many notes during the meeting. Chris and Paloma have apparently done a large share of the work of organizing MJS to date. Chris speaks probably more than anyone else at the meeting, john and Paloma nearly as much as him. When Bo introduces me to Chris, as a writer working on a book, my impression is that Chris is wary, bristly, thinking that I’ll waste his time if he lets me. (Months later, when I tell Paloma this, her reaction is: “No! Not Chris!” Later, still thinking surely I was mistaken, she asks Chris who, after a long pause, admits it was true.) Like john, Chris and Paloma are in their mid-thirties.

Several people, in their twenties and thirties, affiliated with western North Carolina’s faction of Katuah Earth First! have driven up for the meeting. Although North Carolina is outside the coalfields, a core group of half a dozen or so Asheville-area anarchist eco-activists, with the support of a larger network there, is strongly committed to MJS. One of those here today is Sage Russo, in his mid-twenties, short and slight for a man and much-tattooed, with dark curly hair and a tidy beard, an improbable mix of Brooklyn (where his father’s family lives) and North Carolina mountains (where his mother’s from). Sage is a dedicated Christian, highly unusual among anarchists.

Prominent among the local Blacksburg folks organizing the meeting is Chris Dodson, in his twenties, also small and slender, with blond dreadlocks, homemade-looking patchwork long shorts, hiking boots, a mellow demeanor, vegan but not evangelical about it. (When individuals during the meeting volunteer to solicit food donations for summer, he says he’ll ask a man he knows who raises rabbits to donate meat for those who “eat bunnies.”)

Dave Cooper has traveled here all the way from Lexington, Kentucky—but he’s well accustomed to travel. Since a year ago last fall, Dave’s logged many thousands of miles to scores of places throughout the region and beyond, presenting a slideshow and talk on MTR, hoping to make a wider public aware of and outraged about it. Sitting next to Dave is Bill McCabe, a coalfield native now living in eastern Tennessee and working on staff with Sierra Club’s Environmental Justice Program. He describes himself as “not a tree-hugger” although, he adds, “my church is in the woods.” While he personally supports MJS, he says Sierra Club won’t officially endorse it. (All of the nonprofits opposing MTR are keenly aware that direct support for civil disobedience would threaten their tax-exempt status.)

For a day and a half, the organizers report back on what’s been going on, region by region. They discuss issues of concern to the whole campaign. They talk about what needs to be accomplished in the next month, from courting media to tweaking the MJS website, and individuals volunteer to “bottom line” making specific things happen. By prior agreement, no one is “in charge” of MJS, and decisions are made by consensus rather than majority vote; proposals are discussed and modified, concerns voiced and addressed, until all present reach agreement.

The group also discusses an emerging problem with the term “mountaintop removal.” Officials and mining companies in Tennessee say there is no MTR there—they call it “cross-ridge mining” and claim it doesn’t destroy whole mountains. Bo notes that coal companies generally are redefining “mountaintop removal” very restrictively, so they can say they’re not doing it. He suggests using the term “steep slope strip mining” to get around this subterfuge.

At lunch on Saturday, passing mention is made of “taking over a mountaintop” near the end of summer, either an active MTR site or a place proposed for MTR. CRMW folks don’t know anything about this but laugh and say they know plenty of mountains they could suggest.

After lunch, Bo tells the meeting that CRMW’s top priority this summer is to stop Massey’s operations next to Marsh Fork Elementary School—stop the coal-loading and coal-prep operations, fix the dam, stop blasting at the MTR site above the school. School ends for the summer on June 8. Might MJS do a direct action to shut the coal plant down in mid- or late May? Bo emphasizes that permanently shutting this site down is doable, as the school was there long before the coal plant, which should never have been permitted, making this a potential early success story for MJS, one that would provide encouragement and build campaign momentum.

After some discussion about needing an overall public statement of goals for MJS, john proposes that the group write an MJS mission statement to broadcast to potential allies and the world at large. After much discussion, here’s what they come up with:

Mountain Justice Summer (MJS) seeks to add to the growing anti-MTR citizens movement. Specifically MJS demands an abolition of MTR, steep slope strip mining and all other forms of surface mining for coal. We want to protect the cultural and natural heritage of the Appalachia coalfields. We want to contribute with grassroots organizing, public education, nonviolent civil disobedience and other forms of citizen action. Historically coal companies have engaged in violence and property destruction when faced with citizen opposition to their activities. MJS is committed to nonviolence and will not be engaged in property destruction.

Posted on the MJS website and reproduced again and again in MJS literature, this would serve as both a definition of and a guideline for MJS throughout the summer and beyond.

Shortly after the meeting in Blacksburg, Bo does a radio interview for a station in Asheville with Julia Bonds. (Bonds’s friends call her Judy, and that’s what I’ll call her here from this point on). Judy’s family lived in the same hollow, near Whitesville, for nine generations. Then, in 1994, Massey moved in. Neighbors moved out. Judy’s home was covered with coal dust and rattled by blasting. Fish died in the streams her family had always relied on.

“My grandson lay in bed one night when it was raining,” Judy recalls, “and we knew other dams had failed. He was eight years old at the time, and he tried to reassure me, because he knew I was worried. He said, ‘Mawmaw don’t worry. If that dam [above our house] breaks, I’ve got a path that we can just climb the mountain, and a cave that we can hide in.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandson that we’d never make it.

“My grandson developed asthma, and things became worse and worse.” Finally they moved, the last people in their hollow to leave. Judy would have stayed, but she feared for her daughter and grandson.

“Most Americans simply do not understand where their so-called cheap electricity comes from,” she says. “There’s nothing cheap about it. And Americans need to understand that coal from cradle to grave is dirty. There’s no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ And they need to understand that [with] our materialistic lifestyle, the use of excessive electricity that you don’t need, we’re destroying our children’s future. We’re selling our children’s [future] necessities for our luxuries.”

Bo notes that their local allies against MTR are few—there’s a lot of apathy and intimidation in the coalfields, he says. Massey, the coal company that dominates Coal River valley and mines extensively elsewhere in the region, hires most of its employees from out of state, Bo says, because coal companies would prefer to rid the coalfields of natives who might someday be in their way or complain about what they’re doing. (West Virginia’s population in 1950 was more than 2 million, and had grown each decade for the past century and a half; by 2005 its population had shrunk to 1.8 million. While West Virginia’s population was shrinking, the overall population of the United States nearly doubled between 1950 and 2005. West Virginia’s anomalous population loss is overwhelmingly concentrated in the coalfields in the southern part of the state.)

Bo explains to the radio listeners that a mix of toxic chemicals (and in winter, antifreeze) is sprayed on coal at the plant next to Marsh Fork Elementary School—and that three teachers there have died of cancer in the past few years; a former principal, just retired, now has bone cancer; two girls who went to school there have had ovarian cancer, highly unusual in very young women—one of them has died. Other kids at the school have asthma and blood disorders.

“We’re inviting everyone in,” he says. “There’s a place in this [campaign] for everyone. This is not just an Appalachian problem, it’s a national problem. It’s a worldwide problem, when you come right down to it. America’s cheap electricity does come at the expense of coalfield residents. Why should someone in West Virginia lose their home for the profit of a coal company? That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Around the time of this radio interview, I begin corresponding with john johnson, intrigued by how things he said at the meeting in Blacksburg, coming from an anarchist, eco-centric perspective, so closely connect with Judy and Bo’s sense that MTR exemplifies a rush toward bankruptcy in America’s current way of life. “I agree totally,” john says. “MTR is totally an example of the utter insanity of modern industrial capitalism. I don’t think it’s just America. It’s the whole modern world. The flip side is that America and other cultures also have a lot of ingenuity and creativity when it comes to doing things differently.”

john’s a “damn Yankee,” as he puts it. (Yankees live up north. Damn Yankees come south and don’t go back.) He grew up in the Northeast, then his family moved to Tennessee when he was fifteen. In college, at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he found himself becoming more open to “alternative ways of viewing the world. I’ll be straight with you—part of it was from doing drugs, smoking pot and dropping acid. And part of it was from listening to punk rock music and heavy metal, which has a very rebellious, challenge-authority thing going on. And I started meeting people who were acting on their beliefs.” He began attending protests and meetings of activist groups, and became involved in environmental/racial justice campaigns in Chattanooga. Among the environmental activists he met were people working on forest issues, who eventually connected him with Earth First! “In the early 1990s, I got exposed to EF!, I got exposed to the anarchist movement—I got exposed to the most radical wing of the anarchist movement, the anti-civilization bunch. Those ideas have had a profound influence on the way I view things.” He’s matured enough that he no longer thinks he has The Right Answer for the way the world should run, but “I do know there are slivers of the truth, there are things that I know could and should work, but not the totality.”

In 1993, john and several others decided to reconstitute a southern Appalachian bioregional chapter of the radical environmental movement Earth First!, which they named Katuah, the Cherokee word for the region. Before then, in 1991, he’d decided to drop out of college and become a “full-time revolutionary activist, and to dedicate my life to overthrowing the government, and the corporations, and the whole social order, which I perceive as very wrong.” At the same time, in the early 1990s, he was protesting against the first Gulf War and against police brutality.

By 1994, “I really liked the Earth First! take on things, the ideology of Deep Ecology and biocentrism.”(Deep Ecology holds that humans are first and foremost part of nature, and that living ecosystems have the same sort of value and right to well-being as humankind, regardless of their usefulness to humans.) So john made a conscious decision to focus on environmental issues. Besides, “Earth Firsters are a lot of fun. Even the non-Earth First! [environmentalists], the mainstream conservationists, are great people.

