Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (8 page)

There's always been a strain of religion in the mountains that has been bought off by the company. But there has also always been a strain of real active religious groups, like during the early union days, when Holiness preachers would lead the strikes. But that seems to have disappeared for the most part. The Catholic Church used to be very active. There was a group of Jesuit priests and nuns in the Sixties who were very active in West Virginia. Also, down in Southwest Virginia, during the Pittston strikes, there were some nuns down there who were into everything.

I think apathy has infected the church as well as everywhere. There are some signs that that might be changing, though. Sojourners, for example, has always been a liberal evangelical group,
and Jim Wallis has had some impact on fellow evangelical leaders to change.
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I saw an article in the paper recently about a group of younger evangelicals who were getting involved in environmental issues.

Mountaintop removal needs everybody against it. Change is not going to come from this region, even. It's going to come from national and international pressure to stop mining coal this way. I worry because in this country there are a lot of people—including the Clintons—who are supporting and pushing clean coal technology and all this stuff. When that happens, then you can kiss the mountains good-bye. That's what I think. I hate to think that. That scares me to death. The mountains' only hope is if the world won't go along with it. If some of the projections are correct, in twenty or thirty years from now, people are going to be really aware of it and they're going to be mad when they find out what has been being destroyed here.

My brother is a conservative Republican, but he can't stand mountaintop removal. He says, “It's not a liberal-conservative issue; it's a smart-stupid issue.” That's the way he put it. But even the
Charleston Gazette
, which has always been a liberal paper, is pro–mountaintop removal. It's also a nonissue for West Virginia politicians. They don't even talk about it.

That's one reason I ran for governor, so it'd get talked about in the debates. I ran for governor just to get a dialogue going, not at all expecting to win. I did the third party thing, I got talked into it. The Mountain Party, which hasn't been too active since then. If I had ran as a Democrat I knew I wouldn't get very far, so we did the Mountain Party thing so I could get in the general election. To force the dialogue, to force the others to talk about it. I'm not sure it was a real smart thing to do in some ways because it just about wore me out and burned me out. I have a writer's temperament. Most—not all—writers are introverted. I'm not bubbly and outgoing. I'm quiet, I really value my quiet time. It was just like pulling teeth to go out and shake hands and all that. People are always asking me if I'm going to write a
book about it and I think, “Are you kidding?” I don't even like to think about it.

Partly why I ran was because I was curious as to how it would turn out. We had almost no money, but we got a lot of free publicity. We were in the
Washington Post
and the London
Economist
. A friend of mine was in Spain, and the cabdriver asked her where she was from and when she said West Virginia he said, “Woman running for governor with dog!” Because he'd seen me and Phyllis on CNN.

Look at John Edwards.
¹⁶
He seems like a good guy with principles, but he's not going to speak up against mountaintop removal. I thought, “What if someone runs for office and actually
says
what they think, without worrying about what the unions say, or what the business community says, or what anyone says and just says what they believe?” I wanted to run as someone who wouldn't dilly-dally. Someone who would be honest. I'm for this and that, I'm against mountain removal, and see where the chips fall. And I got the answer. Because I had 2 percent of the money and I got 2 percent of the vote. It fell out almost exactly. It made me lose hope in the system.

One of the most interesting things about that campaign is something I haven't talked about. But at that time Ralph Nader was running and people were worried about him taking away Democratic votes from Gore and all that. We had an incumbent Republican governor, so that was in his favor. So some of the people within the state started to worry that a third-party candidate would take votes from the Democrats. That's the conventional wisdom, but I argued that that wasn't the case because I had a lot of Republicans who told me they were going to vote for me, too. I thought I'd take from both sides. The state co-chairs from the Democratic Party called me, took me to lunch, and offered me the seat on the legislature in this district. I mean, offered it to me. Can you believe that? “If you would not run for governor, you will be the next Democratic legislator in this district.” I played along out of curiosity, asked how much it paid. $20,000. They
were dead serious, the two of them. They were buying my lunch and offering me a seat in the legislature. That really blew my confidence in the system. What does that say about how our public officials get into office?

