Belonging: A Culture of Place (5 page)

Mountaintop removal robs the earth of that dignity. It robs the folk who live in the cultural wasteland it creates of their self-esteem and divine glory. Witnessing up close the way this assault on the natural environment ravages the human spirit, the anguish it causes folk who must face daily the trauma of mountaintop removal, we who live away from this process are called to an empathy and solidarity that requires that we lend our resources, our spiritual strength, our progressive vision to challenge and change this suffering.

A beacon light to us all, elder Daymon Morgan embodies the unbridled spirit of a true Kentucky revolutionary. He acts a conservationist, a steward of the land, and as one who is committed to the struggle to end mountaintop removal. Returning from World War II, Morgan bought land on Lower Bad Creek in Leslie County, Kentucky. Raising a family, growing herbs on his land, he had allowed the earth to teach him, to be his witness. His is special because he is in many ways representative of the ordinary citizen who is called to political action because of their love of the land and community. In recent times the Appalachian Studies program at Berea College makes certain that the faculty and staff, especially those who are new, take the Appalachian tour so that they may better understand our region, have an opportunity to meet this amazing man of integrity who stands for all that is right and wonderful in a democratic country. Taking the tour provided me an opportunity to meet Mr. Morgan, to be in his presence, to learn from his knowledge. Even before he opens his mouth, the strength and stillness of his being radiates glory. In Buddhist tradition the student learns that it is transformative just to stand in the presence of a great teacher.

Both by his presentation and in my short dialogue with Mr. Morgan, I saw in his visage and heard in his own words the extent to which fighting mountaintop removal wears on his spirit, wears him down, especially when that resistance must take the form of challenging relatives who would surrender the land, their legacy to big business. Before meeting Daymon Morgan, I had learned from his writing about the tens of thousands of years it takes for the organic matter of the forest to biodegrade and make rich. When this earth is attacked he mourns: “It’s very disturbing to me to see the things that I love being destroyed. I got my medicine and my food from these mountains, and I still do. There’s a place down here where I can lay down and drink out of this creek and I want to keep it that way because it’s clear above. I feel like I’m being pushed into a corner.” Just two years later hearing Morgan speak we hear the emotional toil resistance takes. Yet he tells with pride that there is joy in struggle, that he continues to struggle because of the debt he owes this Kentucky land. He honors the mutual relationship between him and the earth be working to protect and preserve the world around him. I ask him about protecting this legacy beyond the grave. No matter the steps he does not take to still be resisting beyond death, his presence is making a difference in the here and now.

Unlike other Appalachian tour groups who have visited at Morgan’s home, we were not able to make it up the mountain in our bus. He came down the mountain to talk with us. We were watched by coal mining hired hands sitting in vehicles. Subjected to a level of surveillance that bordered on harassment, their intent was to block us using roads that would enable us to see first hand the devastation. Their intent was to keep us from seeing the work of mountaintop removal. Concern for our safety was paramount to Mr. Morgan. Still we were able to witness and experience the threat he faces daily from those who could care less about the survival of our Kentucky land, culture, and the lives of folks who are mostly poor and working class. The lack of empathy for the lives that are devastated by mountaintop removal reminds us of the overall crisis in human values generated by dominator culture, by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

In dominator culture the will to power stands as a direct challenge to the cultural belief that humans survive soulfully because of a will to meaning. When the will to meaning is paramount, human life retains dignity. The capacity of humans to create community, to make connections, to love, is nurtured and sustained. For those us who believe in divine spirit, in higher powers, the issue of mountaintop removal and all practices wherein the earth is plundered and the environment wasted is as much a spiritual issue as it is a political issue. In order to justify dehumanizing coal mining practices, the imperial capitalist world of big business has to make it appear that the plant and human life that is under attack has no value. It is not difficult to see the link between the engrained stereotypes about mountain folk (hillbillies), especially those who are poor, representations that suggest that these folk are depraved, ignorant, evil, licentious, and the prevailing belief that there is nothing worth honoring, worth preserving about their habits of being, their culture.

Mass media representations of poor folk in general convey to the public the notion that poor people are in dire straits because of the bad choices they have made. It pushes images that suggest that if the poor suffer from widespread addiction to sugar, alcohol or drugs it is because of innate weaknesses of character. When mass media offers representations of poor mountain folk, all the negative assumptions are intensified and the projections exaggerated. No wonder then that is usually easier for citizens concerned about environmental issues to identify with the hardships facing nature and the lives of the poor in underdeveloped countries than to identify with the exploitation of the environment, both the natural and cultural world of people here is our society, especially in Appalachia.

