Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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that “the mountains are asking for our help.”
More campers arrive overnight, bringing the total at breakfast to about eighty. Workshops scheduled for today cover nonviolence and de-escalation training, MTR issue education, and mountain culture and cultural-sensitivity issues. All are mandatory for anyone here who wants to participate in the coming campaign.
Also relating to cultural sensitivity, a “potty mouth jar” has been set up in the camp’s main meeting hall and dining room. Anyone who cusses (defined as using a word you would not use in talking to someone else’s grandmother) owes 25 cents—and the fine is 50 cents for each “Jesus Christ!” or “Goddamn!” The idea behind this is to train MJSers from outside the region not to inadvertently offend religious, personally conservative locals. Because the language of many of the folks here is customarily pretty salty, this turns out to be a pretty good fundraiser as well as a cultural sensitivity tool.
At lunch, I catch up with Dave Cooper, who just arrived this morning. Dave gave a talk in Louisville last night, then stopped at home to get some sleep with the intention of driving here in the morning and arriving midday. “I woke up at 2:30 in the morning. I was so excited I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I just got in the car at 3:00 and was driving all night.” Finding more than eighty people here was “a dream come true,” he says. “We worked really hard to get to this point, there’s real good energy here, the weather’s nice, it’s a beautiful spot, everybody’s in a good mood—so we’re off to a really good start.”
Chris Irwin, too, thinks MJS is off to a good start, his ambitious goal earlier this year of thirty or forty full-time MJS volunteers looking pretty realistic now. “I think maybe 30 percent of the people here will travel from place to place” for the whole summer, he says. “But then another 35 to 40 percent are going to [stay in one place]—like we’re going straight back to Tennessee [after the camp concludes] to begin our organizing and preparing.” The number of full-time MJSers (staff, in effect) “make us the largest nonprofit staffed organization fighting mountaintop removal in America. Ever.” The turnout comes as a relief to Chris, “after all this hard work, months and months, and thinking: Good God, there’s going to be 20 people that’ll actually show up. And that was a real danger, because I think a lot of people still don’t know what MTR is. If Americans were more aware, I think we’d have a thousand people here.”
When I catch up with john outside the dining hall, he tells me: “I’m high as a kite. Not on—well, maybe a little bit of caffeine, but nothing else. There’s a great crew of people here. I’m totally impressed with how engaged people are.” In the past, john’s seen forest-defense camps where a good many people seemed most interested in partying. Here, today, people are focused on the work at hand. “People are taking it real seriously,” john says. “I’m totally pleased.”
Chris Dodson, now one of the interns at the Naoma house, tells me: “Exactly what we’re all going to be doing [at the house] is going to become more clear when we can all get together and plan it all out. Everybody’s sort of coming from a different place. But my perception of it is that we’re going to be assisting with logistical stuff for MJS when MJS is in the area. And beyond that, we’re going to be doing similar things to what CRMW and OVEC have been doing, in organizing that community, Coal River valley, specifically with regards to Marsh Fork Elementary. There’s probably going to be a lot of door-to-door, a lot of hearings and stuff. But then my vision, also, is to have MJS things being coordinated with the community, and hopefully from the community.” And he hopes that the program at the Naoma house will not shy away from civil disobedience.
“I bet that we could really make change at Marsh Fork. I don’t think they’re going to build another silo. They’re trying to, but we’re kicking their ass. They’re not going to. And I think it’s possible for that whole facility to be done. Soon.”
That afternoon, I sit in on Dave Cooper’s MTR 101 workshop, adapted from his roadshow. Like the roadshow, today’s workshop relies on slides, accompanied by Dave’s narration of facts about MTR: MTR in West Virginia is concentrated south of Charleston, west of Beckley. MTR uses explosives made of ammonium nitrate (a common chemical fertilizer) and diesel fuel—the same powerful mix that was used to bomb the federal building at Oklahoma City. Most of the land, and by far most of the forested mountains in West Virginia, is controlled by out-of-state owners, typically coal or timber or land-holding companies. Appalachia’s mixed mesophitic forest is the most biologically diverse hardwood forest in the world. MTR is profitable only because coal companies are allowed to externalize so many of its costs. Coal companies called the fatal 1972 Buffalo Creek sludge-dam disaster an “act of God.” The slurry pond looming over Marsh Fork Elementary School overlies old underground mines—if it breaks through to the mines below, millions of gallons of sludge will gush through the old mines and blow out a huge flood God knows where. Lespedeza, the exotic grass typically planted on “reclaimed” MTR sites is, in addition to being ugly, inedible to livestock and wildlife. MTR brings poverty and depopulation not only because it employs so few people but also because the ill effects of MTR preclude other economic activities.
Dave Cooper generally tries to bring coalfield locals along to speak at his roadshows. Today he’s joined by Larry Gibson and Pauline Canterbury, a seventy-five-year-old resident of Sylvester, the next town down the Coal River from Whitesville. Pauline’s (and Sylvester’s) main problem is coal dust. In 1997 Massey got permission to put a processing plant in Sylvester. The plant is built just upwind of the town, where a bluff used to shield the town from wind. In building the plant Massey blasted off the bluff, and as soon as the plant began to operate, airborne coal dust began to fall on Sylvester. Lots of coal dust. (Pauline’s attic has so much coal dust in it that it’s a fire hazard.) Pauline and her neighbor Mary Miller (who call themselves “the Dustbusters”) collected dust samples daily for two years. They took their evidence to state officials and to the federal Office of Surface Mining. They took Massey to court and got an injunction. Massey built a multimillion dollar fabric dome over the plant—and still the dust rains down on Sylvester.
“We’re being sacrificed for cheap energy for the rest of the world,” Pauline tells the MJS group. “Our homes have lost 90 percent of their value because of MTR mining. Their goal is to get us out because flat land is hard to find in West Virginia,” and Sylvester is a fairly wide, flat place in the valley, potentially useful for processing plants, storage depots, and other coal-related facilities. But coal dust is not their only problem. The Coal River now runs at just a trickle when it’s not raining, because so much water is being taken out to wash coal—and then pumped up into giant slurry dams like the one by Marsh Fork Elementary and another up behind her home. There are no escape routes from the valley should any of these huge dams break. Locals can’t even go to visit their ancestors’ graves without a coal company escort, as old graveyards were mostly sited high up and many are now surrounded by strip mining.
“It does my heart so good to see all you young people here,” she says. “This is your world. I’m just sorry that I’m leaving it like we are.”
Pauline is followed by Larry. “When we go into this” summer, he says, “above all we’ve got to be right,” to do the right thing so that the people remaining in the coalfields after the summer’s over will be better off, better able to speak for themselves, to protect themselves, and to end MTR. Larry is keenly aware of the potential dangers MJS poses for coalfield locals, as the bad things that have happened to him have often followed times when he’s had outside supporters up at Kayford.
The high point of the day comes early in the evening, when Bo and Judy arrive at camp and are greeted with enthusiastic applause and many hugs. On their way here, they tell us, they stopped to pay their fines in Beckley, at the Raleigh County magistrate’s office. A police officer they passed in a hallway said to them: “I know who you are, and I know what you did yesterday. And I just want to say off the record that I respect what you did and I’m proud of you.” They didn’t know what their fine would be when they walked in. It could have been up to $100—but after they talked with the magistrate, he ordered a fine of just $5 each plus court costs.
Bo and Judy arrive at camp in time to represent West Virginia in a panel discussion