Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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I first started in the mining industry, in the 1960s, there were hundreds of thousands of miners working. We’ve produced more coal in the last few years in West Virginia than we ever have in history—with the fewest number of miners, because of mountaintop removal. It’s put people out of work. A handful of people are making a profit from this. There’s a handful of people controlling the corporation who are really making the money. And the rest of us are suffering for it.”
I catch up with Bo again in West Virginia in mid-February, where he introduces me to his daughter Sarah and son-in-law Vernon Haltom, and Patty Sebok, a fellow CRMW activist who’s married to a disabled underground coal miner. Together we drive down to Blacksburg, a pretty little college town in western Virginia, for a meeting of about three dozen people aiming to organize MJS. One person has traveled here from Atlanta, the rest from around the region—West Virginia, western Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky.
In addition to the crew from Coal River, West Virginians at the meeting include Larry Gibson, the one person still living up on Kayford Mountain. Larry rode down to Blacksburg with Abraham Mwaura, an organizer with Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) in Huntington, West Virginia.
From Tennessee come Amanda Womac and john johnson, a big bearish fellow in plaid flannel shirt and camouflage pants, with a long ponytail and long brown beard. (john says he doesn’t believe in capitalism.) Both are affiliated with Katuah Earth First! in Knoxville. So are Paloma Galindo and her husband Chris Irwin, a law student, who is intense, fast-talking, impatient, and very much attached to his laptop computer, on which he makes many notes during the meeting. Chris and Paloma have apparently done a large share of the work of organizing MJS to date. Chris speaks probably more than anyone else at the meeting, john and Paloma nearly as much as him. When Bo introduces me to Chris, as a writer working on a book, my impression is that Chris is wary, bristly, thinking that I’ll waste his time if he lets me. (Months later, when I tell Paloma this, her reaction is: “No! Not Chris!” Later, still thinking surely I was mistaken, she asks Chris who, after a long pause, admits it was true.) Like john, Chris and Paloma are in their mid-thirties.
Several people, in their twenties and thirties, affiliated with western North Carolina’s faction of Katuah Earth First! have driven up for the meeting. Although North Carolina is outside the coalfields, a core group of half a dozen or so Asheville-area anarchist eco-activists, with the support of a larger network there, is strongly committed to MJS. One of those here today is Sage Russo, in his mid-twenties, short and slight for a man and much-tattooed, with dark curly hair and a tidy beard, an improbable mix of Brooklyn (where his father’s family lives) and North Carolina mountains (where his mother’s from). Sage is a dedicated Christian, highly unusual among anarchists.
Prominent among the local Blacksburg folks organizing the meeting is Chris Dodson, in his twenties, also small and slender, with blond dreadlocks, homemade-looking patchwork long shorts, hiking boots, a mellow demeanor, vegan but not evangelical about it. (When individuals during the meeting volunteer to solicit food donations for summer, he says he’ll ask a man he knows who raises rabbits to donate meat for those who “eat bunnies.”)
Dave Cooper has traveled here all the way from Lexington, Kentucky—but he’s well accustomed to travel. Since a year ago last fall, Dave’s logged many thousands of miles to scores of places throughout the region and beyond, presenting a slideshow and talk on MTR, hoping to make a wider public aware of and outraged about it. Sitting next to Dave is Bill McCabe, a coalfield native now living in eastern Tennessee and working on staff with Sierra Club’s Environmental Justice Program. He describes himself as “not a tree-hugger” although, he adds, “my church is in the woods.” While he personally supports MJS, he says Sierra Club won’t officially endorse it. (All of the nonprofits opposing MTR are keenly aware that direct support for civil disobedience would threaten their tax-exempt status.)
For a day and a half, the organizers report back on what’s been going on, region by region. They discuss issues of concern to the whole campaign. They talk about what needs to be accomplished in the next month, from courting media to tweaking the MJS website, and individuals volunteer to “bottom line” making specific things happen. By prior agreement, no one is “in charge” of MJS, and decisions are made by consensus rather than majority vote; proposals are discussed and modified, concerns voiced and addressed, until all present reach agreement.
The group also discusses an emerging problem with the term “mountaintop removal.” Officials and mining companies in Tennessee say there is no MTR there—they call it “cross-ridge mining” and claim it doesn’t destroy whole mountains. Bo notes that coal companies generally are redefining “mountaintop removal” very restrictively, so they can say they’re not doing it. He suggests using the term “steep slope strip mining” to get around this subterfuge.
At lunch on Saturday, passing mention is made of “taking over a mountaintop” near the end of summer, either an active MTR site or a place proposed for MTR. CRMW folks don’t know anything about this but laugh and say they know plenty of mountains they could suggest.
After lunch, Bo tells the meeting that CRMW’s top priority this summer is to stop Massey’s operations next to Marsh Fork Elementary School—stop the coal-loading and coal-prep operations, fix the dam, stop blasting at the MTR site above the school. School ends for the summer on June 8. Might MJS do a direct action to shut the coal plant down in mid- or late May? Bo emphasizes that permanently shutting this site down is doable, as the school was there long before the coal plant, which should never have been permitted, making this a potential early success story for MJS, one that would provide encouragement and build campaign momentum.
After some discussion about needing an overall public statement of goals for MJS, john proposes that the group write an MJS mission statement to broadcast to potential allies and the world at large. After much discussion, here’s what they come up with:
Mountain Justice Summer (MJS) seeks to add to the growing anti-MTR citizens movement. Specifically MJS demands an abolition of MTR, steep slope strip mining and all other forms of surface mining for coal. We want to protect the cultural and natural heritage of the Appalachia coalfields. We want to contribute with grassroots organizing, public education, nonviolent civil disobedience and other forms of citizen action. Historically coal companies have engaged in violence and property destruction when faced with citizen opposition to their activities. MJS is committed to nonviolence and will not be engaged in property destruction.
Posted on the MJS website and reproduced again and again in MJS literature, this would serve as both a definition of and a guideline for MJS throughout the summer and beyond.
Shortly after the meeting in Blacksburg, Bo does a radio interview for a station in Asheville with Julia Bonds. (Bonds’s friends call her Judy, and that’s what I’ll call her here from this point on). Judy’s family lived in the same hollow, near Whitesville, for nine generations. Then, in 1994, Massey moved in. Neighbors moved out. Judy’s home was covered with coal dust and rattled by blasting. Fish died in the streams her family had always relied on.
“My grandson lay in bed one night when it was raining,” Judy recalls, “and we knew other dams had failed. He was eight years old at the time, and he tried to reassure me, because he knew I was worried. He said, ‘Mawmaw don’t worry. If that dam [above our house] breaks, I’ve got a path that we can just climb the mountain, and a cave that we can hide in.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandson that we’d never make it.
“My grandson developed asthma, and things became worse and worse.” Finally they moved, the last people in their hollow to leave. Judy would have stayed, but she feared for her daughter and grandson.
“Most Americans simply do not understand where their so-called cheap electricity comes from,” she says. “There’s nothing cheap about it. And Americans need to understand that coal from cradle to grave is dirty. There’s no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ And they need to understand that [with] our materialistic lifestyle, the use of excessive electricity that you don’t need, we’re destroying our children’s future. We’re selling our children’s [future] necessities for our luxuries.”
Bo