Читать книгу Mountain Justice - Tricia Shapiro - Страница 8
ОглавлениеA New Movement
There’s been a school at the site of Marsh Fork Elementary since the 1940s. When Judy Bonds was a student there, in the mid-1960s, it was a middle school. She remembers that the school was rebuilt after being partly destroyed by fire in the 1950s, then rebuilt and expanded after another fire in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It became an elementary school in the 1990s.
The school is the lone survivor in the Coal River valley of a series of school closings and consolidations that began in the late 1960s, in tandem with depopulation of the valley after the mostly boom years in coal mining—from the 1940s to the early 1960s—ended. Depopulation accelerated in the 1980s as MTR began, as many families were forced from their homes by mining operations or lost their jobs to mechanization and out-of-state hiring. What population remains here now is concentrated along Rt. 3, as most of the hollows along the streams that feed, or formerly fed, the Coal River have been taken over by MTR operations.
When Judy was in middle school, the high school football team played on what is now Marsh Fork Elementary School’s athletic field. On nights when games were played, you couldn’t find a place to park within a mile of the school along Rt. 3. “Friday night football was really big,” Judy remembers. “Not everybody went to the same church, but everybody went to the same school. The school was a real close tie, for our sense of community.
“When I went to school here, there was no mining around this school whatsoever. [At] football games, you could look up on the hill and see people with bonfires up there watching the football game from the top of the mountain. It was kind of comforting to look up there and see those people standing up there.” Now that mountainside is off-limits to all but Massey employees working the enormous mountaintop removal site just over the ridge.
That MTR site feeds coal to the Goals Coal prep plant, a Massey subsidiary, where coal is washed with water and chemicals by the river right next to the school. Coal moving along the prep plant’s conveyor belts and into and out of its coal silo sheds dust and chemicals into the air just 150 feet from the school grounds. The byproduct of the coal’s washing, called slurry or sludge—black goo laden with toxins—gets pumped up into the 2.8 billion gallon slurry pond back behind the 385-foot earthen dam that looms over the plant and the school.
Construction on the dam began in 1985. “Of course I did not know that in ’85,” Judy says. “A lot of people did not know that dam existed—thought it was a few buildings up there, and they’s loading coal up there. I didn’t find out about that dam until 1997 or 1998, when I found out about the one [down the river] at Marfork [and] someone said: ‘Well, don’t you know there’s a dam over the elementary school?’
“The coal companies really do not want anyone to see what they’re doing, don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in Appalachia. It’s as though we’re the coal companies’ private serfdom. And that’s how they treat us: ‘How dare you! Don’t look at that.’”
If you did dare to look, if you hiked up through what was left of the mountains here in 2005 and picked your way through the mine sites, here’s what you would have seen: A long tramp through woods gets you to a long drainage ditch that feeds into the sludge pond. (Yes, the pond collects rainwater runoff from the mine site as well as sludge from the prep plant. No, this is not a safe design.) Follow the ditch downhill, clamber over the Massey access road that circles the pond (watch out for trucks on patrol), and continue along the ditch to where it empties into the sludge pond. Seen from maybe a quarter mile back from the dam, the top of the dam’s wall looks pretty high above where you’re standing—exactly how high is hard to guess, though, since scale is hard to reckon on enormous MTR sites devoid of natural features. The pond—a lake, really—is irregularly shaped and too big for you to see all of it at once when you’re standing at the edge. Where you’re standing, trees line the edge of the pond. The top layer of liquid on the sludge pond is oily, black, opaque, ugly.
If there’s blasting today anywhere nearby, you’ll surely feel it here. Blasting at the MTR site behind Bo’s house a while back shook Ed Wiley’s house several miles up the river. Since that blasting took place about midway between Ed’s house and this sludge pond, Ed worries that what rattled his house might also have damaged the dam. In addition, a great deal of other blasting has taken place much closer to the pond.
In some places, dead trees stick out of the pond near its edge, having been submerged as the pond filled. As the trees rot, they’ll break off and could clog the overflow system intended to ease liquid out of the pond during times when runoff from rain is heavy. If that system gets clogged, the uncontrolled rush of water could overwhelm the dam. This and other potential dam-failure scenarios worry parents enough that some won’t send their kids to school on days when heavy rain is forecast.
