Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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.