Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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work in strip mines. They destroyed the timber, they destroyed the land.”
About ten years ago, up on this mountain not far from here, Jim tells me, “I was on a four-wheeler, and I seen a bunch of wild turkeys, and I just eased up on them.” They were at a place on a hillside where miners had drilled augur holes sideways into the mountain to take out small deposits of coal left behind by previous mining. “Snakes [copperheads] were coming up out of the augur holes, and [the turkeys] were pecking them and eating them. I sat there and watched them for probably thirty minutes. I never seen nothing like that.” The turkeys were so focused on what they were doing that they didn’t run from Jim, who was quite close. “Usually, a wild turkey—you get close to it, and it’s gone. But they were really eating those snakes up. They’d peck ’em in the head, reach and get ’em, throw ’em up, and swallow ’em down.” From the number and variety of snake stories Jim has to tell, I wonder if he isn’t some sort of snake magnet. He tells me he once stumbled into a den of maybe fifty copperheads out in the woods near his old home place. “Man, they scared me to death.” I’m sure they did. I tell him I think maybe I won’t want to go hiking off-trail with him.
I promise to put Jim in touch with some of the folks in Knoxville working on the MJS campaign. He later sends me an email: “It would take days to really show you the damaged mountain and wood lands in this area. I would be honored to talk to you or anyone that can help us (the people of this area) stop all this nonsense. I alone don’t have the knowledge to get it done, but with your help we can get a lot done.”
The April MJS meeting is held in a classroom at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, less than an hour down the road from Caryville. In response to the growing concern about inclusiveness, and particularly in response to the controversy stirred up by how OVEC’s Vivian Stockman was quoted in the Charleston Gazette, the meeting starts with a long discussion about equality and solidarity—how to allow diverse voices to be heard and to enable various groups and individuals to participate in MJS.
Diane Bady, OVEC’s co-director, here instead of Abe today representing OVEC, says that OVEC does want to be involved with and supportive of MJS. She mentions “an enormous amount of anger directed at Vivian” over the newspaper article she was quoted in, and says Vivian has found that anger painful to deal with. Diane says that in the past OVEC has worked on campaigns in which well-intentioned outsiders have come in to help and have done things that cause problems that OVEC later has had to clean up; they’ve made OVEC’s work more difficult rather than bolstered their energy and resources, and then left. OVEC does want MJS to succeed, Diane emphasizes.
Larry tells the group that there are folks in West Virginia who do not feel invited. For the past century and more local voices haven’t been heard, they’ve not been taken seriously or valued—so failing to invite people opens old wounds. Bill McCabe affirms that MJS needs to respect and listen to folks in the mountains who’ve been working against MTR (and other strip mining before it) for years, long before MJS was dreamed of.
Chris Dodson notes, at this point, that there are different groups working to the same end, and we don’t all have to do things the same way. If we disagree, we should do it with respect.
Patty Draus, Dave Cooper’s partner, observes that people at MJS planning meetings are well voiced, but people who are not yet at the table aren’t. Another woman from Kentucky says that there at least, people don’t have a clear idea of MJS. They think that civil disobedience is all there is to it. There’s little awareness, for example, of ongoing and planned work like the Listening Projects.
A while back, john johnson says, MJS organizers made an effort to come up with a comprehensive survey of existing local organizations working against MTR. Obviously we’ve missed people, he says. The group brainstorms for a while about who’s not at the table today and should be contacted.
The inclusiveness problem is not just about getting strangers to the table, but also affects group dynamics among those who are already here. In that connection, john says that he’s an anarchist, not a leader, and notes that there’s no hierarchy in MJS. He acknowledges that the big mouths (himself included) need to make more space for others to speak up—but at the same time everyone else needs to be more aggressive about checking them. We made a mistake over the past few months, he adds, creating the impression that everyone has to completely agree with MJS to work with it. Nonprofit organizations aren’t going to endorse civil disobedience—but even if they don’t sign on officially, many of their members will want to help and should be encouraged to do so.
john adds that he’s uncomfortable with a strict policy of following the lead of coalfield locals, because by itself that won’t necessarily result in straight-up confrontation with coal companies and their profits. He has a responsibility to act on his own principles, he says. He believes he has to act on behalf of his life-support system, the ecology of his home bioregion. But he also believes that we should listen to local voices in sorting out how.
Bo sees the inclusiveness issue as related to the ugly rhetoric about MJS “outsiders” poised to invade the coalfields—and he’s angry about it. Coal companies have used this sort of rhetoric about “outsiders” for a hundred years, he says. “There are no outsiders in America.”
After lunch on Saturday, regional report-backs are full of specific plans for the months ahead. In West Virginia, CRMW has learned that Massey is requesting a permit from the state DEP to build a second coal silo right next to the existing silo beside Marsh Fork Elementary School. CRMW and others are requesting a public hearing on the application; MJS’s schedule for its time in West Virginia this summer should stay loose until they know when that hearing will be scheduled. A Listening Project has begun in the neighborhoods near Marsh Fork Elementary, and letters about the school have been published in Charleston and other West Virginia newspapers. Speaking events with Judy Bonds and other coalfield activists are scheduled not just around the region but around the country. Abe Mwaura’s been busy organizing in Logan County, ordinarily a place very hostile to any efforts to hold coal companies accountable. And OVEC and CRMW are setting up a house in Coal River valley for half a dozen grant-supported summer interns as well as additional traveling MJS activists.
In Tennessee, plans are being made for MJS time in Nashville, in the Knoxville area, and in the coalfields north of Knoxville, near Caryville and Zeb Mountain, including a “variety of ideas” for direct action. In the past month, they’ve been working to get hearings on MTR-related permits, and working on fundraising. Lawyers are being contacted for legal support this summer.
After the meeting is over, I sit down for what becomes a long talk with john johnson about the state of the campaign against MTR and how he came to be so involved in it. He tells me he first heard about MTR in the late 1990s, but at that time he was already stretched pretty thin as an activist and didn’t think he could take on another issue.
“But then we found out about this project on Zeb Mountain” and he thought: “Holy shit, it’s in my backyard now.” Here in Tennessee, john reminds me, “technically it’s ‘cross-ridge’ mining, because they’re going to put the mountain back together, supposedly. If you go to the Office of Surface Mining, [they say] ‘There’s no mountaintop removal in Tennessee.’ But it’s still massive strip mining, and really disgusting.”
Unlike southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, which have seen so much MTR that most of the landscape is now affected by it, in Tennessee so far there are only a few islands of MTR (such as the Zeb Mountain site), with the natural fabric of most of the landscape still sufficiently intact to support normal forest regeneration. MJS’s goal in Tennessee is to keep it that way, to prevent MTR’s spread.
After he found out about Zeb Mountain, john helped arrange to bring Dave Cooper and Judy Bonds to Tennessee for anti-MTR roadshow presentations in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Crossville, alongside himself and other Tennesseans talking about how MTR was moving into Tennessee. More Tennesseans got involved, and they met more people fighting MTR elsewhere in the region.
In 2003, john and two other activists affiliated with Katuah Earth First! blockaded a road at the Zeb Mountain site by locking themselves to large metal drums filled with concrete. (Unfortunately,