“By 1996, 1997 my environmentalism had transformed from an intellectual thing to a totally heartfelt, passionate—I tell people that not only am I in love with my fiancée, Amanda, but I am hotly in love with the landscape of southern Appalachia.” Before then, “I couldn’t talk to you about the particulars of nature. I could just tell you why we needed to protect it,” as our life-support system. “Now that I have this interest in it, and this love affair with it, I’m trying to learn it. Because I want to talk to people about the particulars, about salamanders, and freshwater mollusks, and the different kinds of trees.”

While I’m enjoying seeing individuals as different as Bo, Judy, and john on the same page, other people are worried that MJS is becoming too radical-fringy.

One of those people is Dave Cooper. Born in Cincinnati, Dave grew up Republican, conservative, middle-class. When he was still in high school, during the Carter administration, the first Arab oil embargo and ensuing “energy crisis” hit home: “It was crystal clear that we needed to do energy conservation then,” he says. “And then we just forgot about it.” Dave went to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, then worked at a General Motors plant in Ohio for seven years as a quality control engineer. When that plant closed down, he went to work for a defense contractor for three years.

During this time, in 1986, he joined the Sierra Club, mostly because he’d gone camping and hiking when he was a kid and missed it. He went on his first national Sierra Club outing that year, and “got exposed to some other Sierra Club people—and they’re all talking about lobbying and writing letters to Congress. I thought they were a bunch of kooks.” Two decades later, he’s a full-time activist. In the past year and a half, he’s done nearly 180 roadshow audiovisual presentations and other talks on MTR in 13 states, many of them at colleges and universities, some for radio and TV, others for churches, civic groups, environmental clubs, and even a corporation or two.

“I’m a little concerned,” he writes in late February, “about the tilt of our MJS group and membership towards the EF! side. It needs to be more mainstream and we have to talk—and listen—to regular folks if we want to get our message across and be heard. I’m speaking to all these Rotary Clubs, and you really have to tone down the eco-blabber or they will tune you out immediately. I think this may be a problem this summer if we don’t get the more mainstream groups like KFTC [Kentuckians for the Commonwealth] on board.”

MJS at this point already includes very different sorts of people—and clearly understands the need to include people with a much greater range of differences if they’re to have any success with building a mass movement against MTR.

One set of differences among MJSers concerns perspectives on nature: Some are more inclined to see nature in terms of the usefulness of its various elements to humans, while others see nature primarily as something that has value in and of itself. The first point of view is sometimes labelled “anthropocentric,” the second “biocentric.” In practice they’re not so much two separate camps as they are two directions that encompass a whole range of attitudes toward nature. Extremists in either direction are unlikely to be interested in MJS: neither anthropocentrist extremists who see no value in nature at all beyond its utility to humans, nor biocentric extremists of the anti-civilization camp, who believe that the development of human society past the hunter-gatherer way of life has been a mistake. In between those extremes, most of the range of anthropo-to-biocentric opinion is present among MJSers from the start, with common ground found in the idea of nature as our life-support system; people who are working to protect that system primarily for its value to themselves can work side-by-side with others working to protect it for its own sake. The mutual respect needed for meeting on that common ground is relatively easy in this case, as MJS participants generally share a sense that humans are part of a larger natural community to which they have responsibilities, and a sense that it’s wrong to plunder nature and leave it a wasteland.

Another set of differences concerns how activists see—or don’t see—the fight against MTR as part of broader efforts toward more extensive, even revolutionary change in society. Several factors make it relatively easy for MJSers to live with differences among themselves on this issue. Foremost is the campaign’s agreement to welcome and encourage all efforts to end MTR, and to welcome in everyone who wants to help, as long as all participants eschew both violence and property damage. Also helpful are a cluster of attitudes among the self-identified radicals in MJS, many of whom call themselves anarchists as well as Earth Firsters. Unlike libertarians, who envision a world of cussed individualists, every one for oneself, anarchists tend to favor self-organizing communities of cussed individualists. Solidarity and mutual aid matter—out of them, community is built. Self-defense matters, too, which EF!-affiliated anarchists involved with MJS construe as including defense of one’s ecological life-support system. Thus, for this movement’s anarchists, working together with non-anarchist coalfield activists defending themselves, their communities, and the land from MTR is a good ideological fit. It’s helpful, also, that some of those coalfield activists see MTR as part of broader, systemic problems in America—helpful, but not necessary. There’s no requirement for ideological unity in this campaign.

There’s also no requirement for philosophical unity about nonviolence. MJS requires its participants to adopt nonviolence and avoidance of property damage as a tactic for this campaign, not as a way of life. Nonviolence and avoidance of property damage have often, perhaps more often than not, been linked in campaigns that adopt civil disobedience, for both practical and philosophical reasons. However, Earth Firsters have long been of several minds about this. EF! has consistently (or as consistently as such a loosely organized movement can manage) eschewed violence and taken care to avoid risks of physical harm to anyone in its actions. Although most individuals and campaigns have usually eschewed property damage as well, some have chosen to damage or destroy machinery that is used to harm living ecosystems. EFers have also differed about what exactly constitutes property destruction. (Does making a mess count? Pulling up survey stakes? Spiking trees?) In addition, most of the people involved in MJS (EFers as well as others) personally believe that they have a right to use violence in self-defense: If someone attacks them, they have a right to fight back. Others in the campaign, though, are personally committed to avoiding violence in all situations. MJS’s nonviolent, no-property-damage position has been adopted both to enable such diverse people to work together and because there’s general agreement that, as a practical matter, it’s what’s tactically best for this campaign.

MJSers encompass a wide range of differences about religion as well. Some are fiercely secular, actively hostile to organized religion. Others perceive themselves as spiritually engaged, but not necessarily in a church-going way. The movement also includes Christians whose anti-MTR activism is motivated by their religion. Most MJSers who have any sense of spirituality at all perceive it as connected with or activated by contact with nature. Most are at least somewhat familiar and comfortable with the precepts of Deep Ecology. A few of MJS’s religious Deep Ecology believers see themselves as worshipping Gaia, or pursuing forms of paganism; most incorporate Deep Ecology into Christian or other religious beliefs and practices. By and large, MJS does pretty well with avoiding religious disagreements. The fact that religious MJSers typically have a sense that God speaks many languages, and that there are many paths to God, defuses much of the hostility to religion that “godless” MJS activists might ordinarily feel or express. It also means that differences about religion tend to be perceived as lifestyle differences, rather than heresy.

However, lifestyle differences turn out to be the source of some of the most dysfunctional divisions within MJS. Appalachians living in the coalfields have a range of rural lifestyles that have little in common with the urban-punk sensibility of many other MJSers. In addition, MJS’s coalfield-based activists are mostly middle-aged; MJSers based outside the coalfields are mostly younger. Lifestyle differences among MJSers don’t line up neatly along local/outsider or older/younger lines. Across those lines are endless permutations and combinations of hippie, hillbilly hippie, crusty punk, vegan, omnivore, “ninja,” “pirate,” and other preferences in clothing, food, music, and other matters. Still, for a host of reasons having to do with differences in life experience, coalfield locals and “outsider” activists often experience moments of mutual incomprehension, opportunities for giving or taking offense without real intention. With MJS’s recruiting efforts focused primarily on college-aged urban activists, such moments look likely to multiply in the months ahead.

Tension across these various differences is inevitable. MJS’s hope is that focusing on a clear common goal—ending MTR, combined with persistent efforts at mutual respect, and at finding strength rather than weakness in the sum of everyone’s differences, will be enough to make those tensions manageable.

MJS activists are busy on many fronts this February and March. A donation wish list for MJS is now circulating. An activist in southwestern Virginia is working up a list of threatened and endangered fish and mollusks in the area, for use in challenging MTR there. Judy Bonds, Dave Cooper, and others are working on outreach to religious groups, from nuns in Ohio to Baptists in West Virginia, connecting support in the fight against MTR with religious responsibility to care for God’s creation. OVEC and CRMW, with outside funding promised, have begun seeking “coalfield organizers” to hire for the summer. Folks in Tennessee are researching coal companies and permits there, mobilizing activists to attend or submit comments to hearings on mine permits for sites north of Knoxville up near the Kentucky border. They’re also moving toward appealing a court ruling against a challenge to the federal Office of Surface Mining’s failure to study and consider environmental impacts before permitting the MTR site at Zeb Mountain, recently bought by National Coal Corporation (NCC). (Zeb and NCC are prime targets for MJS action in Tennessee.)

In early March, Chris Irwin bounces his truck back into the woods to photograph a twenty-five-acre landslide a few ridges southwest of Zeb Mountain, on a former strip mine officially deemed “reclaimed” in accordance with government regulations. “It was as if the ‘reclamation’ was a cancer that had finally burst from the skin of the earth,” Chris reports. “What caused [the] megaslide is evident—you can hear it, water. At least four different sources of water were cutting through the shale and coal-blended soil. An unstable substrate combined with water and really steep slopes creates landslides. Ridgetops may be cheap for coal companies to blast—it’s impossible to repair.”

“We see slides fairly frequently, but rarely one this size,” an official with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) observes. And, in fact, on his way to the big slide, Chris saw several other, smaller landslides that he’d not heard about. That such slides could happen on “reclaimed” land at all, let alone “frequently,” calls into question the adequacy of reclamation protocols—and presents an opportunity, as Chris and others in Tennessee see it.

“Normally Katuah Earth First! regards politicians as scum who are not to be trusted on any level,” Chris writes in another email to the MJS listserv. “But tactically at this juncture in our campaign here in Tennessee all the arrows are pointing to our state agencies. TDEC regulates water permits for Tennessee. Mountaintop removal aka cross-ridge mining by its very nature destroys highland watersheds. TDEC has been wavering lately on the wisdom of being a rubber stamp for the final solution for our watersheds.” MJS is aiming to compel them to instead protect streams by protecting their mountains.