On your way to and from the sludge pond, you’ll pass by active mine sites with miners at work. But not very many miners. This whole mining complex, including the sludge pond, the prep plant by the school, and all the 1,849 acres of surface mine sites feeding it, employs perhaps 60 to 80 workers. Maybe twenty to twenty-five more miners work in a nearby underground mine that also feeds the prep plant. Surprisingly, you don’t see much coal being taken out of the strip sites. Most of the thick, easy-to-reach coal seams were mined out of Appalachia long ago. The seams you’ll see exposed here now are thinner and seem hardly worth the effort of removing hundreds of feet of mountain to reach them. Still, they work these sites 24-7, using floodlights at night. (If you’re leaving the sludge pond toward sunset, pause where you can look back down on it to see the reflected sunlight off the sludge, a spectacularly unnatural and oddly beautiful effect.) You ought to be well camouflaged and careful as you pass by the active sites, as security tends to be more vigilant there, where there’s so much expensive equipment vulnerable, than at the sludge pond.
Back in the woods you’ll see a great deal of dust, in the air and on the ground, with no evidence of either current or recent spraying of water to keep dust down as required by mining permits. The trees that you’re walking among will probably be gone soon, likely burned rather than harvested for lumber or even firewood. Wasted forest, wasted mountains and hollows and streams. Only the memory remains of places that used to be here—Clay’s Branch, Shumate Hollow—places where hundreds of local people, many now displaced from their former homes, grew up exploring and hunting.
At 11:30 AM on Tuesday, May 24, 2005, about two dozen people have gathered in front of Marsh Fork Elementary School, clustered under a big oak tree that looks like it’s dying—perhaps poisoned by the particulates and chemicals emitted by the prep plant next door. It’s raining when I arrive, but it soon stops.
Reporters have been invited here today, and Bo Webb tries out his talking-to-media spiel on me: “I’m here because for the past year and a half—gosh, longer than that—we’ve been trying to bring attention to the abuses of these kids at the school by this mine company. We’ve gone to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the county health department, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the governor’s office, the county school board, the state school board, and the federal EPA, various politicians—and they keep passing the buck.
“We filed [under the] Freedom of Information Act for the MSHA reports on the sludge dam. I’ve got some of them with me. The dam has various leaks. The toe of the dam is leaking, which is one of the most dangerous places. The downstream foundation of the dam is leaking. There’s widespread leaks all over the dam, and we think it’s time to stand up and get attention. Someone is not doing their job. They’re either being paid off by the coal company, they’re intimidated by the coal company, or they don’t want to stop progress—or maybe they just do not want to admit that the school’s here. But it’s not just the schoolkids that are in danger [according to] these MSHA reports. It’s everyone downstream. That dam’s holding back 2.8 billion gallons, and there’s a lot of lives that they’re playing Russian roulette with here. So that’s why I’m here today.
“I want a government that has the authority—and I believe the federal EPA has the authority—to shut down this mine site, shut down that dam, dry it out, cap it, and throw them [Massey] out of here. They should not be allowed to mine in this state. They have more violations, Massey Energy does, than all other coal companies combined in West Virginia. I think that they have lost the right to mine coal in this state, in my opinion. Anyone that abuses these kids like they have been doing should be shut down. If [another company] wants at some future date to mine coal underground up there, responsibly, we would not be opposed to that. But we want the kids moved out of that school, we want the school torn down because it is laden with chemicals and toxins, and we want another school built up the road, upstream.”
Most of the people here today are longtime locals, like Bo, but some “outsiders” are here to support them, including Hillary and the interns now living just up the road in Naoma, as well as a carload from Tennessee—Chris and Paloma, Gena (one of Chris’s fellow law students, very active in the fight against MTR in Tennessee), and john johnson, whose role today is to provide security for cars.
CRMW’s Patty Sebok arrived here early today, she tells me, and soon afterward a car carrying two state troopers pulled up. (State police told CRMW the day before that they’d be there, to make sure the demonstrators were safe from traffic on the road, which typically travels quite fast.) “I showed them the pictures [aerial views of the sludge pond looming over the school] and I started telling them the story about what sits behind the school and what’s going on.
“They said that they had heard rumors that there was a camp going on, an action camp,” referring apparently to the weeklong MJS training camp that’s to begin near Pipestem, West Virginia, this evening. “And they said that they were concerned because they heard it was the ‘earth movement people.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know who the earth movement people are, and he said, ‘Well, they blow up power lines and things like that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to blow up the power line—I wouldn’t have any power!’ And he started laughing, and kind of got relaxed a little bit. And he said, ‘You all are our people,’ and I said ‘That’s right.’”
