Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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