In mid-March, MJS organizers from around the region once again gather for a weekend meeting, this time in Asheville, at Warren Wilson College just east of town. Close to four dozen people attend, at least a dozen or so newcomers since the meeting in Blacksburg.

Bo tells the meeting that there’s been heavy blasting behind Marsh Fork Elementary School in the past month. In Kentucky, activists affiliated with KFTC (a few of whom attend part of this weekend’s meeting) are looking to see what their role in MJS might be. Erin from Blacksburg reports on plans for a “Listening Project” in and around the town of Appalachia, Virginia, going door-to-door to hear people’s concerns about mining in their neighborhoods. (Last August there, a three-year-old boy, Jeremy Davidson, asleep in his bed, was crushed to death by a boulder off an MTR site above his home.) Listening Projects have also been done or are soon to begin near Zeb Mountain in Tennessee and in Coal River valley. College students from several states are expected soon to visit Larry Gibson’s place at Kayford Mountain, to see MTR firsthand, in the hope of drawing them in to MJS for the summer. Paloma reports that the MJS internet listserv now has 267 members, and that 2 or 3 people are signing up at the website each day, volunteering to help this summer.

“Looks like we’ll have more people than we know what to do with,” john johnson says.

Chris Irwin responds, “We’ll know what to do with them.”

Much of the weekend is devoted to working out a rough-draft calendar for the summer, and to meetings of and report-backs from working groups focused on Listening Projects, training camps to be held early in the summer, finances, art, intake process for volunteers, media and outreach, logistics of housing and feeding and transporting volunteers, music, and scouting for possible actions sites and to learn what’s happening with mining in various places. Informally, in conversations during breaks in the meeting, activists are still considering a mountaintop occupation sometime during the summer, with possible locations to be scouted in the next few weeks and discussed at the next monthly meeting, in April.

Kayford Mountain in West Virginia is five hours of fast driving from Asheville, mostly on highways. There’s a network of wide, well-built highways throughout this region (thank you Sen. Robert Byrd), but when you get off these roads you’re often quite quickly on narrow, light-duty roads with no shoulders and steep drop-offs, not built to withstand heavy truck traffic but subjected to it nonetheless to suit the convenience of mine operations. Coal trucks pound the hell out of roads running within a few yards of people’s homes, and come tearing around blind curves too fast for anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment to get out of their way. Dozens of people on foot and in cars have been killed this way. Sharing the road with coal trucks is scary, and people who live in the coalfields live with that fear every day.

When I visit Kayford one afternoon in late March, I meet Larry at the Stanley family cemetery, near the top of the mountain, amid a constant din of working equipment from the surrounding mine sites. Trees around the cemetery are still winter-dormant. On the back of a white-painted rock marking the entrance to the cemetery Larry has painted a Bible verse, Psalms 95:4: “In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.” Larry’s family has been burying relatives here since the early 1800s.

Members of the Stanley family have lived here for 220 years, Larry tells me. (Larry’s grandmother was a Stanley.) They lost most of their land a century ago, in 1906, as so many other southern Appalachian families did when land companies greedy for timber and mineral rights moved in. “We had 566 acres. We now have fifty. A crooked land company and a crooked notary cheated my family out of [the rest] because they couldn’t read,” he says.

Gesturing to the trees at one side of the cemetery, Larry says: “Before they started this, in ’86, you could come in here and above the trees there you could see a pasture, with cattle and horses in it. Above the trees.” Now there’s nothing but sky there. The mountainside where the pasture was located has, like all the mountains for miles around now, had its top blown off and been reduced in height by hundreds of feet, with the rubble pushed aside into valley fills. “This here [Kayford] was the lowest point. Everything around me was higher, about 300 feet higher than this.”

The strip mining that surrounds Kayford stretches for seventeen miles. Larry’s little fifty-acre island in the middle is the only place that isn’t controlled by mining companies. “Thirteen permits, 7,538 acres, several different companies,” Larry says.

As we’re walking up the private access road to the cemetery, we stop to look at tire tracks from a big mining truck that’s been using the road without Larry’s permission, presumably to dump something beyond the edge of the cemetery. Similarly, mining trucks tear up the private dirt road that goes through Larry’s property past several cabins maintained by relatives, because it’s a shortcut to property a mining company controls and has been logging just beyond the cabins. Flyrock from blasting has landed in the cemetery and its parking area from as far as 1,500 yards away. In fact, Larry’s picked up flyrock all over his property—on the road, in his yard, plenty of places where he or someone else could easily have been standing when it fell. “We’ve had rocks coming on our property as heavy as five tons,” Larry tells me. Later he’ll show me photographs, and tell me to look for flyrock boulders along the road I’ll take down the mountain. Some are as big as easy chairs.

For all the land that’s being torn up by mining here, there are very few mining jobs. “When I was a boy, in 1960,” Larry says, “they had 25,000 men. Now 500 men take out five times as much coal as the 25,000 did.” The coal companies hire just a few locals “so they can tell people: Well, we’re hiring. But you go sit at the mine site and watch the cars when they’re coming out—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri [license plates].”

Just a few hundred people live in the hollow below Kayford now, all clustered along the road by the creek, none up in the hills. There used to be a high school here for 1,500 students, but it closed. “We have one elementary school in the hollow, and they’re talking about closing it down. [Since 1960,] we lost sixteen schools that I remember.”

I ask why people around here aren’t angry about all this. “They feel powerless,” Larry says, adding that the mining companies have succeeded in dividing and conquering. “They’re very good at keeping them fighting amongst themselves. The people that they hire intimidate the people that they don’t hire. Fear is so thick you can cut it with a knife.” There’s good reason for that fear. Since Larry began speaking out against MTR and the destruction of his home place, he’s been keeping a list of attacks against himself and his property. It’s now a very long list. He’s been run off the road. His cabin was burned down in 2002, after a threat the day before. His dogs have been killed. People have shot up his house. People have come here and shot at headstones in the cemetery—he shows me the marks from bullets hitting a relatively new stone. His camper, parked up here, was shot up so badly he had to put a new door on it. “They ripped the windows out of it, they shot it up, turned it over.” The cap on his truck has been busted up. Mining companies also exercise control through “the flow of money” among locals: “If they ain’t making any money, they wait for crumbs.” They don’t want to rock the boat lest if a job opens up the company won’t hire them. Or, if they don’t wait for “crumbs,” they leave.

We take Larry’s truck up past his home, then continue on along the dirt road past his relatives’ cabins. He thinks there’s likely to be blasting off that side of his property right about now, and he’d like me to see it.

We drive past a sign warning about blasting, and I ask Larry how that can be, are they allowed to turn his property into a blast site just by posting a sign? “What sign? I don’t see no sign,” he says, grinning. “You gotta know, us hillbillies, if there’s not a picture, we cain’t read.” In fact, the sign marks the edge of his property, and we trespass a short ways onto land the mining company has been logging, to see what’s happening. (Seems a fair exchange, since miners’ trucks have been trespassing across the private road through Larry’s property as a shortcut to get here.)

When we get out of Larry’s truck, the land we’re standing on, which Larry says they’re going to drop by several hundred feet, is peppered with flyrock. Some pieces I see are big as bricks—and they came from a blast site 500 yards away, Larry says. Certainly, looking down into the enormous mine site several hundred feet below us, the active mining looks that far away. They’re currently blowing off another 150 to 180 feet of rock to get at an 8-foot seam of coal.

Several times Larry asks: “Do you hear a whistle?” expecting a warning whistle—although they don’t always whistle a warning before blasting. “If there’s a tree still standing and you hear a blast, get behind it. Actually, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a tree now.” After the recent logging, only scattered spindly little trees remain, too thin to offer cover.

We’ll never know whether my being there stopped the blasting that day; mining companies don’t like to publicize their MTR operations. “They don’t know who you are,” Larry tells me. “They know I’ve been at the cemetery with you.” Several mining company pickup trucks have driven past while I’ve been here, their drivers waving at me and Larry. Larry knows they keep track of his comings and goings because they talk about it on public communications radio channels, which he sometimes monitors.

“I want to emphasize to you how dangerous this area is,” Larry says, “not just for strangers but for the people—they have no responsibility toward the people that live here.” Larry is fifty-nine years old. He looks older.

Dave Cooper and others continue to be concerned that MJS isn’t doing well enough at including mainstream environmental groups; the KFTC members Dave invited to the Asheville meeting left early and remain wary.

Others are concerned that MJS is inadequately rooted in local communities, and thus risks doing more harm than good. One organizer, thinking of leaving the campaign, writes in a letter to friends that:

This campaign holds the terrifying possibility of eroding away what foundation for change has been created. [MJS should not be] inciting people from outside of Appalachia to come to our region, while spending a very limited energy towards asking the coalfield residents and organizers what vision they themselves hold.

Direct action in Appalachia this summer, being chiefly organized, or being perceived to be organized, by EF! activists from Knoxville and Asheville will not stop or slow MTR. It will gain attention to the issue, but it will alienate locals and make them less [trusting] of groups like OVEC, Appalachian Voices, CRMW, and the array of others who have spent years planting and cultivating seeds of change. If MJS comes into West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee this summer and attempts to plant, by relative force, grown trees of this needed change, and then disperses, the trees will die. Those residing in the areas where the proverbial trees are planted will not understand the intricacies of sustaining them, but there will be more than a few who are ready and willing to cut them down and use their branches to beat the hell out of OVEC, KFTC, and the rest, and ultimately all our visions of a better world.