Debbie Jarrell, Ed Wiley’s wife, tells me: “I’ve lived here all my life. Generations of my family have lived here. I have a ten-year-old granddaughter inside the [school] building right now. The reason we’re here is not only the slurry pond, not only the prep plant, or the silo, or them wanting to put another silo right beside that. How much poison do our kids need? It’s time for the community to put their foot down. And that’s why I’m here.”
Melissa Beckner moved here only about four years ago, she tells me. Her daughter goes to this school. “She had the little childhood sicknesses, but she never was really sick until she started kindergarten [here] last year, and she has been sick ever since. She has to take [medication] for allergies and asthma, she keeps a headache, she keeps a sore throat, a stomachache. And I didn’t know, I thought it was just her,” until Ed and Debbie told her about other kids at the school being sick. And not just the kids are sick. “I keep headaches,” Melissa says, “just from being around here. I didn’t keep headaches until I moved down here. And I keep sore throat, upset stomach. It’s from being around here. I mean, I live down here. We just want to save our kids, and keep them safe.”
CRMW—primarily Bo and Ed—went door to door recently to try to get a handle on how many kids at the school have health problems. “There are a lot of sick kids,” Bo says. “Sore throats, coming home with headaches, coughs. Sometimes the next morning they’re OK, and they’ll come home from school and it’ll be the same thing. Sometimes they’d be like that all week, and then the weekends they’d feel better, and then Monday when they went back to school they would start feeling worse.” Of 125 homes surveyed, 60 had kids attending Marsh Fork Elementary. Of those sixty, fifty-three had children with health problems, mostly respiratory (asthma, chronic bronchitis) but also symptoms such as headache and nausea that get better when the child is away from school. In addition, several students, former students, and teachers have contracted unusual cancers in recent years. Some have died.
Larry Gibson’s here today too, down from Kayford half an hour or so away. He’s holding a sign that says: “Remember Buffalo Creek—125 dead.” “My family lost sixty-six people to the Buffalo Creek disaster in 1972 because of coal,” he tells me. Larry’s father’s family had been there for generations. “You got this over here,” he says, pointing to the coal processing plant, “and you got the impoundment above the school. How safe do you think these kids are? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they’re doing here is wrong.”
The comparison with the Buffalo Creek disaster isn’t unduly alarmist. Here as there, the dam is flawed—different flaws, but potentially fatal just the same. And here as there, the coal company knows the dam is flawed. “I helped build [this] dam,” says Jackie Browning, another local man attending the protest today. “I was the main dozer operator on that dam, from ’94 to ’99 till I got disabled from chemicals.
“A lot of [the dam] has got big mud pots in it. You have to compact a dam. Back when they used trucks to haul the refuse [the ungraded mine wastes used to build the dam] up there, you had to put the refuse down in two-foot lifts and it had to meet a strict compaction test. And that determines the strength of that dam. Well, when they put the belt line up there [in 1997, to transport the mine waste previously hauled by the trucks], the belt carried lots of water with the refuse.” In rainy weather, “you’d start to push that slate across that dam” from where the belt brought it, maybe 150 feet in from one side, push it across the top of the dam, 960 feet wide, toward the other side. “You’ve already got water in that slate. You have to push from the belt head over 800 feet. You cannot, on these rainy days, push that far without hanging up—you can’t get all the way across.” But you have to keep hauling what the belt delivers, so the loads of slate-mud-water pile up maybe 200 feet from the far side of the dam. Mud oozes out of the pile into the resulting low spot between the growing pile and the far side, “and that thing just fills up with this soft mud, like jelly.” When the weather improves, the belt starts delivering waste without so much water, “and you just start filling that [low spot] in,” right over the mud. “There’s no compaction there. Underneath there’s a big deck of Jello.” And Jello, of course, is not a good structural material. “How come when they used trucks they had to meet a compaction test? It was strict. Now they use dozers to push, they do not compact proper at all, and nobody worries about it.” Inspectors don’t come when it’s raining, and when they do come, it looks fine and they’re told everything is fine. “On paper, they’ll say everything’s passing. But it’s not. I went down [about two months ago] and talked to them, and the engineer told me, ‘We know we’ve got problems.’”
Jackie is also keenly aware of how toxic the chemicals used at the plant really are. He’s badly disabled from his own exposure to them, and wonders what they’re doing to the children attending school here. “I was down at the plant [working] on the coal pile for a little while,” he says, just a short distance from the school, “and that’s where I got the exposure. The last six weeks that I worked they increased the chemicals, about three or four times what they’s supposed to, in order to get that real fine coal out. The more chemicals they use, the more coal they can recover. They increased so high that my system couldn’t stand it. It’s just like I drank acid, it just ate me up.” Since then, Jackie has been plagued by multiple chemical sensitivity and a range of neurological and respiratory symptoms.