People were afraid of losing their votes, though, so they didn't vote for me. I think if you took a poll in this state, the majority of the people would say ban mountaintop removal, but that doesn't translate into action because people feel powerless. I bet you could get 60 percent of the people in this state to vote against mountaintop removal. But people just feel a lack of power. I feel that; I feel like I can't do anything. When I was out there campaigning for governor it was like banging my head against the wall to get anything done. I got shut out of all but two of the debates. Twice on statewide television I got to get up and talk for two minutes on MTR. A year and a half of work to get to speak for two minutes.

The first year we spent just getting on the ballot. It probably would've been better if I had run as a Democrat because I wouldn't have had to spend so much time doing all that preliminary stuff. I could've gotten into all the Democratic debates and wouldn't have been so burned out when it was over. And probably would've gotten 25 percent of the vote. I probably shouldn't have let myself get talked into it. I'm glad I ran, though. I'm glad somebody ran and brought the issue up. It got more press nationally than it did locally, which always seems to be the case. The
Washington Post
had a huge piece on it. People here in West Virginia don't know enough about it.

That sense of disenfranchisement goes all the way back to the beginnings of coal. You voted the way your boss told you to. You registered as whatever party the company told you to. My mom was a county school nurse and the county was Democrat so she had to register Democrat to keep her job. The poll workers would stand over your shoulder and watch how you voted.

We love the land, we're attached to the mountains, yet we let them be blown up. We convince ourselves that that's necessary. We swallow it whole, accept the lies. We need that flat land so we
can build things on it! It's going to take several thousand years to fill up what we've already flattened. We just take it, we just put up with it. I don't know why. It used to be, when the union was feistier and stronger, they used to be able to get people feisty, too. But not anymore. And some of the kids I teach, I just want to shake them. They don't care about anything. They don't care about Iraq, about mountaintop removal. They don't read the newspaper, they don't watch the news.

I think it's like the civil rights movement. That wasn't just a Southern issue, it was everywhere, but it was worse in the South, the segregation. But that wasn't something that white people in the South could solve, it just was not going to be solved that way. It took a national effort to solve that. I think it's the same way with mountaintop removal. It's not going to be solved by people here. Because we're too politically isolated or we're too tied into the system or we're too apathetic. It's going to have to be banned on a national level.

If this was western North Carolina everybody'd be outraged. If it was upstate New York everybody'd be outraged. Because it's West Virginia and Kentucky nobody cares. Nobody even knows we're here, first of all. And if they do, they think we're just a bunch of dumb ignorant hillbillies anyway. I can't imagine anywhere in this country that would allow this kind of thing to be going on.

Americans are so self-centered, and we don't care what happens in another country. “Oh, kill them Iraqis,” people'll say. And we're the same way, Appalachia, to them.
We're
just another country.

Look at Buffalo Creek. If that had happened somewhere else, everybody would still know about it, and remember it. Or the Martin County spill. I've talked about that before, told them it was the worst environmental disaster in the South, and nobody had heard of it. And it's because of where it happened. Someday they'll look at this region and they'll say, “Oh look at how they tore that place up; isn't that a shame.” Then they'll go back to what they were doing.

They say I'm anti-coal. I'm not loyal to my culture. I'm a traitor
to the state, to the economy. You get treated like an outsider even though you're not. My Italian daddy was just as hillbilly as they come, and he always told me not to get above my raising. And sometimes people treat me like I don't belong anymore, because of the stand I've taken. I've written letters and columns, refuting that, telling people, “Hey, I grew up in a coal camp, don't tell me I'm not from here.”

Even in this state, one of the most active groups is the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and they're in Huntington. Half their members are in southern West Virginia, but they named themselves after the valley. So people talk about them and say, “Why, they're from Ohio, they're from out of state!”