Concerns about MJS’s inclusiveness and “outsider” problems come to a head with publication of an article in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette in May, a few days before MJS’s planned kickoff rally in Charleston, at the state capitol. The article begins: “Environmental activists from around the country are being urged to descend on Appalachia this summer for a series of protests.…sponsored and promoted by a Tennessee-based affiliate of the controversial group Earth First!” MJS organizers are most upset by one particular quote in the article: “‘Frankly, OVEC is wary, as we don’t know all the groups and individuals involved,’ said Vivian Stockman, project coordinator for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. ‘We are very relieved to see this note on the [MJS] website: “MJS is committed to nonviolence and will not be engaged in property destruction.”’” The best that can be said of this is that Abe Mwaura, OVEC’s representative at recent MJS meetings, hasn’t adequately conveyed to Vivian what MJS is up to. Many MJS organizers, Bo Webb among them, see Vivian’s statement as a betrayal.

The Gazette article’s most insidious quality, though, is its treatment of violence. It notes the potential for “confrontation” at MJS’s rally on Thursday, asserts that Earth First! is “linked” to “violent ‘eco-terrorism’” with specific reference to tree-spiking and the planting of a pipe bomb by opponents of EF! in an EF! organizer’s car in California in 1990, and notes that in West Virginia, in 1999, “a mob attacked [West Virginia] Secretary of State Ken Hechler and other anti-mountaintop removal activists who were re-enacting the march that union miners made in 1921 during the Battle of Blair Mountain.” (Larry Gibson and Judy Bonds also were among those who were attacked.) The article’s overall implication is that MJS will be a magnet for violence, and that sensible people might be wise to stay away.

Thursday’s rally turns out to be thoroughly civil. MJSers pass out fact sheets about coal and MTR at the Friends of Coal rally being held right next to and just prior to the MJS event. Several hundred people attend the FOC event, many of them miners given the day off from work and a bus ride to do so. A few FOCs (or FOCers, pronounced “fuckers” by some MTR opponents) stay to watch the MJS rally. There are no confrontations, and a few courteous conversations.

After the rally, coal-industry supporters in the region’s media begin to refine what through the rest of the summer will become a persistent labeling of MJS as a bunch of weird outsiders who are somehow both dangerous and frivolous. “We learned this week,” the State Journal’s political editor writes, “that West Virginia will be treated to a visit by the traveling eco-circus.… Until August, West Virginia will be thick with Birkenstocks and patchouli oil. These are the kind of environmentalists who say they won’t use violence but are dangerous enough to have to make that clear. We can expect padlocked gates, people chained to equipment, human shields in front of pine trees, and maybe even a sit-in. Throw in some dried fruit and a glass of soy milk, and you’ve got yourself a party.”

Shortly after the rally, out of the blue, Bo Webb receives an email from Peabody Coal saying they don’t do MTR and shouldn’t be an MJS target. I tell Bo that I’ve been seeking interviews with representatives from several coal companies, and none has been willing to talk with me. (After a few months of this, I give up and rely instead on the companies’ press releases and statements made by their employees at public events.) Bo’s reaction: “It doesn’t surprise me that they won’t meet with you. Now that MJS is out, they have to strategize and work on certain buzz words so they can all tell the same lies.”

Heading toward Knoxville for the next MJS organizers’ meeting, in April, I stop for a walk in the woods on a mountain near Caryville, a few miles south of Zeb Mountain.

The leaves are just beginning to come out on trees along the trail here. Maples are leafing out, but the mast trees—oaks, hickories, other nuts—are barely showing leaves. Shadbush is blooming up here; down in valley, where the season’s further advanced, dogwood’s already in full bloom. I hear a Carolina wren calling “teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, tea.” Migrating birds are now coming through—on this sunny day I hear quite a bit of warbler noise, even as late as mid-morning. Blooming along the trail are pure white trillium, violets (white, light purple, red purple, dark purple, white with purple streaks), jack-in-the-pulpit, toadshade trillium not yet turned its mature red, white star chickweed, wild strawberry, several yellow buttercuppy things. The last of the various ferns’ fiddleheads are unfurling. The flowers of bloodroot have already gone by; May apple and columbine are up and leafy but not flowering yet. Ramps ought to be up and ready for digging, and morels up and ready for picking too, though I don’t see any myself.

In the woods today, I meet Jim Massengill, an older fellow who grew up on the mountainside facing Caryville here and still camps up here on the mountain. Jim’s family has lived here for long enough that one of the mountains nearby was named after them. He at first thinks I’m here to poach morels, and he starts his conversation with me with warnings about snakes and game wardens. We chat warily for a while, and then he says, speaking of himself and his neighbors: “We love these mountains. We love these mountains.” I ask him what he thinks of coal companies’ plans to blow up the tops of many of these mountains. Without hesitation he says: “We’re gonna stop that.” No longer wary, we talk about strip mining and the horrific clear-cutting that’s preceding it on thousands of acres of beautiful mountainside like the one where we’re standing.

Jim’s family arrived here in the 1830s or 1840s, migrating south from Kentucky. At one time, they owned 11,000 acres. Like Larry Gibson’s family, they lost most of it a century ago. In the late 1800s, “a land company came in here and they had what they call gun thugs,” Jim explains. “And they run all the people out of these mountains and took the land. That’s what I was told.” Timber was taken out first, followed by coal.

When Jim was a child, in the late 1940s, the only road over this mountain was one dirt lane. That road was first paved only a few years ago, and this summer it’s to be fixed up and widened—a convenience for logging and mining trucks, I guess. Federal funding is involved, ostensibly to make the road safe for school buses.

Jim remembers huge old hemlocks being taken out of the woods near here, some years back. “They left them alone [when the land was first logged] because the people that owned the land would not let them cut them. There was eleven of them. Monster hemlocks,” as big as nine feet across at the base. “I cried when I seen them cut. I’d seen them since I was a kid.”

Jim’s father owned and worked a scattering of little “dog-hole” coal mines in the area, where he scraped out enough coal to make a modest living. His father’s working life extended into the first wave of strip mining in the 1950s and 1960s, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with that. “He didn’t believe in strip mining. He was a deep miner. He wouldn’t work in strip mines. They destroyed the timber, they destroyed the land.”

About ten years ago, up on this mountain not far from here, Jim tells me, “I was on a four-wheeler, and I seen a bunch of wild turkeys, and I just eased up on them.” They were at a place on a hillside where miners had drilled augur holes sideways into the mountain to take out small deposits of coal left behind by previous mining. “Snakes [copperheads] were coming up out of the augur holes, and [the turkeys] were pecking them and eating them. I sat there and watched them for probably thirty minutes. I never seen nothing like that.” The turkeys were so focused on what they were doing that they didn’t run from Jim, who was quite close. “Usually, a wild turkey—you get close to it, and it’s gone. But they were really eating those snakes up. They’d peck ’em in the head, reach and get ’em, throw ’em up, and swallow ’em down.” From the number and variety of snake stories Jim has to tell, I wonder if he isn’t some sort of snake magnet. He tells me he once stumbled into a den of maybe fifty copperheads out in the woods near his old home place. “Man, they scared me to death.” I’m sure they did. I tell him I think maybe I won’t want to go hiking off-trail with him.

I promise to put Jim in touch with some of the folks in Knoxville working on the MJS campaign. He later sends me an email: “It would take days to really show you the damaged mountain and wood lands in this area. I would be honored to talk to you or anyone that can help us (the people of this area) stop all this nonsense. I alone don’t have the knowledge to get it done, but with your help we can get a lot done.”

The April MJS meeting is held in a classroom at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, less than an hour down the road from Caryville. In response to the growing concern about inclusiveness, and particularly in response to the controversy stirred up by how OVEC’s Vivian Stockman was quoted in the Charleston Gazette, the meeting starts with a long discussion about equality and solidarity—how to allow diverse voices to be heard and to enable various groups and individuals to participate in MJS.

Diane Bady, OVEC’s co-director, here instead of Abe today representing OVEC, says that OVEC does want to be involved with and supportive of MJS. She mentions “an enormous amount of anger directed at Vivian” over the newspaper article she was quoted in, and says Vivian has found that anger painful to deal with. Diane says that in the past OVEC has worked on campaigns in which well-intentioned outsiders have come in to help and have done things that cause problems that OVEC later has had to clean up; they’ve made OVEC’s work more difficult rather than bolstered their energy and resources, and then left. OVEC does want MJS to succeed, Diane emphasizes.

Larry tells the group that there are folks in West Virginia who do not feel invited. For the past century and more local voices haven’t been heard, they’ve not been taken seriously or valued—so failing to invite people opens old wounds. Bill McCabe affirms that MJS needs to respect and listen to folks in the mountains who’ve been working against MTR (and other strip mining before it) for years, long before MJS was dreamed of.

Chris Dodson notes, at this point, that there are different groups working to the same end, and we don’t all have to do things the same way. If we disagree, we should do it with respect.

Patty Draus, Dave Cooper’s partner, observes that people at MJS planning meetings are well voiced, but people who are not yet at the table aren’t. Another woman from Kentucky says that there at least, people don’t have a clear idea of MJS. They think that civil disobedience is all there is to it. There’s little awareness, for example, of ongoing and planned work like the Listening Projects.

A while back, john johnson says, MJS organizers made an effort to come up with a comprehensive survey of existing local organizations working against MTR. Obviously we’ve missed people, he says. The group brainstorms for a while about who’s not at the table today and should be contacted.