By just before noon, close to sixty people have gathered in front of the school. Four police cars are here. Several of the protesters, including Bo’s daughter, Sarah Haltom, are carrying cameras to document whatever happens. Local TV and radio reporters are here, too.
Chris Irwin, Judy Bonds, Hillary, and a couple of others are holding a large banner reading “Massey Energy Corporation Raping Our Homeland” as the demonstration prepares to move up the road from the school toward the driveway and gate of the coal facility. The demonstrators line up along the road in front of the school, holding up signs so people in passing cars can read them. Some drivers, a few dozen over the next hour or so, honk their support as they go by.
At noon the procession starts up the road, with Bo in the lead, alongside Jackie Browning, who looks a bit nervous. At the entrance to Goals Coal two police cars have stopped traffic in both directions. Another police car is parked in the plant’s driveway, which is closed to deliveries right now. (They’ve also got a back entrance, so the demonstration may be inconvenient but isn’t actually shutting the facility down.) Demonstrators and the big banner stretch across the driveway in front of the gate, but at the request of police, they refrain from blocking it completely.
When everyone has reached the plant entrance, and the police have allowed traffic to resume on the road, Bo speaks to the crowd, followed by Jackie and then Judy. “It is time to join together to halt this destructive mining practice that destroys our homes, communities, and Appalachian mountains and culture,” Judy says. “From across Appalachia and the entire country, Americans are building a strong movement called Mountain Justice Summer. Who is Mountain Justice Summer?” The crowd shouts back: “We are!”
“We are the ones whose homes are being blasted,” Judy continues, “whose homes are being dusted, whose children are being poisoned every day. We are everyday citizens who have been abused and denied our rights for over 130 years. It’s a shame that we have to beg our government for our basic human rights, to live in our homes in peace and send our children to a clean school without fear of being poisoned or crushed to death by a dam. We welcome all of our brothers and sisters that will join us to fight for justice for mountain people this summer and beyond. Welcome, Mountain Justice Summer.”
Next, Bo reminds the crowd that two days from now representatives from the state DEP will hold a hearing at the school. “Massey has applied to build another silo identical to that monstrosity over there, right next to it,” he says. “Give our kids some more coal dust and chemicals, I guess. They haven’t killed them with that one, they want to speed it up.” Bo asks everyone here to come to the hearing. “We want them to do their jobs. We want that sludge dam shut down and dried out. Take their license away! They don’t have the right to have a license in this state!”
Debbie Jarrell addresses the crowd briefly, describing the siting of the silos as “pure arrogance” and reading a list of demands, including: 1) that the coal processing plant beside the school be shut down; 2) that the school be cleaned up or a new, safe school be built nearby, in “our community,” not a long drive away like the other schools that have replaced those closed in the valley; 3) that Massey withdraw its request to build a second silo; 4) that Massey stop blasting that affects local homes; and 5) that Massey shut down all of its surface (strip) mine sites.
It’s now shortly after 12:30. The protesters move to line both sides of the driveway but, cooperating with the police, still refrain from blocking it. Bo and Judy walk across the bridge and up the driveway to deliver the list of demands to Massey.
“You know, that was so strange,” Judy tells me later. “[At first,] no one stopped us, so we just kept going. And all of a sudden the police said: ‘Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Where are you going?’ And then here came the two Massey employees [security guards], and they just completely ignored me. Here I was, a woman standing there—and I was invisible to them. All they wanted to see was the male. And I’m glad Bo was there and said what he said, but I just kept listening and watching because I thought: ‘OK, I’m being peaceful, I’m gonna listen.’ So I did.
“I could have just kept going. That really would have got their attention. But I never thought about that. There was a calmness and a peacefulness in me. I felt like I was doing the right thing.”
Bo and Judy ask that someone in authority come out to receive and discuss the list of demands. Massey security people say no one will meet with them, and ask them to leave. By now, Judy says, one of the guards “was becoming a smart-aleck, and he was beginning to make Bo very angry. Bo controlled his anger pretty well though, until the man took his hands and fluttered them out like we were insects and said: ‘Go on, go on, get off here. You’re trespassing. If you don’t leave, we’re gonna arrest you.’ And the policeman said: ‘It’s over.’ And Bo said: ‘No! Trespassing? You say I’m trespassing? If you think I’m trespassing, then I want you to keep your coal dust and your flyrock off my property, Marty,’” calling the security guard by name.
