Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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