Standing Our Ground. Joyce M. Barry
basic necessities, such as food, clothing, child care and elder care, they view environmental problems in unique ways. Dianne Rocheleau argues that these responsibilities put women “in a position to oppose threats to health, life, and vital subsistence resources, regardless of economic incentives, and to view environmental issues from the perspective of home, as well as that of personal and family health.”42 As examined in parts of this book, some feminists argue that this particular connection to home, community, and environment precipitates women’s large numbers in environmental justice groups in the United States and beyond. West Virginia women active in the movement to end MTR are representative of the formidable presence of women in environmental justice groups. Regardless of the community, or the environmental justice issues at hand, women, working-class white women, and women of color form and join EJ groups in large numbers.43
Even with women’s undeniable presence in environmental justice practice, much of environmental justice scholarship fails to analyze and include gender in its analysis in substantial ways. Nancy C. Unger suggests that “while race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender,” but “women’s responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways.”44 Women in West Virginia, like many women in EJ groups throughout the world, transform work associated with the private sphere into public, community-based activism. In doing so, they show the importance of women’s influence in both the public and the private sectors of society.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 examines the material conditions of West Virginia women in this age of mountaintop removal coal mining, guided by the assumption that in searching for solutions to the political, economic, and environmental problems associated with MTR and Big Coal in the state, the perspectives of poor and working-class women must be considered. This focus is important, given that it is poor, rural women (nationally and internationally) who not only bear the costs of uneven political and economic conditions, but who form or join collectives to fight injustices in their communities. In discussing the material conditions of women in West Virginia, this chapter examines how gender ideologies have been shaped by the coal industry, and how women’s participation in the anti-MTR movement simultaneously embraces and defies traditional gendered prescriptions.
Chapter 2 places the anti-MTR movement, and women’s participation, within the context of environmental justice activism in the United States. The EJ framework provides a productive way to assess the anti-MTR movement because of its historic focus on the connections between adverse environments and disenfranchised human populations. Environmental justice links social justice—economic, political, and cultural—with the natural world, exposing the root causes of both environmental problems and social inequity. This chapter reviews EJ’s historic focus on race and class, but, more important, centralizes gender in this analysis of the movement to end MTR and Big Coal’s influence in West Virginia. EJ has done a tremendous job of emphasizing the importance of class, social justice, and vulnerable communities’ connections to the environment, but, as indicated above, insufficiently assesses the role of gender in EJ thought and practice. Too often the tireless efforts of women EJ activists are not fully examined by environmental justice scholars, even though working-class white women, and women of color, participate in these movements in large numbers.
Chapter 3 situates West Virginia women’s environmental justice activism in the anti-MTR movement within the history and culture of grassroots protest in Appalachia. Historically, women in the region have joined coal industry reform efforts such as labor strikes and unionization campaigns. Women were also active in anti-strip-mining activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Women in the anti-MTR movement, unlike previous instantiations of women’s activism, envision a life without coal in central Appalachia, focusing their efforts on creating economically and environmentally sustainable communities. In doing so, they promote a vision of West Virginia that sees the mountains as inextricably tied to the area’s culture and history. They highlight this connection, while supporters of Big Coal argue that coal, and not mountains, is the defining marker of West Virginia’s cultural history.
Chapter 4 examines racial constructions inherent in the popular anti-MTR slogan “Save the Endangered Hillbilly,” positioning this call within white studies scholarship and as a directive to mainstream environmentalism, which has historically separated humans from the nonhuman environment. The culturally derogative term “hillbilly” has a long history in this country, and is a descriptor used both racially and in terms of class in American society. Activists in the anti-MTR movement reclaim this pejorative term and use it to foster a sense of pride in coalfield residents. In their embrace of “hillbilly,” they mark themselves by race and class in their efforts to preserve the culture and environment of West Virginia in this age of mountaintop removal coal mining.
Finally, chapter 5 situates mountaintop removal coal mining, and the movement to end it, within the global context of neoliberal economic transformations, global energy, climate change, and environmental justice protest. Appalachian activists realize that the adverse impact of MTR does not remain in the isolated mountainous communities where coal is extracted. Coal provides half of this country’s electricity, and is, indeed, the primary source for electricity generation in the world, but emits the largest amount of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere, contributing greatly to climate change. With this knowledge, grassroots Appalachian activists are concerned with making global environmental justice connections in their efforts to end MTR. These activists work with the realization that while they are all rooted locally, they are socially and environmentally connected to the world at large.
CHAPTER 1
Living in a Sacrifice Zone: Gender, the Political Economy of Coal, and Anti–Mountaintop Removal Activism
We’re trying to preserve something, and save this creation. . . . We’re trying to push the state forward, you know, and to stop the destruction and diversify the economy.
—Judy Bonds
Introduction
On a january evening in 2003, coal river mountain watch codirector Judy “Julia” Bonds was home with her grandson when the telephone rang, and the caller ID revealed that the incoming call was from California. Bonds answered, and the man on the other end of the line identified himself as Richard Goldman, phoning to inform her that she was the 2003 North American recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.1 Bonds, who knew nothing about the Goldman Foundation or this prestigious prize that annually gives monetary awards to one environmental justice activist from each continent, casually responded, “Oh, okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate that.”2
During their brief conversation, Goldman gave Bonds a web address and encouraged her to read more about this prize. She explained, “I looked it up on the computer and then I was in total shock. . . . It took my breath away.”3 Bonds learned that she was one of seven environmental justice activists in the world that year to win $125,000 for her work with the Coal River Mountain Watch.4 She said winning this prize was personally monumental but also significant for her organization and the anti-MTR movement, as “people began to realize who CRMW was. They began to realize what MTR is, and it started a snowball effect” of more people becoming educated about MTR and its impact on Appalachian communities and, as a result, wanting to join the fight to end it.5
Five years earlier, in 1998, Judy Bonds went to the CRMW offices looking for help after being forced off her land in Marfork Hollow, near Whitesville, West Virginia, by coal operations that rendered the area unfit for habitation. Bonds, whose family has lived in this area for ten generations, noticed dramatic changes in her environment when Massey coal operations began there in the 1990s. She witnessed color and consistency changes to the water sources in her backyard, and was particularly alarmed when her grandson, playing in a creek behind her home, asked, “What’s wrong with these fish?”6 His innocent question alerted Bonds to fish kills in the water, and she then knew something was horribly wrong. After this, Bonds said, “I started to notice as my neighbors moved