“And at that point I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing,” Judy recalls. The guard said: “ ‘Go away, go away, you!’ And so Bo said, ‘You know, I’m not going anywhere. What happens if I just stand here?’ And the policeman said: ‘Well, we’ll just have to arrest you.’ Bo said, ‘I reckon you’re gonna have to arrest me.’ And then the policeman looked at me and said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ And I said: ‘Well, I’m with him.’ So they took Bo, got him by his arm and walked him away. No one even come near me,” Judy continues. “No one put their hands on me. They acted like I wasn’t even there.” (Bo sees this a little differently: “I really believe it’s because they did not want to arrest Judy Bonds,” he later tells me. “They know she’s a powerful force.”) “So I looked at the policeman and I said: ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said: ‘Oh! Just follow this way.’”
It feels sad to see them led away. When I tell Bo this later he says: “That’s good. That’s good that that was the effect.”
On the way to the car, Judy continues, “I said a prayer thanking God for the safety of the people [at the demonstration] and asking Him to watch over everyone while we were gone, that they would do what they should be doing, stay calm, and not get in trouble.” When Bo and Judy reached the police car, “they had no idea where they were gonna put me, so they finally cleared out the front seat. They were stunned,” Judy thinks, about having to arrest them, “and they were really very respectful.”
Meanwhile, the crowd is chanting: “Massey close the plant.” The driveway re-opens for business, and a cement truck comes on through.
The police car holding Bo and Judy drives away, heading for the state police substation downriver near Whitesville. “I have to say the ride to Whitesville was scary,” Judy says. “That was the scariest part of the day”—though not because she’s just been arrested, but because of the driver’s speed. “That guy flew!”
At the police station Bo and Judy are charged with trespassing and are released after the demonstration disperses. The police apologize for having had to arrest them.
Later that day, at 8:30 PM, not much more than an hour’s drive away, sixty-eight people gather in the dining hall at the Appalachian Folklife Center near Pipestem, West Virginia, for the opening circle of Mountain Justice Summer’s training camp. (Two more MJSers are stationed at a table near where the driveway enters the camp. They’re being cautious about security. Already either law enforcement or coal company operatives are keeping an eye on the camp. As I drove into camp for the first time myself, I passed a black sedan with tinted windows with a man in the driver’s seat talking on a cellphone, parked in a good position to note the license plates of cars heading to camp.) The group here tonight includes most of the faces I’ve been seeing at MJS meetings, plus quite a few new ones. It’s a young crowd. While many of those who’ve been organizing MJS these past months are in their thirties, the majority of people here at camp are in their twenties; only a very few older people, in their forties and fifties, are here. There are more men than women, but not overwhelmingly so. Dress trends toward hippie or crusty punk or camouflage, with an overlay of hiking/camping gear.
One by one, going around the circle, the MJSers identify themselves and state what they hope the campaign will accomplish this summer. Larry Gibson says: “My people are an oppressed people,” and it’s hard to reach oppressed people who don’t know they’re oppressed. It’s MJS’s work to reach them. Nineteen years ago, when he first started fighting MTR, he says he “couldn’t get two people together” to work with him. He’s deeply touched, teary, to see so many people here today. Later he tells me: “Before, for so many years, I would look behind me and I wouldn’t see anyone. When I first started talking about this, I couldn’t even get my own family to listen to me.”
Most of the other people in the circle simply state their names and give brief, one-sentence summaries of what they’d like to see this summer. Abigail Singer, an Earth First! activist who’s lived in Knoxville off and on for several years and has been involved with MJS since its beginnings, wants to “inspire the rest of the country to transition to a sustainable lifestyle.” One of the Asheville organizers says: “What I’d like to see is National Coal Company’s stock prices drop like a rock.” Hyena, from Kentucky, wants to work on developing “a real clear picture” of the way of life we want to have, not just what’s wrong with what we do have.
john johnson’s supposed to deliver a rabble-rousing rant after the go-around. Instead, he starts crying. Like Larry, he’s touched to see so many people here—and he says more people are coming. He says he hopes that MJS will be the spark that begins the end of the “death machine that’s gripping the entire planet.” MTR, john says, represents everything that’s wrong with the modern industrial commodity-market way of life. He says he doesn’t have much of a “spiritual practice,” but believes that “the mountains are asking for our help.”
More campers arrive overnight, bringing the total at breakfast to about eighty. Workshops scheduled for today cover nonviolence and de-escalation training, MTR issue education, and mountain culture and cultural-sensitivity issues. All are mandatory for anyone here who wants to participate in the coming campaign.