We're the Mountain State. Our state song says, “Oh, the West Virginia hills, how majestic and how grand/with their summits bathed in glory, like our Prince Emmanuel's Land.” And the state motto, “Mountaineers are always free.” The football team is the Mountaineers. We're destroying our whole identity! Psychologically, it's much like the way the German people convinced themselves they weren't responsible for what they did during World War II. It's self-delusion.

People bring up the economy. Well, our economy has already collapsed. We are killing any future economy we might have had. If we hadn't been practicing mountaintop removal we would have more tourism, a place that we could possibly entice other businesses to come and set up. Why would any business want to move to Eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia, with mountaintop removal? When Toyota came to West Virginia, they didn't want a mountaintop removal site. We're not creating places that are going to bring in economy. No big business is going to want to locate somewhere that is not served by roads and good schools and recreational facilities. These places are being trashed, not improved. The coal industry has destroyed our economy. For the last 125 years it's kept out any competition. If it wasn't for coal, we could be like Vermont or New Hampshire, or western North Carolina. Instead, we've got this wrecked economy that was wrecked
by the coal industry 125 years ago, and it's never recovered. They stole the land, and now they're destroying it.

I've heard people in the coal industry say it doesn't affect the waterways. Mountaintop removal doesn't affect waterways because it just destroys them, period. The way to stop water pollution is to stop the water! Of course! They've got it all figured out.

We could still have another Buffalo Creek, too. That humongous thing in Boone County, with the grade school right below it. Can you imagine any other place in America allowing that? Can you imagine the parents in the Hamptons having to scream about their kids going to school beneath a slag heap, with water behind it? It'll be on the national news when several hundred people get killed. For a little while, maybe.

To make it national, I think it'll take hundreds of people having to die. I hate to say that. But I believe that's what it will take. I've thought about, what if some of us went on a hunger strike? Or what if there was a suicide bomber? Would that bring attention to it? I wonder. Shortly after September 11, I was talking to my friend Jim Lewis and saying that I couldn't understand the logic of suicide bombers and he said, “Well, now, I don't know, you might have a little bit of that in you.” And I thought about it and said, “Well, I might, actually.” If it would stop mountaintop removal, would I strap a bomb on? Obviously I wouldn't, but I'd sure love to save a mountain. But I wonder if that would even stop it. I just don't know.

The authorities and the powers that be have figured out how to control us. It's not like the mass uprising you saw during the civil rights movement, when people just didn't want to take it anymore. Or during the Pittston strikes, that was such a community entity. Everybody was involved. I covered it for the newspaper. Gas stations wouldn't even fill up state troopers' cars so they could go out and patrol the strikes. Even the local county officials were standing up against the company. It was involvement from local government to the gas station attendants to the grade school kids. Everybody. I've never seen anything like that.

So many people have forgotten the land ownership study. The land is 80 to 85 percent corporate owned, and it is not for sale. They've taken what should be community-access land, and they own it, and they destroy it. If I decide, in this neighborhood, to take a ball and chain and start knocking this house down, I'm not allowed to do that. Because I have neighbors. I'm not allowed to move a dozer onto this property. I can't do just anything I want to. Just because it's your land doesn't mean you can destroy it. That's from a practical point of view. From a spiritual point of view I'd say, well, it's not your land, it's God's land. You're just caretaking it for a little while. From a Woody Guthrie point of view I'd say, “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

I think the average West Virginia attitude is, “It's wrong, but there's nothing I can do about it.” And that's real frustrating.

I don't see much hope. I hate to say that, but it's true. Part of it's that I'm getting older and crankier, and the governor thing took a lot of it out of me. But you just have to keep on fighting it. And I try to remain hopeful. I mean, in 1987, if you had told me that in five years that Eastern Europe was going to be free and the Berlin Wall was going to fall, why, I'd have thought that you were smoking dope. But five years later, it had all happened. So maybe some miracle will come. Maybe the good Lord's got some kind of a plan that he's just waiting to unleash on us, and it'll just snowball. And all of a sudden we'll look at this and say, “Well, we've lost some mountains, but we've got most of them, so now let's pick up and get on it with it.”