Standing Our Ground. Joyce M. Barry
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our property, our quality of life. We were in danger . . . and it was basically the quality of the air and water that made me find out more about what’s happening in my own holler, and the coal industry.”7 Feeling under siege from MTR blasting, the persistent presence of coal trucks, and the inability to drink water in her home or visit the family cemetery, she moved nine miles away to Rock Creek, West Virginia. She was the last resident to leave the community of Marfork.
Prior to joining the CRMW, Bonds had no experience in grassroots activist politics, but at an early age she began to develop a deep sensitivity to economic and social injustice. All the men in her family, including her father, grandfather, ex-husband, cousins, and others worked in nearby coal mines. She spent her childhood in Birch Creek, the upper reaches of Marfork Hollow, where her family grew large gardens, foraged for edible plants in the surrounding mountains, kept livestock, and hunted animals for their own subsistence. Bonds lived in Birch Creek until she was seven, when a coal company forced her family off their land. They settled nearby in Marfork Hollow, and her father worked for Bethlehem Coal Company.8
She recalled seeing one of her father’s paychecks, and the anger she felt upon learning his weekly compensation was a meager $15. She said, “Fifteen dollars for a man risking his life and his health. Fifteen dollars is what he gets for that?”9 Even though Bonds had no political activist experience before joining the CRMW, she credited her mother with imparting a strong sense of justice in her: “She was a very strong willed, opinionated woman. I remember listening to my mother rant and rave about Buffalo Creek. . . . And I remember hearing my mother talk a little bit about Mother Jones, and John L. Lewis and about Matewan. . . . So, a little bit of that outrage against injustices was instilled in me at an early age.”10 In the anti-MTR movement, Bonds had a reputation for speaking bluntly, motivated by an angry passion that was not palatable to all people, particular coal industry supporters. However, she was unapologetic, saying, “That’s who I am. I can’t apologize for that. I lost my diplomacy a long time ago.”11 She, like other grassroots activists in the movement, was the victim of threats and intimidation for speaking out against coalfield injustices, but she remained unwavering in her position.
Arguably, Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, and Maria Gunnoe are the faces of the MTR movement. West Virginia natives with deep historical ties to the region, they, along with other people profiled in this book, have felt the negative impacts of Big Coal firsthand. All have refused to remain silent while this industry obliterates their communities. Bonds, in particular, took a firm stand on the issue and believed other people should as well. She argued, “If you do not raise your finger to stop an injustice, you’re the same as that person doing the injustice.”12 She has been called a “folk celebrity” for her work with the CRMW,13 a coalfield Erin Brockovich. However, Bonds was quick to say that she was just one of many, “a reflection” of Big Coal’s impact on southern West Virginia and of the numerous people taking stands against the coal industry in this era of mountaintop removal coal mining.14 She said, “I’m just the first one out there, because there’s a lot more women that have deeper and bigger and more compelling stories to tell. . . . That’s what makes it so good is that the rest of these women are now telling their stories because one woman had the courage to step out.”15
Bonds and Gunnoe are representative of many Appalachian women who have become politically active to save their homes, communities, and the lush Appalachian Mountains literally from obliteration. They occupy an area of the country known as an energy “sacrifice zone,” where the lives and environment of the few are sacrificed for the greater good of the many; in this case through the production of coal, which provides most of the electricity in the United States.16 While they work to protect the land and quality of life, women environmental justice activists in West Virginia are cognizant that MTR is not solely an environmental issue. Rather, these women position the problems associated with MTR within a holistic framework, highlighting the political, economic, and environmental linkages to this destructive form of coal extraction.
MTR is a controversial form of coal extraction, polarizing state citizens, many of whom defend the practice and the industry, because of Big Coal’s long history in West Virginia; because of the cultural belief that this area “is coal country”; and because of economic reasons, as the industry provides most of the good-paying jobs in the coalfields today. Those critical of the coal industry, particularly mountaintop removal mining, are fewer in number given the overall population in West Virginia’s nine southern coal counties (Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Nicholas, Raleigh, Logan, McDowell, Mingo, and Wyoming), which in 2007 had a combined population of 476,996, while the total number of people residing in the state was 1,812,035.17 While working in environmental justice groups, these grassroots women activists maintain a transformative vision focused on ending the coal hegemony in West Virginia and preserving local communities and the natural environment by promoting the use of alternative energy forms. In doing so they find themselves deeply lodged within the long-standing jobs-versus-environment tensions between those who protect coal in this area and others who seek a new direction for the state. This chapter examines the material conditions of working-class West Virginia women in the age of MTR, gender ideologies shaped and utilized by the coal industry, and how women’s anti-MTR activism challenges and defies established gendered prescriptions.
In the Shadow of a “Resource Curse”: Material Conditions of West Virginia Women and the Hegemony of Coal
The coal industry rules supreme in the rural coalfields of southern West Virginia. In this nine-county area, the heavy manufacturing of this fossil fuel provides one of the best means of employment, with adequate wages and health benefits for many coal miners and their families. West Virginia is typically characterized as a mono-economy, reflecting the prominence of coal in the state’s economy and also its long history as the most influential industry in West Virginia. While the number of mining jobs has decreased over the years with the increased mechanization of the industry, coal still employees a large number of working-class people in southern West Virginia, either directly through mining jobs or through other businesses that support mining.18 The rest of this wage-earning population is largely employed in service-oriented occupations, many lacking health-care benefits and living wages.19
While the state is rich in natural resources such as coal and timber, its citizens are some of the most impoverished in the country. Currently, West Virginia ranks as the fifth-most-impoverished state in the US, behind Kentucky, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Mississippi.20 The highest rates of poverty are in the rural southern areas of the state, including two counties located in the southern coalfields, McDowell and Mingo, with poverty rates at 33 percent and 25.4 percent, respectively.21 Many scholars and most anti-MTR activists connect the consistently high levels of poverty in West Virginia to the extraction of natural resources, the very basis of the state’s mono-economy. Journalist Jeff Goodell claims:
Nearly 150 years and some 13 billion tons of coal later, it’s strikingly obvious that the great wealth of natural resources in West Virginia has been anything but a blessing. Rather than bringing riches, it has brought poverty, sickness, environmental devastation, and despair. By virtually every indicator of a state’s economic and social well-being—educational achievement, employment rate, income level—West Virginia remains at or near the bottom of the list. Nowhere is the decline clearer than in the southern part of the state, where the promise of riches was once brightest.22
The adverse socioeconomic conditions Goodell notes impact many West Virginia citizens but are, perhaps, most keenly felt by working-class women in the state. Over the past decade, many studies have assessed the socioeconomic conditions of West Virginia. Some analyses focus explicitly on conditions of women, while others isolate the category of gender among other discrete variables. Surprisingly, the most influential assessment of the region, the Appalachian Regional Commission report, insufficiently addresses gender in its assessment of living conditions in Appalachia.
In 2003, the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal program established in 1965 to assess and ameliorate persistent poverty in the region, released its annual report, Appalachia at the Millennium: An Overview of Results from Census 2000, based on 1990s socioeconomic data.23 Curiously, the report has a section that segments