Also relating to cultural sensitivity, a “potty mouth jar” has been set up in the camp’s main meeting hall and dining room. Anyone who cusses (defined as using a word you would not use in talking to someone else’s grandmother) owes 25 cents—and the fine is 50 cents for each “Jesus Christ!” or “Goddamn!” The idea behind this is to train MJSers from outside the region not to inadvertently offend religious, personally conservative locals. Because the language of many of the folks here is customarily pretty salty, this turns out to be a pretty good fundraiser as well as a cultural sensitivity tool.
At lunch, I catch up with Dave Cooper, who just arrived this morning. Dave gave a talk in Louisville last night, then stopped at home to get some sleep with the intention of driving here in the morning and arriving midday. “I woke up at 2:30 in the morning. I was so excited I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I just got in the car at 3:00 and was driving all night.” Finding more than eighty people here was “a dream come true,” he says. “We worked really hard to get to this point, there’s real good energy here, the weather’s nice, it’s a beautiful spot, everybody’s in a good mood—so we’re off to a really good start.”
Chris Irwin, too, thinks MJS is off to a good start, his ambitious goal earlier this year of thirty or forty full-time MJS volunteers looking pretty realistic now. “I think maybe 30 percent of the people here will travel from place to place” for the whole summer, he says. “But then another 35 to 40 percent are going to [stay in one place]—like we’re going straight back to Tennessee [after the camp concludes] to begin our organizing and preparing.” The number of full-time MJSers (staff, in effect) “make us the largest nonprofit staffed organization fighting mountaintop removal in America. Ever.” The turnout comes as a relief to Chris, “after all this hard work, months and months, and thinking: Good God, there’s going to be 20 people that’ll actually show up. And that was a real danger, because I think a lot of people still don’t know what MTR is. If Americans were more aware, I think we’d have a thousand people here.”
When I catch up with john outside the dining hall, he tells me: “I’m high as a kite. Not on—well, maybe a little bit of caffeine, but nothing else. There’s a great crew of people here. I’m totally impressed with how engaged people are.” In the past, john’s seen forest-defense camps where a good many people seemed most interested in partying. Here, today, people are focused on the work at hand. “People are taking it real seriously,” john says. “I’m totally pleased.”
Chris Dodson, now one of the interns at the Naoma house, tells me: “Exactly what we’re all going to be doing [at the house] is going to become more clear when we can all get together and plan it all out. Everybody’s sort of coming from a different place. But my perception of it is that we’re going to be assisting with logistical stuff for MJS when MJS is in the area. And beyond that, we’re going to be doing similar things to what CRMW and OVEC have been doing, in organizing that community, Coal River valley, specifically with regards to Marsh Fork Elementary. There’s probably going to be a lot of door-to-door, a lot of hearings and stuff. But then my vision, also, is to have MJS things being coordinated with the community, and hopefully from the community.” And he hopes that the program at the Naoma house will not shy away from civil disobedience.
“I bet that we could really make change at Marsh Fork. I don’t think they’re going to build another silo. They’re trying to, but we’re kicking their ass. They’re not going to. And I think it’s possible for that whole facility to be done. Soon.”
That afternoon, I sit in on Dave Cooper’s MTR 101 workshop, adapted from his roadshow. Like the roadshow, today’s workshop relies on slides, accompanied by Dave’s narration of facts about MTR: MTR in West Virginia is concentrated south of Charleston, west of Beckley. MTR uses explosives made of ammonium nitrate (a common chemical fertilizer) and diesel fuel—the same powerful mix that was used to bomb the federal building at Oklahoma City. Most of the land, and by far most of the forested mountains in West Virginia, is controlled by out-of-state owners, typically coal or timber or land-holding companies. Appalachia’s mixed mesophitic forest is the most biologically diverse hardwood forest in the world. MTR is profitable only because coal companies are allowed to externalize so many of its costs. Coal companies called the fatal 1972 Buffalo Creek sludge-dam disaster an “act of God.” The slurry pond looming over Marsh Fork Elementary School overlies old underground mines—if it breaks through to the mines below, millions of gallons of sludge will gush through the old mines and blow out a huge flood God knows where. Lespedeza, the exotic grass typically planted on “reclaimed” MTR sites is, in addition to being ugly, inedible to livestock and wildlife. MTR brings poverty and depopulation not only because it employs so few people but also because the ill effects of MTR preclude other economic activities.