The inclusiveness problem is not just about getting strangers to the table, but also affects group dynamics among those who are already here. In that connection, john says that he’s an anarchist, not a leader, and notes that there’s no hierarchy in MJS. He acknowledges that the big mouths (himself included) need to make more space for others to speak up—but at the same time everyone else needs to be more aggressive about checking them. We made a mistake over the past few months, he adds, creating the impression that everyone has to completely agree with MJS to work with it. Nonprofit organizations aren’t going to endorse civil disobedience—but even if they don’t sign on officially, many of their members will want to help and should be encouraged to do so.

john adds that he’s uncomfortable with a strict policy of following the lead of coalfield locals, because by itself that won’t necessarily result in straight-up confrontation with coal companies and their profits. He has a responsibility to act on his own principles, he says. He believes he has to act on behalf of his life-support system, the ecology of his home bioregion. But he also believes that we should listen to local voices in sorting out how.

Bo sees the inclusiveness issue as related to the ugly rhetoric about MJS “outsiders” poised to invade the coalfields—and he’s angry about it. Coal companies have used this sort of rhetoric about “outsiders” for a hundred years, he says. “There are no outsiders in America.”

After lunch on Saturday, regional report-backs are full of specific plans for the months ahead. In West Virginia, CRMW has learned that Massey is requesting a permit from the state DEP to build a second coal silo right next to the existing silo beside Marsh Fork Elementary School. CRMW and others are requesting a public hearing on the application; MJS’s schedule for its time in West Virginia this summer should stay loose until they know when that hearing will be scheduled. A Listening Project has begun in the neighborhoods near Marsh Fork Elementary, and letters about the school have been published in Charleston and other West Virginia newspapers. Speaking events with Judy Bonds and other coalfield activists are scheduled not just around the region but around the country. Abe Mwaura’s been busy organizing in Logan County, ordinarily a place very hostile to any efforts to hold coal companies accountable. And OVEC and CRMW are setting up a house in Coal River valley for half a dozen grant-supported summer interns as well as additional traveling MJS activists.

In Tennessee, plans are being made for MJS time in Nashville, in the Knoxville area, and in the coalfields north of Knoxville, near Caryville and Zeb Mountain, including a “variety of ideas” for direct action. In the past month, they’ve been working to get hearings on MTR-related permits, and working on fundraising. Lawyers are being contacted for legal support this summer.

After the meeting is over, I sit down for what becomes a long talk with john johnson about the state of the campaign against MTR and how he came to be so involved in it. He tells me he first heard about MTR in the late 1990s, but at that time he was already stretched pretty thin as an activist and didn’t think he could take on another issue.

“But then we found out about this project on Zeb Mountain” and he thought: “Holy shit, it’s in my backyard now.” Here in Tennessee, john reminds me, “technically it’s ‘cross-ridge’ mining, because they’re going to put the mountain back together, supposedly. If you go to the Office of Surface Mining, [they say] ‘There’s no mountaintop removal in Tennessee.’ But it’s still massive strip mining, and really disgusting.”

Unlike southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, which have seen so much MTR that most of the landscape is now affected by it, in Tennessee so far there are only a few islands of MTR (such as the Zeb Mountain site), with the natural fabric of most of the landscape still sufficiently intact to support normal forest regeneration. MJS’s goal in Tennessee is to keep it that way, to prevent MTR’s spread.

After he found out about Zeb Mountain, john helped arrange to bring Dave Cooper and Judy Bonds to Tennessee for anti-MTR roadshow presentations in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Crossville, alongside himself and other Tennesseans talking about how MTR was moving into Tennessee. More Tennesseans got involved, and they met more people fighting MTR elsewhere in the region.

In 2003, john and two other activists affiliated with Katuah Earth First! blockaded a road at the Zeb Mountain site by locking themselves to large metal drums filled with concrete. (Unfortunately, they’d decided to mix the concrete on site, to avoid having to move large drums full of it. When police arrived, the concrete hadn’t yet set, so disassembling the blockade was ridiculously easy for them. Next time, they’ll know better.)

Then, in August 2004, Jeremy Davidson was killed by MTR operations in Virginia. KEF! “had already been working with some people in that area on [trying to prevent] a timber sale in the Jefferson National Forest.” So when people in Virginia suggested the idea of organizing a protest in response to the boy’s death, KEFers came up and joined in. “The Jeremy Davidson murder was really a big catalyst for [MJS]: Omigod, a three-year-old kid, killed in his sleep by a boulder from a strip mine.”

Around this time, Chris Irwin and others were talking with Sue Daniels, a biologist at Virginia Tech, about the idea of a “Mountain Justice Summer,” a campaign to address MTR the way Mississippi Freedom Summer and Redwood Summer had used nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to address racial injustice and forest destruction. Chris started talking up this idea among KEF! people in Tennessee. Judy and Dave and other folks in West Virginia and Kentucky thought it was a good idea, too. (Sue Daniels provided much of the initial energy and vision for MJS. It was a great shock when, toward the end of 2004, she was killed in a murder-suicide committed by a man who had apparently become personally obsessed with her.)

“If I had my druthers,” john says, noting that Chris Irwin would disagree with him about this, “we’d wait until next year to do MJS, because it would give us more time to organize for it.” Better still, “instead of saying ‘wait until 2006,’ I wish that we’d started thinking about it in 2003,” to be better prepared for doing it now. “It’s a super-pressing issue. But if we had another year, we would be avoiding some of the issues that have come up, about people not feeling good about being invited, and about us not putting enough energy into grassroots organizing.” More time would have made it possible “to build more relationships with more people.” Still, john believes that MJS has now, at this point, got enough of this done to be on track for pulling off a successful summer.

john would like to see more people who have concerns about MJS raise them out in the open, in meetings. And he notes, about “some of the people I’ve been a little worried about,” worried that they’re creating an unhealthy power dynamic within the group, “I’ve heard them acknowledge that we need a bigger tent, and I’ve heard them acknowledge—a little bit, not as much as I’d hoped—that we have to address the power dynamics, and that we have to keep reminding people that we want them to be full participants. And that we want a community of equals, not a community of leaders and followers.” I don’t know this at the time, but later learn that there have been ongoing problems of this sort within KEF!, mostly involving Chris and Paloma.

I note that in this month’s meeting, he and Chris were a lot quieter than in previous meetings. “Yeah. That was totally intentional,” john says. “It’s hard, because we care so much. And it’s not like we have bad ideas. But there does come a time when we have to recognize that we are talking too much, to not just pay lip service to making space for other people but to really make the space. If we have this thing where Paloma says something, Chris says something, I say something, then everyone else says OK, I feel uneasy about it.

“Regardless of all that, I think things are really moving in a good direction. I think we did open up some space this weekend, and I hope that that continues.”

This summer, john says, “I want people to come here and fall in love, and maybe decide to stay. I want to see people [who grew up here and left] come home and fall in love. I want to see people who live here, both in the coalfields and adjacent to the coalfields, become empowered to really challenge King Coal. So I want to see several high-profile, pretty intense, nonviolent direct actions throughout the summer. I want to see a lot of people helping out with grassroots organizing and listening.” And he wants to be able to say at the end of the summer something that can’t honestly be said today: that “mountaintop removal is an internationally recognized environmental issue—and if not quite internationally then a nationally recognized environmental issue,” so that Americans everywhere recognize that “there is a conflict in the coalfields, because the way coal is mined fucks up the land and fucks up people’s lives.”

john believes that the direct action component of MJS is poised to do this “the same way Earth First! created more tension around the logging of the old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest—a lot of people know about that because people blocked roads and sat in trees and occupied offices and raised hell.”

But given the nature of MTR, the total nature of its destruction, way more is at stake, john says, than in the western forests, where forest of some ecological value does grow back even on most clear-cuts. “The mountains are not going to come back. [MTR] is the Final Solution for the forests, and the mountains themselves.”

Meanwhile, at Zeb Mountain, mining is still continuing as fast as NCC wants to do it. “You know,” john says, “we’re probably not going to be able to save that mountain.” But they might make it cost so much to mine it that nobody wants to take other mountains. “We want to send a clear message to the industry that they just can’t get away with this stuff.

“I want to see mass outrage, and public discussion about how electricity is produced and used in this country. MTR is the poster child for everything that is wrong with industrial civilization. And there’s this collective denial in our culture: The president says global warming’s not an issue, so global warming’s not an issue. Global warming needs to be an issue, and all the other environmental issues need to be issues. [Otherwise], at some point, everyone is gonna wake up and say: Oh shit, the ecosystems have collapsed and we’re all gonna die.”

After the meeting in Knoxville, I drive north and catch up with Bo back home in West Virginia. I’ve been thinking about MJS’s potential to encourage a virtuous circle, starting with a few locals like Bo and Judy standing up against MTR, others from elsewhere in the region and outside it joining them and encouraging more locals to stand up, and so on. “That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Bo says. “We’ve been working on trying to get locals organized for a couple years, and it’s like pulling teeth. A lot of the local people are against [MTR]. They just are afraid to speak out.” Bo hopes that getting national news coverage will help a great deal with this. Outside the region, you tell people about Marsh Fork Elementary School and their jaws drop. It’s so egregious. If people here start seeing national coverage of the issue, Bo hopes that will “empower” more of his neighbors to say “You can’t do that!”

He thinks the school is “the right issue” to mobilize anti-MTR sentiment into action. For the next three weeks he and his friend Ed Wiley, who lives a few miles upriver and has a granddaughter attending the school, will be “going door to door, listening to people and talking about the school, to see how they feel about it—and what do they know about it, what do they actually know about the sludge dam above it, what do they actually know about the prep plant, what a prep plant does, and the coal silo, and adding another silo, and the chemicals used, and how much [blasting nearby] can that dam take, the dangers of it.” They’ll hand out free pH testing kits so folks can test the streams by their homes for acid mine runoff. And they’ll ask people if they’d be willing to go door to door and talk about this themselves, or hold a sign up at the school: “Will you stand next to me, and stand up for your child and other children on this river? Because it’s their future. And if we allow it to continue—shame on us, because it’s our responsibility as adults to protect our kids, whether the government’s doing it or not.

