Standing Our Ground. Joyce M. Barry
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apt word “removal” when referring to the practice.
Despite the rhetoric of tighter enforcement and regulation over this type of coal extraction, in June 2010 the EPA approved its first MTR mine under the new guidelines: Arch Coal’s Pine Creek Mine in Logan County, West Virginia, a 760-acre MTR operation containing three proposed valley fills.29 Environmental groups and activists were displeased with the decision, expecting more from the Obama administration’s environmental protection agency. However, in 2011 the Obama EPA did revoke the permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County, the largest proposed MTR operation to date, signifying a major victory for the anti-MTR movement.30 Despite this regulatory success, Maria Gunnoe, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition community organizer and 2009 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, objects to the regulation of mountaintop removal coal mining:
I will never believe that they can regulate, in any way, shape, form, or fashion, doing MTR or filling valley fills. I think it’s impossible to regulate doing that. “Regulate,” in my opinion, is a way to find excuses for it, and there is no excuse for doing it. . . . They mislead people into thinking that since these words are on paper that this just isn’t happening anymore, and that’s not the case.31
When the regulatory guidelines were initially released, and the Pine Creek Mine was approved under the new rules, Amanda Starbuck, a representative of the international environmental organization Rainforest Action Network, also voiced objections:
This is a devastating first decision under guidelines that had offered so much hope for Appalachian residents who thought the EPA was standing up for their health and water quality in the face of a horrific mining practice. . . . The grand words being spoken by Administrator Jackson in Washington are simply not being reflected in the EPA’s actions on-the-ground. This continues the inconsistent and contradictory decisions that have plagued the EPA’s process on mountaintop removal coal mining all along.32
Environmental groups continue to pressure the administration in hopes that MTR will cease in central Appalachia. Local activists repeatedly invite Lisa Jackson to the coalfields to see an MTR site firsthand. At the time of this writing, she has ignored all requests.
Environmental Justice, Gender, and Anti–Mountaintop Removal Activism
Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal is fundamentally an examination of women’s environmental justice activism in the anti–mountaintop removal coal mining movement in West Virginia. The working-class white women and Cherokee women profiled in this book have ties to coalfield communities and have been directly impacted by the rise of MTR in West Virginia. Some have lost their homes and been forced to relocate, while others fight to stay in their homes and communities. While the book trains its analysis on West Virginia women’s participation in this movement, and the voices of these coalfield women are contained throughout the manuscript, this is not an ethnographic study. Ultimately, this book is an interdisciplinary cultural studies examination of the environmental justice movement against MTR. Even though I focus attention on those most directly affected by Big Coal, the women contained in these pages are not the only ones working tirelessly for environmental justice in the central Appalachia coalfields. Women such as Vivian Stockman, Diane Bady, and Janet Keating have committed their professional lives to coalfield justice through their work in the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. In fact, chances are that if you view a picture of an MTR site contained in books, magazines, or newspaper articles, it was taken by Vivian Stockman.
There are other women, too, such as Sandra Diaz, Steph Pistello, and Mary Ann Hitt, who speak out against MTR and engage in lobbying efforts within the coalfields and in Washington, DC. Also, Teri Blanton, member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, has been active against Big Coal for years now. Ann League is fighting MTR in Tennessee as part of the Save Our Cumberland Mountains organization, Jane Branham and Kathy Selvage organize against Big Coal with the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards in Virginia, Elisa Young fights the industry in Ohio as founder of the Meigs Citizens Action Now organization, and Julia Sendor and Debbie Jarrell are members of the Coal River Mountain Watch in West Virginia. And, of course, there are many men working for environmental justice in the coalfields. Men such as Larry Gibson; Bo Webb; Vernon Haltom; Ed Wiley; ex–coal miner Chuck Nelson; Julian Martin, member of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy; and Bill Price, a West Virginia native who represents the Sierra Club in the coalfields, are all on the ground in West Virginia and very active in anti-MTR campaigns. In fact, Judy Bonds noted that the gender composition of the movement has changed from the late 1990s. She acknowledged that “as the movement has become bigger, and more people have become involved in this, more men have stepped up to the plate. . . . It’s very much needed and appreciated that the men are starting to become more involved, and in that way it diversifies the movement.”33
Indeed, the movement to end mountaintop removal coal mining in central Appalachia is diverse, and since the late 1990s has grown tremendously. What began as a purely local issue in the coalfields of Appalachia has become a regional, national, and international campaign to end this destructive form of coal extraction. The movement involves people from all walks of life: housewives, former coal miners, professional environmentalists, high school and college students, musicians, academics, scientists, actors, filmmakers, and many others who are compelled to work for environmental justice in Appalachia. However, this work argues that MTR became an environmental justice issue through the tireless work of primarily women dealing firsthand with the effects of Big Coal in their communities. Coal River Mountain Watch member Sarah Haltom claims that in her experience, women are more vocal and less afraid to speak out than men in the movement, and “tend to see the issue with more urgency than men.”34 OVEC community organizer Maria Gunnoe claims that “women are the ones who began this movement, and I think it’s because we recognized what it was doing to our kids.”35 Gunnoe recalls a 2003 meeting where twelve women discussed MTR and strategies for fighting Big Coal: “There was a lot of women around that table when we decided, no compromise. . . . It has to be stopped.”36 Women’s activism in the coalfields put this issue on the map, so to speak, and my work highlights their participation and centralizes gender in environmental justice theory and praxis.
Discussions of environmental justice, and the ways in which it differs from mainstream environmentalism, are numerous and well-established in the EJ canon.37 Environmental justice began in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, and was birthed by the civil rights movement.38 Environmental justice seeks to highlight the ways human injustices based on race, gender, class, nation, and so forth are connected to environmental problems. It differs from mainstream environmentalism in that it defines the environment as where we “live, work, and play,” complicating the long-standing conception of the environment as remote wilderness infrequently touched by humans.39 Conversely, EJ emanates from human communities and concentrates on improving and preserving those communities in the face of industrial incursions. Environmental justice operates from the assumption that poor people occupy poor environments, and it seeks justice for vulnerable human populations and the natural spaces that house them.
In particular, EJ argues that minority communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental pollution and resource depletion, and community members often form or join collectives that fight for political, economic, and environmental remediation.40 EJ scholar Filomina Chioma Steady argues that environmental justice has “inspired movements that challenge environmental racism all over the world, especially in the African Diaspora and in Africa and has appealed mostly, though not exclusively, to people of color, indigenous people, and poor people in endangered environments.”41 Indeed, environmental justice scholarship has focused primarily on race and class because of its origins in communities of color. This manuscript applies EJ scholarship and actions rooted in communities of color to primarily white, working-class coalfield communities in West Virginia, expanding the elastic purview of EJ. In addition, I centralize gender in environmental justice thought and practice by focusing on women’s participation in the anti-MTR movement.
Feminist political ecologists argue that women have a unique connection to environmental issues, not based solely or exclusively in biology, but primarily in the work they perform in their