Dave Cooper generally tries to bring coalfield locals along to speak at his roadshows. Today he’s joined by Larry Gibson and Pauline Canterbury, a seventy-five-year-old resident of Sylvester, the next town down the Coal River from Whitesville. Pauline’s (and Sylvester’s) main problem is coal dust. In 1997 Massey got permission to put a processing plant in Sylvester. The plant is built just upwind of the town, where a bluff used to shield the town from wind. In building the plant Massey blasted off the bluff, and as soon as the plant began to operate, airborne coal dust began to fall on Sylvester. Lots of coal dust. (Pauline’s attic has so much coal dust in it that it’s a fire hazard.) Pauline and her neighbor Mary Miller (who call themselves “the Dustbusters”) collected dust samples daily for two years. They took their evidence to state officials and to the federal Office of Surface Mining. They took Massey to court and got an injunction. Massey built a multimillion dollar fabric dome over the plant—and still the dust rains down on Sylvester.
“We’re being sacrificed for cheap energy for the rest of the world,” Pauline tells the MJS group. “Our homes have lost 90 percent of their value because of MTR mining. Their goal is to get us out because flat land is hard to find in West Virginia,” and Sylvester is a fairly wide, flat place in the valley, potentially useful for processing plants, storage depots, and other coal-related facilities. But coal dust is not their only problem. The Coal River now runs at just a trickle when it’s not raining, because so much water is being taken out to wash coal—and then pumped up into giant slurry dams like the one by Marsh Fork Elementary and another up behind her home. There are no escape routes from the valley should any of these huge dams break. Locals can’t even go to visit their ancestors’ graves without a coal company escort, as old graveyards were mostly sited high up and many are now surrounded by strip mining.
“It does my heart so good to see all you young people here,” she says. “This is your world. I’m just sorry that I’m leaving it like we are.”
Pauline is followed by Larry. “When we go into this” summer, he says, “above all we’ve got to be right,” to do the right thing so that the people remaining in the coalfields after the summer’s over will be better off, better able to speak for themselves, to protect themselves, and to end MTR. Larry is keenly aware of the potential dangers MJS poses for coalfield locals, as the bad things that have happened to him have often followed times when he’s had outside supporters up at Kayford.
The high point of the day comes early in the evening, when Bo and Judy arrive at camp and are greeted with enthusiastic applause and many hugs. On their way here, they tell us, they stopped to pay their fines in Beckley, at the Raleigh County magistrate’s office. A police officer they passed in a hallway said to them: “I know who you are, and I know what you did yesterday. And I just want to say off the record that I respect what you did and I’m proud of you.” They didn’t know what their fine would be when they walked in. It could have been up to $100—but after they talked with the magistrate, he ordered a fine of just $5 each plus court costs.
Bo and Judy arrive at camp in time to represent West Virginia in a panel discussion on strategy for the summer, state by state. Just before this discussion, MJS’s summer schedule is unveiled, showing the campaign moving from West Virginia to Kentucky, and then on to Virginia in June, back to West Virginia for most of July, then to Tennessee in August. There are eighty-five people in the room this evening. With more doing cleanup in the kitchen and security patrol outside, there are at least ninety people at camp now.
“I got chill bumps when I walked in this room today and saw all of you,” Bo tells the crowd. This is the right issue, and the right time, he says, to change the way people are enslaved to corporations in cities all over America as well as here in Appalachia. West Virginia’s new governor, Joe Manchin, who before his election had business with coal and timber interests, on his first day in office said: “West Virginia is open for business.” Today, in reaction to yesterday’s action at Marsh Fork, the governor’s office called CRMW to set up a meeting with the governor to discuss the school. Bo hopes MJS will keep up the pressure on Massey (and the governor) about the school this summer, keep the moral high ground, and make this a national issue. More immediately, he hopes to see lots of people turn out for the state DEP hearing at the school tomorrow evening. “Without question, tomorrow night is going to be the largest opposition, ever, in West Virginia, to a mining permit,” he says.
A young woman named Ali presents for Kentucky. “We don’t have an awesome group like you all,” she says, a little wistfully, gesturing toward Bo and Judy. The relatively low-key events planned for MJS in Kentucky are clustered in June: a backwoods camp, a “mountain witness” tour in Martin County, a film festival and rally in Lexington, and perhaps some visits to the homes and offices of coal company executives. (Earlier in the day, Dave Cooper told me that Kentucky isn’t likely to see much in the way of civil disobedience this summer. “Mountain witness” tours run by KFTC are igniting a lot of interest in MTR in the state, but that interest hasn’t yet coalesced into opposition with any momentum or clear direction. He hopes to see that change this summer, but he expects the fruits of this to be borne later.)
