Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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they’ll know better.)
Then, in August 2004, Jeremy Davidson was killed by MTR operations in Virginia. KEF! “had already been working with some people in that area on [trying to prevent] a timber sale in the Jefferson National Forest.” So when people in Virginia suggested the idea of organizing a protest in response to the boy’s death, KEFers came up and joined in. “The Jeremy Davidson murder was really a big catalyst for [MJS]: Omigod, a three-year-old kid, killed in his sleep by a boulder from a strip mine.”
Around this time, Chris Irwin and others were talking with Sue Daniels, a biologist at Virginia Tech, about the idea of a “Mountain Justice Summer,” a campaign to address MTR the way Mississippi Freedom Summer and Redwood Summer had used nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to address racial injustice and forest destruction. Chris started talking up this idea among KEF! people in Tennessee. Judy and Dave and other folks in West Virginia and Kentucky thought it was a good idea, too. (Sue Daniels provided much of the initial energy and vision for MJS. It was a great shock when, toward the end of 2004, she was killed in a murder-suicide committed by a man who had apparently become personally obsessed with her.)
“If I had my druthers,” john says, noting that Chris Irwin would disagree with him about this, “we’d wait until next year to do MJS, because it would give us more time to organize for it.” Better still, “instead of saying ‘wait until 2006,’ I wish that we’d started thinking about it in 2003,” to be better prepared for doing it now. “It’s a super-pressing issue. But if we had another year, we would be avoiding some of the issues that have come up, about people not feeling good about being invited, and about us not putting enough energy into grassroots organizing.” More time would have made it possible “to build more relationships with more people.” Still, john believes that MJS has now, at this point, got enough of this done to be on track for pulling off a successful summer.
john would like to see more people who have concerns about MJS raise them out in the open, in meetings. And he notes, about “some of the people I’ve been a little worried about,” worried that they’re creating an unhealthy power dynamic within the group, “I’ve heard them acknowledge that we need a bigger tent, and I’ve heard them acknowledge—a little bit, not as much as I’d hoped—that we have to address the power dynamics, and that we have to keep reminding people that we want them to be full participants. And that we want a community of equals, not a community of leaders and followers.” I don’t know this at the time, but later learn that there have been ongoing problems of this sort within KEF!, mostly involving Chris and Paloma.
I note that in this month’s meeting, he and Chris were a lot quieter than in previous meetings. “Yeah. That was totally intentional,” john says. “It’s hard, because we care so much. And it’s not like we have bad ideas. But there does come a time when we have to recognize that we are talking too much, to not just pay lip service to making space for other people but to really make the space. If we have this thing where Paloma says something, Chris says something, I say something, then everyone else says OK, I feel uneasy about it.
“Regardless of all that, I think things are really moving in a good direction. I think we did open up some space this weekend, and I hope that that continues.”
This summer, john says, “I want people to come here and fall in love, and maybe decide to stay. I want to see people [who grew up here and left] come home and fall in love. I want to see people who live here, both in the coalfields and adjacent to the coalfields, become empowered to really challenge King Coal. So I want to see several high-profile, pretty intense, nonviolent direct actions throughout the summer. I want to see a lot of people helping out with grassroots organizing and listening.” And he wants to be able to say at the end of the summer something that can’t honestly be said today: that “mountaintop removal is an internationally recognized environmental issue—and if not quite internationally then a nationally recognized environmental issue,” so that Americans everywhere recognize that “there is a conflict in the coalfields, because the way coal is mined fucks up the land and fucks up people’s lives.”
john believes that the direct action component of MJS is poised to do this “the same way Earth First! created more tension around the logging of the old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest—a lot of people know about that because people blocked roads and sat in trees and occupied offices and raised hell.”
But given the nature of MTR, the total nature of its destruction, way more is at stake, john says, than in the western forests, where forest of some ecological value does grow back even on most clear-cuts. “The mountains are not going to come back. [MTR] is the Final Solution for the forests, and the mountains themselves.”
Meanwhile, at Zeb Mountain, mining is still continuing as fast as NCC wants to do it. “You know,” john says, “we’re probably not going to be able to save that mountain.” But they might make it cost so much to mine it that nobody wants to take other mountains. “We want to send a clear message to the industry that they just can’t get away with this stuff.
“I want to see mass outrage, and public discussion about how electricity is produced and used in this country. MTR is the poster child for everything that is wrong with industrial civilization. And there’s this collective denial in our culture: The president says global warming’s not an issue, so global warming’s not an issue. Global warming needs to be an issue, and all the other environmental issues need to be issues. [Otherwise], at some point, everyone is gonna wake up and say: Oh shit, the ecosystems have collapsed and we’re all gonna die.”
After the meeting in Knoxville, I drive north and catch up with Bo back home in West Virginia. I’ve been thinking about MJS’s potential to encourage a virtuous circle, starting with a few locals like Bo and Judy standing up against MTR, others from elsewhere in the region and outside it joining them and encouraging more locals to stand up, and so on. “That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Bo says. “We’ve been working on trying to get locals organized for a couple years, and it’s like pulling teeth. A lot of the local people are against [MTR]. They just are afraid to speak out.” Bo hopes that getting national news coverage will help a great deal with this. Outside the region, you tell people about Marsh Fork Elementary School and their jaws drop. It’s so egregious. If people here start seeing national coverage of the issue, Bo hopes that will “empower” more of his neighbors to say “You can’t do that!”
He thinks the school is “the right issue” to mobilize anti-MTR sentiment into action. For the next three weeks he and his friend Ed Wiley, who lives a few miles upriver and has a granddaughter attending the school, will be “going door to door, listening to people and talking about the school, to see how they feel about it—and what do they know about it, what do they actually know about the sludge dam above it, what do they actually know about the prep plant, what a prep plant does, and the coal silo, and adding another silo, and the chemicals used, and how much [blasting nearby] can that dam take, the dangers of it.” They’ll hand out free pH testing kits so folks can test the streams by their homes for acid mine runoff. And they’ll ask people if they’d be willing to go door to door and talk about this themselves, or hold a sign up at the school: “Will you stand next to me, and stand up for your child and other children on this river? Because it’s their future. And if we allow it to continue—shame on us, because it’s our responsibility as adults to protect our kids, whether the government’s doing it or not.
“If the government’s turned its back on us, and they’re not going to protect us, we have to protect ourselves. They’re forcing us to be revolutionaries. I hate using words like that. But they are not protecting us. We don’t get the same protections other citizens do.
“We’re all Americans. Look at how many Americans from West Virginia have volunteered in times of crisis and died—per capita, more folks from West Virginia have died in wars than any other state. There’s no such thing as an outsider in America. We’re all in this together. And we’d better start standing up together, because the corporations are taking our country over.”
The “outsider” propaganda directed against MJS this year plays to a deep-rooted and well-founded suspicion of outsiders here, where there’s such a long and pervasive