“If the government’s turned its back on us, and they’re not going to protect us, we have to protect ourselves. They’re forcing us to be revolutionaries. I hate using words like that. But they are not protecting us. We don’t get the same protections other citizens do.

“We’re all Americans. Look at how many Americans from West Virginia have volunteered in times of crisis and died—per capita, more folks from West Virginia have died in wars than any other state. There’s no such thing as an outsider in America. We’re all in this together. And we’d better start standing up together, because the corporations are taking our country over.”

The “outsider” propaganda directed against MJS this year plays to a deep-rooted and well-founded suspicion of outsiders here, where there’s such a long and pervasive history of outsiders coming in and taking over land and coal and timber rights. Bo points out the obvious counter to that: “If you want to talk about outsiders, let’s talk about the coal companies,” most of whose executives and stockholders live far from the coalfields. “They’re all outsiders. Look at the big four-wheel-drive trucks going up and down the road here along the Coal River—they’re from Virginia, from Kentucky, more and more from Ohio. They’re bringing in outsiders to displace our workers. Because our workers don’t like this” kind of mining, the destruction it entails. The coal companies manage to turn the “outsider” label to their advantage only because “they work on this twenty-four hours a day, three shifts. They have many people, we have few, and we’re going in a lot of different directions.

“The organizations fighting MTR have been doing a protest here, and then six months later ‘Hey, let’s go over there and protest,’ and let’s write this, let’s fight this permit and that permit. I think we need to focus as one whole group of people that comes together, that sees an injustice and says ‘We’re gonna concentrate on this and nothing else, and we’re gonna get a victory here.’” Bo believes that their best shot at such a victory is at Marsh Fork Elementary School “because it’s so atrocious. And I think it’s winnable—and if we can’t win that one, we’re not gonna win any of them.

“I would like to see an awakening in America that there’s something wrong not just in West Virginia but there’s something wrong in Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia—and Pennsylvania and Ohio. As a matter of fact, there’s something wrong everywhere. When it comes to mineral extraction, humans that are in the way are being screwed.

“We need a thought revolution,” Bo says. “A military revolution’s not going to do it. We can’t defeat the government. We have to change people’s minds.”

Bo recently did a presentation on MTR with Julian Martin of the Highlands Conservancy, one of the mainstream groups that MJS hasn’t quite got inside its tent. “Julian said it real well: If you’ve got to blow up a mountain, that’s not acceptable. If you gotta get the coal, do it underground, responsibly. But this is not acceptable, this has to stop, and if we have to turn off the lights to stop doing that, then that’s what we’re gonna have to do.” Actually, MTR provides a small enough percentage of coal used that conservation measures could easily make up for it: We don’t have to turn all the lights off, only the ones we don’t really need anyway.

“MTR is for profit,” Bo adds. “End story. There’s no other reason for it. And if coal companies had to pay for the environmental impact and all the cleanup, of course it wouldn’t be profitable. If corporations have the same rights as citizens, let’s make sure they have the same responsibilities as citizens.

“I do believe that in the end the truth will win. I believe that if you can explain the truth, and get it out there, in the end it will win. And if I thought it wouldn’t win, I’d go start shooting the bastards. Tomorrow.

“You’ve gotta be optimistic to do what we’re doing [with MJS]. We haven’t got anywhere doing it the same way. We’ve got to make a bold change in direction. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what direction to take other than this [civil disobedience campaign]. And I’m trusting that the American people, when they see this, are gonna go: ‘This isn’t right.’ And maybe they will even start understanding that they’re living in slave cities. They’re slaves to the man, too. Maybe we’ll create an uprising all over.”

May passes in a blur of activity mostly aimed at getting ready for and recruiting people to come to the MJS training camp at the end of the month, and at getting the campaign up and running with actions in West Virginia. Dozens of intake forms for people seeking to attend camp are processed; one sent by a West Virginia state trooper apparently seeking to infiltrate the camp is screened out. Fundraisers are held, volunteer lawyers are lined up, logistics for the rest of the summer begin to be sorted out, state water testing protocols are researched, and plans for the campaign’s time in each state take shape. Farther afield, Project Censored begins following MTR among its “news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country’s major national news media.” In mid-May, hits on the MJS website pass the 10,000 mark.

During this time, I talk with Chris Irwin about how he became an activist, and how he sees the summer ahead.

“My family’s from east Tennessee,” he tells me. “We’ve been here in Knoxville for six generations.” When Chris was 13, he and his immediate family moved for a few years to West Virginia. Where they lived, near Charleston, “was such a weird combination of massive pollution [from chemicals emitted by industry along the river] and natural beauty. I hated it. The river caught on fire” while he was living there. One time when it rained, the rain ate the paint off their car. Every family he knew had someone with cancer. “And then when cancer started eating my stepfather, inside and out” he found it “unbearable” to be at home, “so I just grabbed my books and I was outdoors constantly,” in the forest near his home. “Then they clear-cut all that forest. And I realized everything was really messed up.”

After Chris’s stepfather died, he and his mother moved back to Tennessee. He started reading about environmental groups and issues. (“Every high school had the guy who wore an Army jacket, lived in the library, and played chess, the quiet geek reader,” and Chris was one of those.) He read more and more through college. He started going to environmental protests and was arrested twice in antinuclear protests at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He joined the Peace Corps and went to West Africa. In the late 1990s, he hopped trains to the Pacific Northwest, where he met Paloma in 1998, when they were both in jail after a forest action. By then he was involved with Earth First!

“[Paloma]” swore she’d never leave the Northwest. I told her I would stay. She saw me mourning my bioregion after a while and gave in, said: Alright, I’ll try the South out for a while.”

A few years ago, in what had become Chris’s practice of monitoring Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation permits (he’d been involved in fighting certain state road-building projects, which require permits from TDEC), “I started getting these cross-ridge mining permits for Zeb Mountain,” saw that “they were turning these streams into industrial drainage ditches,” and wondered why. “I hadn’t heard about mountaintop removal at that point.

“Then I went to this action camp,” in Kentucky in 2002. Larry Gibson spoke there about Kayford, and afterward Chris told Larry about the permits at Zeb. Larry said “he’d seen that before, and here’s what’s going to happen next” in the sequence of destruction that plays out on MTR sites.

So Chris “read everything I could get my hands on, on what was going on in West Virginia.” MTR, Chris saw, was “coming south, following the coalfields.”

By then, Chris, john johnson, and KEF! generally were involved in fighting timber sales on exceptionally biodiverse National Forest land in far southwestern Virginia, at the edge of the same coalfields through which MTR was progressing toward Tennessee. In August 2004, Chris asked a guy he knew there to help him scout and understand MTR in Virginia—and a few days before they were to do this, Jeremy Davidson was killed there.

Chris drove by the Davidsons’ house with his friend, “and we talked about it the whole weekend.” Chris’s friend set up a community meeting, “and they said ‘let’s have a march’” through the town of Appalachia. Chris, back in Knoxville, publicized the march through KEF! and other channels. Dozens of KEFers came from Tennessee and North Carolina, and so did Judy Bonds and other anti-MTR activists from West Virginia and Kentucky. At least 200 people showed up, Chris says. “Coal miners showed up. They led the march.” Chris has focused on fighting MTR, and on organizing the Mountain Justice Summer campaign, ever since.

“I think what will happen [as a result of MJS] is one of these states—I think Tennessee is most likely, because we’re not owned by the coal industry—will pass something that will kill [large-scale strip mining].” Chris believes this will happen through pressure being put on the governor and legislators. “We want [MJS] to appear large and scary to the governor, to the general assembly, and to National Coal.” He thinks chances for banning MTR in Tennessee are good “especially if we can form coalitions with hunters and four-wheelers and fishermen. The environmental community’s not going to do it [alone]. If it ends up being just a bunch of tree-huggers, then we’re going to lose.” If Tennessee does pass such a measure, “I think maybe Kentucky will follow suit.

“So many people through miseducation have been pacified into thinking they can’t fight back. Sometimes all it takes is an example of a few people who successfully do fight back and show that that’s not true. Thoreau said that ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ I think everyone is living that right now. Everyone knows things are really messed up, but we’ve all been pacified into thinking that resistance is impossible—especially people in the coalfields. Not only can we fight back, but we outnumber the bastards ninety to ten, which is one of the secrets they don’t want us to know. And fighting back is a lot of fun. And it’s healthy. Edward Abbey said that the antidote to despair is direct action. It’s not psychologically healthy for us to just internalize things and not fight back.

“A lot of people think that we’re all conservative in these hills. I get that impression from these [activist] groups that are—I hate to say it but often from the North. It’s a form of classism. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told, basically: ‘These dumb hillbillies don’t understand direct action. They’ll just freak out, and they’re super-conservative.’ But when you talk to them, you find out that they were using their pickup trucks to blockade [against mining companies during the strip mining boom of the 1970s]. They think that petitions and stuff are bullshit, but they recognize when you are using your body to lock yourself to the equipment and shut down mines. Too many people, especially college-educated people, have this Beverly Hillbillies crap in their mind.” And the coal companies will use this, telling local people that these “outsiders” coming in “want to destroy your community.”

Before leaving Tennessee, I revisit the woods near Caryville. It looks like early summer down in the valley by the highway now, but up here it’s still spring. Maples are leafed out, oaks showing only reddish leaves. Blackberries are just coming into bloom. The night after I was last here, in April, an ice storm came through and froze the early growth off the trees up on top of the mountain but not down in the valley. The trees and shrubs up here have had to start over with leafing and haven’t yet caught up.

