Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
and head up into the hills to Kayford Mountain, and there you’ll see the true enormity of MTR’s effect on this landscape and its natural and human communities. Kayford is the lone hilltop in its neighborhood that’s not controlled by mining companies. All around Kayford, as far as the eye can see, the giant machinery of MTR is dismantling the mountains. In their place, wherever the coal is gone and the machines have moved on, heaps of rubble support either no life at all or thin monocultures of exotic grass, with patches of scrub here and there. The view from Kayford shows that the forested mountainsides along the Coal River are no more than a narrow beauty strip. The river itself has lost most of its headwater streams and is choked with sediment. Miners have been replaced by machinery. The hollows that feed into the valley have been emptied of families who’ve lived there for generations and stripped of the abundant animal and plant life that coevolved there for millennia. The mountains themselves have been blown up and are forever lost.
The Coal River valley is by no means the only place where this is happening, nor is it the only place where local activists are trying to fight it. The email Bo sends me in January has a link to a call for action against MTR throughout Appalachia’s coalfields—in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and southwestern Virginia as well as southern West Virginia. “Mountain Justice Summer [MJS],” Bo writes, “is going to be the campaign that ends the destruction of Appalachia!”
Over the next few weeks, Bo fills me in: “We realize that we are not going to stop MTR in West Virginia without outside help. We envision MJS as a movement that will bring in a broad spectrum of people from all walks of life. We are committed to nonviolent direct action.” However, he adds, “I also know for a fact that when we do a direct action here in the coalfields, we will be met with violence. It is the history of the coalfields and I see no reason why it will be any different this time.
“As long as we stay focused, and on message, we will be OK. Let’s all hope and pray that America listens and demands an ending to this insanity.”
Neither Bo nor his fellow activists see “this insanity” as being limited to MTR. Now that the easiest and best sources of coal and other essentials have been depleted, here and elsewhere, across America and around the world, and returns on efforts to extract them are diminishing, it’s increasingly urgent that we stop blindly squandering resources needed to create and sustain the new ways of life we can now see we’ll need in the not-so-distant future. “I am hoping that our movement will bring attention to the big picture,” Bo writes. “I know that a world with a growing population of over 6 billion people is headed for chaos when it continues to rely on finite fossil fuels. When we resort to blowing up a mountain to extract a ten-inch seam of coal, we definitely have a glaring problem.
“I think Martin Luther King summed it up pretty well when he said, ‘This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.’
“I don’t know if MJS will be successful or not. I don’t know what results we will get. I just know that it needs to be done. Time is short, and I think the time is right.”
Resistance to strip mining in Appalachia did not, of course, begin with MJS in 2005. It’s been going on for decades. For most of that time, Jack Spadaro’s been involved. “I came out of a little mining community in southern West Virginia, near Beckley,” Jack says. “My father worked for a mining company for about twenty years. My grandfather worked in the coal mines for forty-five years. I have an uncle who worked in the mines for thirty-some years. I got a degree in mining engineering thinking that I wanted to go into the industry and make a lot of money. But what happened was, I saw what was going on and I couldn’t be part of it.
“In 1972 I was teaching in the engineering program at West Virginia University, and I got sent for the spring and summer down to a place called Buffalo Creek, in Logan County, where a coal waste dam failed and killed 125 people and left 4,000 people without homes and wiped out 17 communities. From that point forward—I wasn’t born an environmentalist, but I certainly became one.” Jack joined forces with others who were fighting the ill effects of strip mining, including Ken Hechler, then a congressman and now, more than three decades later—in his nineties—still fighting.
According to CRMW’s Julia Bonds, part of what enabled the 1970s movement against strip mining to arise in Appalachia was that prior to that, in the 1960s, volunteers with such federal “war on poverty” programs as VISTA and other outsiders came to Appalachia to do social service work. “When they did,” she says, “they brought their cameras and tape recorders with them. And they sat down and they talked to these people, and listened to these people who lived up in these hollers. And then these people didn’t feel so alone and so oppressed.” Together, the locals and the outsiders began to organize to address problems in Appalachia. When the government “figured out what was going on and who was coming in (they called them ‘outside agitators’) and helping people organize, they pulled the funding” from the programs that had brought the outsiders here. “But the movement had already started.” Today, she adds, “we’re not dependent” on Washington for funding that start-up wave of organizers. “We’re doing it ourselves.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s the women led the charge [against strip mining]. They’re the ones that lay down in front of the bulldozers and stood up in front of the coal trucks.” Women, especially older women, are generally perceived as less threatening than men, who in tense coalfield confrontations are apt to get into fights. “It’s less violent with women in the front line. But it seems as though women are more apt to get things rolling, too.
“Of course we didn’t accomplish what we were setting out to do, or we wouldn’t be” fighting MTR today. They did manage to persuade Congress to pass the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), in 1977. But just before the final version of SMCRA was passed, fatal flaws were added to the bill.
Jack says that he and Ken Hechler “agreed, in 1977, when [SMCRA] was signed into law, that it was probably a mistake. In the first versions of the law [MTR] wasn’t allowed, but then Congressman [Nick] Rahall from West Virginia, who had replaced Hechler, and Senator Wendell Ford from Kentucky got language put into the act to allow mountaintop removal. They at that time sold it as something that would only happen occasionally, it would only be for something special like building a school or some other use that would be of benefit to the community.” But no restriction to that effect was actually written into the law. “To get the variance on [the requirement that reclaimed land be returned to its] ‘approximate original contour’ and allow mountaintop removal you had to demonstrate that you had the plans to use it for something other than just a mine. The states, then, when they were given authority under the act to be the regulatory authorities, they always granted the permits no matter what the intended use.
“That’s been part of the problem all along. The way the law was written, the states could get authority to enforce the federal law. And nearly every mining state did that.” Tennessee is the lone exception in southern Appalachia. It still has direct federal enforcement of SMCRA.
“So we went back to the same old system and the same old people who’d been failing to regulate for the twenty-some years before. Since 1981 there hasn’t been any true enforcement in the field, on the ground, at mine sites. All the [MTR] mining operations in West Virginia are illegal. They’re operating contrary to the federal law. Not one is legal.”
SMCRA “was supposed to be a solution,” Jack adds, “but instead it became the vehicle for the industry to legitimize what it was doing. And they’ve done now, on a massive scale, what the law was intended to prevent, the dumping of spoil onto mountainsides in steep-slope areas.”
Under SMCRA, valley fills were supposed to be small and of limited use. “The justification [for allowing them at all] was they needed a place, for their first few cuts onto the mountainside, to put the overburden material. That’s [all] the valley fill was supposed to be, and everything else would be returned to ‘approximate original contour.’
“When they got into mountaintop mining where they took off the top 400 or 500 feet