Speaking for organizers in Virginia, Erin tells the story of young Jeremy Davidson’s death. Southwestern Virginia is “traumatized,” she says, and no grassroots organization has arisen to fight MTR there. She suggests that people go to the area now to start Listening Projects and scouting in advance of the MJS camp slated for the area in late June. The other main event in Virginia this summer will be a demonstration at Massey headquarters in Richmond on July 8, coinciding with an international day of action against climate change. Planning for this is just beginning.
Speaking for Tennessee, Chris Irwin, manically caffeinated, delivers a grand rant on the history of mining and landscape in Tennessee. “We are really close to turning the tide in Tennessee, which is why we need your help,” he says. MJS organizing there is focused on two coalfield areas, both near the Kentucky border: the New River watershed area (including Zeb Mountain) just west of I-75, and Eagan Mountain to the east of it. Chris notes that National Coal has bought up the land or coal rights to more than 100,000 acres, including the Zeb Mountain site. Eagan is being mined by Mountainside Coal, a Kentucky company. Paloma reports on the Listening Project in Elk Valley, in the shadow of Zeb Mountain; similar efforts are being planned around Eagan. “There is a place for everyone in this campaign,” she says, from direct action, to legal monkeywrenching (filing requests for hearings and studies to slow the permit process down), to letting locals know what they can do about blasting and other problems. john johnson adds that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a huge producer of electricity, has signed contracts with Massey and Arch to buy MTR coal from West Virginia. TVA’s headquarters in Knoxville will be another focus for MJS protest this summer.
Leaving camp late the next afternoon to drive to Marsh Fork Elementary School for the 6 PM hearing there, I pass a green minivan parked near the camp’s driveway and angled to get a good look at cars leaving the camp. Two people, neither in uniform, sit in the front seats. They’ve apparently been there a while—the guy in the passenger seat has his feet propped up in the window. I wave as I pass, and a mile or so farther on as I approach the main road, the van pulls up alongside me and turns off in the other direction. (Later, I learn that a white Jeep Cherokee parked in the same place has followed a car leaving camp all the way to the hearing.)
When I arrive at the school, I stop under the big oak tree to chat with people from the camp, Chad and Gabrielle and their baby, Ukiah. A tall, big, middle-aged man approaches us and asks: “Are you for us or against us?” His tone is belligerent, his manner ambiguous. Feeling a bit protective of the very young little family, I step closer to the man and tell him I’m a writer. He hands me a paper to read, a quote from something published back in 1884 about a local land grab. He said his family’s land had been taken from them by a 2 cent per acre tax: They couldn’t afford to pay it, but a land company could and did. I thank him for the paper and head for the school gym, leaving him and Chad chatting.
More than 130 people assemble for the meeting, filling up the bleachers in the gym, facing a folding table and chairs at which several state DEP officials are seated. More than half of those attending are from MJS camp. Several state troopers stand near the doors of the gym.
As people arrive at the hearing, they’re handed a list of rules, including one that says the only people who will be allowed to speak are those who’ve previously shown an interest in the permit under consideration this evening. Bo, standing with Judy, Sarah, and Vern, floats the idea of putting masking tape over the mouth of everyone who’s not allowed to speak. Instead, he negotiates with DEP officials an agreement that everyone here who wants to speak should sign up to do so, but that the officials running the meeting reserve the right to schedule some of the speaking for another hearing, if this one runs too late. Each person who wants to speak will be allowed to do so for only two minutes.
Ukiah and her parents sit next to a thirty-something-year-old local woman, who’s totally charmed by the baby. Other folks from MJS camp are looking noticeably more cleaned-up and conservatively dressed than usual. (Chris Dodson tells me, “I realized when I was coming here that I do not have any non-hippie pants. I’ll have to work on that.”) john johnson hands flyers about MTR to anyone who’ll accept one. Local print and TV reporters work the room.
Outside, a stranger, not in uniform, is taking photos of license plates, walking from car to car, sometimes looking inside a car through its windows. Most likely he’s either a coal company operative sending a message to locals that their presence here has been noticed, or plainclothes law enforcement keeping tabs on MJS. When two MJSers approach and ask him questions, he doesn’t say a word and keeps “a completely blank look on his face,” one of them later tells me. One of the two gets the idea of standing in front of the license plates, and for a while plays tag with the camera guy, dashing forward to where he’s going, then veering off to another car when he does the same. Finally the guy with the camera cracks a smile and gives up.
The state official who opens the meeting looks nervous. The bleachers are now full to overflowing, with some people sitting on the floor.