I hear lots of birdsong this morning. The warbler migration has already come through—what I hear today are summer residents wrapping up their mating season and beginning to raise their young. A swarm of tadpoles is swimming in a puddle in the middle of the trail. I see elk prints (similar to whitetail deer but quite a bit larger) in the mud here, but no elk.

Under the thickening forest canopy, the spring ephemeral wild-flower show is mostly over now: I see two fading yellow trilliums, some yellow buttercuppy flowers, patches of purple violets, purple geranium. May apple is now blooming, and a few white anemone. A glorious diversity of herbs has emerged from the forest floor since my last visit, many leaf sizes and shapes and plant habits. And now that the trees have leafed out, I can more fully appreciate their diversity too: buckeyes, maples, oaks, cherry trees, shagbark hickories, tulip poplars, pines. Trees of various ages tell me this forest hasn’t been clear-cut in many decades, if ever, although stumps here and there and the lack of any really old trees affirm that it has been selectively logged.

Elk, tadpoles, wildflowers, birds, and diverse hardwoods tell me that even though this area has been logged repeatedly, and patches of it have been strip mined, the logging was selective enough to leave much of the soil intact and the mining was small-scale and patchy. Enough of the fabric of life here has remained intact for this rich, resilient ecosystem to heal itself and support most of the species that lived here before humans began altering this landscape.

Jim Massengill has told me that for generations local families owned and hung onto and managed much of the forest around here for timber so that it would continue to be an intact forest that could be selectively harvested in the future. He’s deeply offended by the wave of careless logging going on in the region now. My first thought about this logging was that it must be the leading edge of mountaintop removal coming in. In fact, heedless clear-cutting began here in the late 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s as chip mills moved into the region, spreading north and inland from the coastal pinelands much as MTR is now spreading south from southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Where the two creeping catastrophes meet, an ugly synergy is created: If there’s little point in saving trees for their potential gain in value, when the only market you foresee is a chip mill, there’s even less point in saving any when the land is about to be blown up under them. Prices for the low-grade wood fit only for chip mills are low right now, though—low enough that, as I’ve seen, sometimes timber clear-cut off MTR sites is simply burned or bulldozed aside. This makes a lot of people who love these forested mountains sick—and mad as hell.

A few days later, back in West Virginia, in Naoma, near where Bo lives, I stop by the house that’s just been rented for the summer internship program. There I talk with Hillary Hosta, who’ll be living there and managing things this summer. Plans for the program are focused along the Coal River and up the still-inhabited hollows branching up from the river. The hope is that once people elsewhere in West Virginia’s coalfields see what’s happening here, CRMW and OVEC and other activists will start hearing from them about what they want to do in their own areas and how the developing network of activists can help.

Hillary was born in Los Angeles and moved to Canada with her family when she was twelve. In the mid-1990s, when Hillary was still in college, she attended the first Ruckus camp, an activist gathering arranged by a founding Earth Firster, Mike Roselle. Five weeks later, Hillary hung her first banner, off a bridge in Seattle, and has continued as an activist ever since.

She moved to Appalachia this spring, and she’s falling in love. “The landscape I am definitely loving,” she says. “It’s growing on me, very much. But it’s the people who really, in a way, have broken my heart. Because you fall in love with them, and then your heart is broken because of what they’re dealing with daily.”

Hillary thinks change will begin to happen “when people here are aware that this relationship [between local Appalachians and coal companies] is inequitable and unnecessary. Many people here really feel like there are only two options: They live with this abuse and receive very, very little in return. Or they don’t live with this abuse, they receive nothing, and they will have to leave their homes because they will have nothing. And then the coal companies can just come back in after they’re gone, and strip it all. And they really don’t believe that there’s another option, and that’s what so sad.”

Coal River valley is “simmering” right now, Hillary says. “Maybe it’s been simmering for some time, and I just got here and am noticing the undercurrents. Maybe people have been bubbling for a long time and just haven’t had the spark, the event hasn’t happened that’s really made it bubble up over the top.

“Marsh Fork Elementary could be that [spark]. I think that’s asking a lot from Marsh Fork as a campaign tool. I think that Marsh Fork will help us gain momentum, grow in size, grow the ranks of coalfield residents who have had enough. I think Marsh Fork is [also] a tool that can be used effectively to reach out to other people in the nation and the world. What makes it a beautiful campaign tool is how horrible, how terrible, what an atrocity it really is.

“One of our challenges is going to be when people from the outside world [who’ve learned about Marsh Fork] come in here and go: Why are you standing for this? Why are you taking this? Why is this happening? People [here] will want to defend their position—just like a wife will defend her [abusive] husband.” What Bo calls the slave mentality, Hillary sees as the mentality of a battered woman defeated by her circumstances.

Recently Hillary watched Matewan, the John Sayles movie about coal miners’ struggle for a decent life in Appalachia early in the twentieth century. She was struck by how “the power dynamics in the relationship between coal and these communities has not changed at all,” and how then as now coal companies used much the same rhetoric about “outsiders” (then, mostly exploiting ethnic differences) to divide people who might otherwise be allies. “They’re using that tactic today, using already-existing cultural prejudices and differences and fear about one another. Fear: the all-powerful tool of oppression. They’re using fear of loss of economic stability, fear of loss of [jobs] to divide the community so that they don’t unite and rise up as one to resist the oppression. Because they would win. Because the possibility of the power dynamic shifting [would] exist then.”

Using fear this way also deflects anger at the coal companies toward other targets—toward those outsiders. “They’re using the same tools because they still work. They’re putting out propaganda saying: Oooh, be afraid of the ecoterrorists. These beautiful people who’ve given of themselves to do public service, some for ten years or more. Beautiful, harmless people who care about community and the world they live in. And they are putting the label ‘terrorist’ on them. It’s really outrageous. And then they’re hitting on the really cheap points where they know that there are social hang-ups that people have with one another,” such as with hairstyle and clothing. “They’re saying you need to be afraid about these differences, so you should be afraid of these people. They’re using stereotypes that are easy homeruns for them because they’re already there. The Birkenstock-wearing, patchouli-smelling hippies that don’t pay taxes—those are some pretty strong stereotypes. It’s not difficult for them to reinforce.”

Hillary doesn’t intend to remain an “outsider” here—she hopes she can stay for a while. Since she was eighteen, she’s never stayed in any one place for more than ten months. But funding for the Naoma house and intern project runs out in September, and she says, “I need to be able to sustain myself. I own nothing. I don’t own a TV. I don’t own a bed. I would like to stay here beyond September, because I have so many campaign ideas. So many. They go beyond what I can accomplish in three months. And I do care about this place. I’d like to be here maybe for a few years working.”

Judy Bonds recently attended a formative meeting for a new organization, Christians for the Mountains. “We talked about the need to have [churches] and religious leaders play a part in the care of the Creation,” she tells me. “The care of the Creation is on the back burner [for most churches in America], and I’ve noticed a move on the religious right side [toward playing] a part in this. And I’m just thrilled. I believe that that is the salvation of the religious right. The religious right now is absolutely going against Jesus’s teachings. And it breaks my heart. Not only that, it makes me ashamed. They actually are turning people away from Christianity instead of bringing people into the fold. A lot of activists have lost their faith because of the religious right. I’ve tried to tell people in the religious community: There’s a lot of people out there who think we’re hypocrites. [Where] the teachings of Jesus of love and understanding, caring for the sick and the elderly, caring for the people that are in prison, people that are lost [are concerned], it’s as though the religious right has been hijacked by Satan.

“I honestly think that God cares a lot about that Creation—not just man, but everything He created. Everything in the Bible tells me so,” Judy says. The Bible says that after God created everything else but not yet humankind, he looked around and saw that it was good. “Genesis 9:12 is one of my favorite scriptures,” she says. “God said this is a covenant made between you and me and every living thing on Earth for perpetual generations—not just between myself and man, for now. I don’t just care about man. I care about every living creature on this Earth. I think man has ignored that because of his own greed.”

Judy was raised Free-Will Baptist. “Of course as I got older I went on my way and forgot about the church. I always believed in God, I always was a Christian, but it was something that didn’t cut into my everyday life. This journey [fighting MTR] has taken me right back into my spirituality and to my Christianity. I truly believe that for any type of movement, particularly environmental movement, to gain momentum and to present its case effectively to the people of America, Christianity and the religious aspect [have] to be a part of it. I truly think there has to be a movement within the religious community to join in for this to work and for us to save this Earth, our children’s future, God’s Creation, and our souls. I truly believe that.”

Judy believes that Americans today are “a generation that’s addicted to comfort, to instant gratification, addicted to technology, addicted to everything that makes their life really easy,” all of which creates a barrier, a buffer between the comfort-seeking individual and the natural world. “And I do think it’s designed to be that way,” she says, “particularly with the TV dumbing people down, particularly our children. All the games and technology that children have is to take their minds off nature and get back to what’s ‘really important,’ and it keeps them in the house.

“I would like to bring Earth First! and the religious community closer together. Earth First! are doing God’s work, they just don’t realize it and they won’t acknowledge it. I know a lot of people think this is funny.” Judy doesn’t. She respects the spirituality of john johnson, for example, and wants some of the legitimacy associated with conventional religion to rub off on Earth First!, which she thinks gets an unfairly bad rap. Judy believes that the pagan Earth Firsters doing God’s work are going to have a much easier time of it with God in the next world than, say, the operator in Tennessee who hangs a giant “Jesus is Lord” sign on his coal silo.

“I’ve seen the look on some Earth Firsters’ faces when you talk about God. But no matter where I go, I’m going to talk about the care of the Creation, because that’s who I am. And when you quote Genesis [about the covenant between God and humankind and all the other creatures on Earth], you can see something in their eyes go: ‘What? What? It says that in the Bible? That’s pretty radical stuff.’”

