Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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“They’re using the same tools because they still work. They’re putting out propaganda saying: Oooh, be afraid of the ecoterrorists. These beautiful people who’ve given of themselves to do public service, some for ten years or more. Beautiful, harmless people who care about community and the world they live in. And they are putting the label ‘terrorist’ on them. It’s really outrageous. And then they’re hitting on the really cheap points where they know that there are social hang-ups that people have with one another,” such as with hairstyle and clothing. “They’re saying you need to be afraid about these differences, so you should be afraid of these people. They’re using stereotypes that are easy homeruns for them because they’re already there. The Birkenstock-wearing, patchouli-smelling hippies that don’t pay taxes—those are some pretty strong stereotypes. It’s not difficult for them to reinforce.”
Hillary doesn’t intend to remain an “outsider” here—she hopes she can stay for a while. Since she was eighteen, she’s never stayed in any one place for more than ten months. But funding for the Naoma house and intern project runs out in September, and she says, “I need to be able to sustain myself. I own nothing. I don’t own a TV. I don’t own a bed. I would like to stay here beyond September, because I have so many campaign ideas. So many. They go beyond what I can accomplish in three months. And I do care about this place. I’d like to be here maybe for a few years working.”
Judy Bonds recently attended a formative meeting for a new organization, Christians for the Mountains. “We talked about the need to have [churches] and religious leaders play a part in the care of the Creation,” she tells me. “The care of the Creation is on the back burner [for most churches in America], and I’ve noticed a move on the religious right side [toward playing] a part in this. And I’m just thrilled. I believe that that is the salvation of the religious right. The religious right now is absolutely going against Jesus’s teachings. And it breaks my heart. Not only that, it makes me ashamed. They actually are turning people away from Christianity instead of bringing people into the fold. A lot of activists have lost their faith because of the religious right. I’ve tried to tell people in the religious community: There’s a lot of people out there who think we’re hypocrites. [Where] the teachings of Jesus of love and understanding, caring for the sick and the elderly, caring for the people that are in prison, people that are lost [are concerned], it’s as though the religious right has been hijacked by Satan.
“I honestly think that God cares a lot about that Creation—not just man, but everything He created. Everything in the Bible tells me so,” Judy says. The Bible says that after God created everything else but not yet humankind, he looked around and saw that it was good. “Genesis 9:12 is one of my favorite scriptures,” she says. “God said this is a covenant made between you and me and every living thing on Earth for perpetual generations—not just between myself and man, for now. I don’t just care about man. I care about every living creature on this Earth. I think man has ignored that because of his own greed.”
Judy was raised Free-Will Baptist. “Of course as I got older I went on my way and forgot about the church. I always believed in God, I always was a Christian, but it was something that didn’t cut into my everyday life. This journey [fighting MTR] has taken me right back into my spirituality and to my Christianity. I truly believe that for any type of movement, particularly environmental movement, to gain momentum and to present its case effectively to the people of America, Christianity and the religious aspect [have] to be a part of it. I truly think there has to be a movement within the religious community to join in for this to work and for us to save this Earth, our children’s future, God’s Creation, and our souls. I truly believe that.”
Judy believes that Americans today are “a generation that’s addicted to comfort, to instant gratification, addicted to technology, addicted to everything that makes their life really easy,” all of which creates a barrier, a buffer between the comfort-seeking individual and the natural world. “And I do think it’s designed to be that way,” she says, “particularly with the TV dumbing people down, particularly our children. All the games and technology that children have is to take their minds off nature and get back to what’s ‘really important,’ and it keeps them in the house.
“I would like to bring Earth First! and the religious community closer together. Earth First! are doing God’s work, they just don’t realize it and they won’t acknowledge it. I know a lot of people think this is funny.” Judy doesn’t. She respects the spirituality of john johnson, for example, and wants some of the legitimacy associated with conventional religion to rub off on Earth First!, which she thinks gets an unfairly bad rap. Judy believes that the pagan Earth Firsters doing God’s work are going to have a much easier time of it with God in the next world than, say, the operator in Tennessee who hangs a giant “Jesus is Lord” sign on his coal silo.
“I’ve seen the look on some Earth Firsters’ faces when you talk about God. But no matter where I go, I’m going to talk about the care of the Creation, because that’s who I am. And when you quote Genesis [about the covenant between God and humankind and all the other creatures on Earth], you can see something in their eyes go: ‘What? What? It says that in the Bible? That’s pretty radical stuff.’”
In the 1990s, Judy and other anti-MTR activists could plausibly believe that momentum on this issue was going their way. Joe Lovett’s lawsuits were resulting in settlements and rulings that, it seemed, would start to rein in MTR. Even in West Virginia’s notoriously pro-coal state government, in spring 2001 a fellow named Matt Crum took charge of the DEP’s enforcement of environmental regulations violated by coal companies in West Virginia. Crum actually enforced the law—for example, by encouraging inspectors to shut down mining operations responsible for blackwater spills (spills of chemical-laden liquid waste from processing coal) until they fixed the problem causing the spill. In the past, inspectors had felt pressured to turn a blind eye to such violations.
Around this time, Judy recalls, “We [anti-MTR activists] had decided: Now is the time for civil disobedience, and people of faith need to be the first people to do this. We all agreed on that, and we were in the process of picking a place, and the perfect site, and the perfect circumstance for this to happen—because you don’t just pull something out of your hat.” And then terrorists took down the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. “It set everything back. It seemed like that was all everyone could think about. The newspapers, the media paid no attention to anything but 9/11.”
Still, she was anxious to move forward with their plans. MTR was continuing, accelerating, and delay meant more and more destruction. “I was impatient, and everyone said no, now’s not the time to do this, let’s just wait a while. So we got back into our comfort zone—fighting permits, going to permit hearings, a lawsuit.”
By 2003, Judy and other anti-MTR activists knew that testifying at hearings was getting them nowhere, and that anti-MTR lawsuit results were apt to be overturned on appeal. By then, it was also increasingly obvious that the Bush administration was failing to live up to previous settlements and apparently hellbent on weakening the mining regulations that they already were systematically failing to enforce. At the state level, things looked no better: In August 2003, incoming DEP head Stephanie Timmermeyer fired Matt Crum and restored cozier relations between the DEP and coal companies.
Matters did not improve in 2004. Apparently not content with failing to enforce the stream-buffer-zone rule, in January 2004 the Bush administration proposed changing the rule to grant mining companies variances that would let them off the hook if they tried not to mine closer than 100 feet from streams “to the extent possible, using the best technology currently available.” The best technology imaginable can’t make it practical to stay a hundred feet from a stream if a valley fill is planned, so in effect what the Bush administration was proposing was to exempt mountaintop removal operations from the buffer rule.
The pattern of anti-MTR legal rulings heading for slapdown on appeal continued through 2004 as well. Back in October 2003, Joe Lovett had filed suit in federal court seeking to bar the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing any more of its Nationwide 21 permits for any proposed MTR operations, regardless of the size of the proposed valley fill. (Both CRMW and OVEC were parties to this suit.) In July 2004, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin ruled that