Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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