In the 1990s, Judy and other anti-MTR activists could plausibly believe that momentum on this issue was going their way. Joe Lovett’s lawsuits were resulting in settlements and rulings that, it seemed, would start to rein in MTR. Even in West Virginia’s notoriously pro-coal state government, in spring 2001 a fellow named Matt Crum took charge of the DEP’s enforcement of environmental regulations violated by coal companies in West Virginia. Crum actually enforced the law—for example, by encouraging inspectors to shut down mining operations responsible for blackwater spills (spills of chemical-laden liquid waste from processing coal) until they fixed the problem causing the spill. In the past, inspectors had felt pressured to turn a blind eye to such violations.

Around this time, Judy recalls, “We [anti-MTR activists] had decided: Now is the time for civil disobedience, and people of faith need to be the first people to do this. We all agreed on that, and we were in the process of picking a place, and the perfect site, and the perfect circumstance for this to happen—because you don’t just pull something out of your hat.” And then terrorists took down the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. “It set everything back. It seemed like that was all everyone could think about. The newspapers, the media paid no attention to anything but 9/11.”

Still, she was anxious to move forward with their plans. MTR was continuing, accelerating, and delay meant more and more destruction. “I was impatient, and everyone said no, now’s not the time to do this, let’s just wait a while. So we got back into our comfort zone—fighting permits, going to permit hearings, a lawsuit.”

By 2003, Judy and other anti-MTR activists knew that testifying at hearings was getting them nowhere, and that anti-MTR lawsuit results were apt to be overturned on appeal. By then, it was also increasingly obvious that the Bush administration was failing to live up to previous settlements and apparently hellbent on weakening the mining regulations that they already were systematically failing to enforce. At the state level, things looked no better: In August 2003, incoming DEP head Stephanie Timmermeyer fired Matt Crum and restored cozier relations between the DEP and coal companies.

Matters did not improve in 2004. Apparently not content with failing to enforce the stream-buffer-zone rule, in January 2004 the Bush administration proposed changing the rule to grant mining companies variances that would let them off the hook if they tried not to mine closer than 100 feet from streams “to the extent possible, using the best technology currently available.” The best technology imaginable can’t make it practical to stay a hundred feet from a stream if a valley fill is planned, so in effect what the Bush administration was proposing was to exempt mountaintop removal operations from the buffer rule.

The pattern of anti-MTR legal rulings heading for slapdown on appeal continued through 2004 as well. Back in October 2003, Joe Lovett had filed suit in federal court seeking to bar the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing any more of its Nationwide 21 permits for any proposed MTR operations, regardless of the size of the proposed valley fill. (Both CRMW and OVEC were parties to this suit.) In July 2004, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin ruled that such permits violate the Clean Water Act and could no longer be used anywhere in his district, the Southern District of West Virginia. In September, the Bush administration announced that it would appeal Judge Goodwin’s ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the Corps was failing to obey Judge Goodwin’s ruling, and the judge refused Joe Lovett’s motions to compel them to do so.

In November 2004, President George W. Bush won re-election. The coal industry could count on four more years of proven friends in power in Washington. Judy and others fighting MTR couldn’t afford to wait those four years out. MTR was destroying their home places. They needed to act now. And so the Mountain Justice Summer campaign began.

The coming summer is filled with unknowns, and Judy is reluctant to predict how it might turn out. “The biggest vision I have is bringing it to a national level, working the religious component, working with Mountain Justice Summer and all the [volunteers from] different states coming in,” while she and Bo and Dave Cooper and others continue to work the roadshow outside the coalfields. “I see all these components working together. I’m not placing my hopes on one thing. You have to make them all happen, and they have to fit together.”

Judy would like to see MJS in West Virginia drop banners and stealthily put signs in strategic places—“because, believe me, people in the coalfields appreciate humor, and appreciate a little bit of an outlaw, people who dare to stand up.” This shouldn’t really be seen as “outlaw” behavior, but instead as free people being free to express themselves openly. In the coalfields that makes you somewhat an outlaw. “A lot of people, particularly if they’re not from Appalachia, have not figured out that central Appalachia’s a banana republic, plain and simple. It is not like being in America. The same rules do not apply.” That’s why the effort to bring national attention to mountaintop removal and all its ill effects is so important. If Americans outside the region understand that this is happening in America, Judy and other coalfield activists hope and believe that good people everywhere will find that unacceptable and won’t allow it to continue.

Judy has believed for years that civil disobedience is a key for bringing this to national attention. “We know we’re taking a chance,” she says, “but what else do you do? If you continue to do what you have done,” plug along in your activist comfort zone of writing letters and going to permit hearings, “and you come up against a stone wall, and every option that you have is blocked, you’ve got to go to the next step. We’ve run out of options. And so it’s come to MJS.”

I ask Judy how is it that she, unlike most of her neighbors, is willing to stick her neck out and fight MTR? “It was the protection of my family, my grandson and daughter, that got me involved in this. And my home place. And the outrage and the anger. The outrage turned to anger then back to outrage then to frustration and anger again. Then it led to understanding, and education. Every morning I’d wake up with coal dirt on my car. And then I got to looking in my house and the coal dirt was everywhere. It permeated everything. And then I got to thinking: Does everybody live like this? And then I educated myself and I became even more outraged.

“My mother was a very strong Appalachian woman, very outspoken.” Both of her grandmothers “were also very strong, very outspoken.” She attributes this partly to Cherokee culture, as her Scotch-Irish ancestor who first came to this region, before most Native Americans were forced out, married a Cherokee woman “and Cherokee women had a lot of autonomy. When she married into the Scotch-Irish family, she lost that public autonomy, that public respect, that public place of leadership.” But not necessarily in private. Judy thinks that Cherokee background is what drives a lot of the Appalachian women involved in the fight against MTR, as many of them count Cherokee women among their ancestors. “I’d always heard there’s an old saying in Cherokee, and it’s Appalachian [too], that while the men sat around the campfire and talked about what to do, the women got out and done it.”

On the other hand, she says she blames “a lot of this materialistic culture on women. The men like the power and the profit. But for a man to keep that trophy wife, he has to provide that trophy with all the beautiful trimmings. And she craves that. I’ve noticed a lot of the women of the coal miners [want] tanning beds and diamond rings and fancy cars and fancy shoes, plenty of clothes. I know that, because I was there once. There’s never enough—always more, more, more, more.”

Judy knows her Cherokee ancestors and her anger at how her home and family have been affected are good reasons why she should fight against MTR, but they don’t fully explain why she has devoted her life to this. What sent her down this path remains, ultimately, a mystery. “I don’t know. I just feel compelled to do it. I try to touch it, but it’s something I can’t touch. It escapes my grasp, every time I try to touch it. Now I can’t ever go back. Because I know the truth now.

“You’re not going to get every coalfield person, just like you’re not going to get every American.” In a way, though, Judy and her colleagues have already “got” most of their coalfield neighbors—most people know that MTR is not a good thing. The hard part is “getting them active, motivated to do something.”

I ask Judy whether she thinks that maybe everyone involved in MJS or any kind of activist work that seeks to change the world is a misfit in some way. We’re not comfortable with things the way they are, and that makes us more prone to act than our neighbors, who for whatever reason are better able to go along with the status quo.

“I think they’re the misfits,” she says. “I think we’re the normal people. They’ve caught a disease, and they’re not even aware of that. They’re addicted to comfort.” Looking at the big picture, Judy’s right—only for a few decades out of all of human history has even the minority of humans in the fully industrialized world been able to view such a level of consumption as “normal,” and this won’t last. Their grandchildren won’t live like they do. “We’re trying to change that [mindset] before they get a rude awakening,” she says. Changing that mindset and lifestyle before the resources needed to make that change are desperately depleted “is a lot easier than doing it [like] Mad Max.

“We’re reaching out to college students, and trying to get the college students to reach out to the high school students because they’re the ones going to be faced with this awful future of no resources and a mess to clean up.” Judy’s also trying to reach parents. “We’re selling our children’s feet to buy ourselves fancy shoes.”

It’s ironic that people seen by much of the rest of the world as ignorant hillbillies are so far ahead of most Americans in understanding this. Judy points this out when she’s doing roadshows. After explaining to the audience why it’s important to pass the Clean Water Protection Act (which would affirm that the law against burying streams applies to mining), she’ll say: ‘I think it’s awful ironic that us ignorant hillbillies have to teach America about the Clean Water Act and the importance of having clean water.’ Some people find it funny. Some people don’t find it funny. And some people—it goes over their head.”

Appalachia, because it’s been passed by and in many ways left behind by mainstream modern culture, retains remnants of older culture useful for making a transition to ways of living well that don’t depend on far-reaching consumption and destruction. Part of this is local lore about subsistence, about hunting and gardening and the wealth of edible and medicinal plants and other renewable resources in the woods here. But part also is habits of mind and living that don’t depend on spending money. For example, entertainment is traditionally seen here as something you do for yourself and the people you know, not something you buy. This was the way it was “for eons, until the industrialized world came,” Judy says. “People did entertain themselves. Setting on a porch, in a swing, or just setting there listening to the birds. Looking at the wildlife. Going for a walk. Walking up the road and saying ‘Hi, how’re you doing, neighbor?’ Talking to your neighbor and looking out for your neighbor’s children. It doesn’t exist anymore except in a very few places in the country, particularly here. Here you can still see people setting on porches and talking.” That it still exists here is because corporate America didn’t deem Appalachia important enough to fully commercialize life here as it has elsewhere. There are no shopping malls or multiplexes along Coal River. That there’s anything of the older way of life here, that it hasn’t been displaced as it has elsewhere in the country, is an accident of neglect. “Lucky us.” Judy isn’t being ironic. She really means it.