In Alice Walker’s most recent book,
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For,
she describes soul murder in dominator culture as “pain that undermines our every attempt to relieve ourselves of external and internalized…domination…the pain that murders our wish to be free.” She concludes, “It is a pain that seems unrelenting. A pain that seems to have no stopping and no end. A pain that is ultimately, insidiously, turning a generous life loving people into a people who no longer feel empathy for the world. We are being consumed by our suffering.” While Walker is talking about the fate of black folk, her words speak to the human condition in our culture, especially to the lives of exploited and oppressed people of all colors.

To truly create a social ethical context wherein masses of American citizens can empathize with the life experiences of Appalachians we must consistently challenge dehumanizing public representations of poverty and the poor. Restoring to our nation the understanding that people can be materially poor yet have abundant lives rich in engagement with nature, with local culture, with spiritual values is essential to any progressive struggle to halt mountaintop removal. Seeing and understanding that abundance means not only that we must collectively as a nation change our thinking about poverty, it means we must see a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives. And that is a challenging task in a material cultural where individual citizens of all classes spend significant amounts of their daily life fantasizing about becoming wealthy by winning the lottery as well as spending much of their income to purchase lottery tickets. This situation would be cause for widespread despair were it not for the education for critical consciousness that is already leading many American citizens to revaluate their lives. Among all classes, decreased economic resources caused by job loss, low wages, high housing costs etc. are all circumstances that are serving as a catalyst for folks to re-think their lives. This rethinking often includes a return to spiritual values which often acts to reconnect folk wit h nature. Walker tells us in her recent work that we have only spirit to guide us, that “spirit is our country because it is ultimately our only home.”

One of the unintended benefits that have come with the widespread rebirth of religious fundamentalist has been the outgrowth of new ways of thinking about the poor. Concurrently, this revived theology calls for those who are truly living according to the biblical word to identify with the poor and to seek to live simply. That call to simple living often begins with a reawakening of wonder sparking awareness of our profound connection to nature. The Christian Bible tells believers to turn again and again to nature to understand the essence of spiritual values. And certainly all the diverse religions of the world pay homage to the role nature plays in our humanization, our spiritual self-actualization. In her essay, “Turning Slowly Nature,” Diane Glancy offers this insight: “It seems to me that nature is an unsaved world. A world groaning for redemption, for release form fear, guardedness, a state of alertedness, a predatory state. Nature longs for release. Creation groans for deliverance like the humanity that inhabits it. In the biblical book of Romans we are told, “The creation itself will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

As we work to redeem nature, to rescue and preserve our natural environment so that future generations may be at home here we claim our own salvation as witnesses and as custodians. Writing about integrating her Native American and European ancestry in the essay, “Becoming Metis,” Melissa Nelson tells us how a commitment to deep ecology was a perspective that served her even as it was the more holistic visions offered by Native traditions which provided for her a spiritual, philosophical, and political foundation from which to grow. She explains: “To indigenous peoples, the basic tenets of deep ecology are just a reinvention of very ancient principles that they have been living by for millennia before their ways were disrupted, and in many cases destroyed, by colonial forces. To learn who I am today, on this land, I live on, I’ve had to recover that heritage and realize a multicultural self…By studying the process others have gone through to embrace the cultural richness of diverse backgrounds, I have come to understand the importance of decolonizing my mind.” We must all decolonize our minds in Western culture to be able to think differently about nature, about the destruction humans cause.

With prophetic vision Enrique Salmon explains in “Sharing Breath” that “Cultural Survival can be measured by the degree to which cultures maintain a relationship with their bioregions. Ecologists and conservation biologists recognized an important relationship between cultural diversity and biological diversity…. Cultural histories speak the language of the land. They mark the outlines of the human/land consciousness.” Our vernacular Kentucky language resonates with the richness and warmth of our land. When we open our mouths, generations can be heard as though we are indeed “speaking in tongues” as we embrace collective unconscious remembering our ancestors, remembering their love of the land. It is that love which must lead us again and again to do all that must be done to stop mountaintop removal, to recover the beauty and function of coal without laying waste the earth. The culture of Appalachia cannot live if our mountains are dead. We cannot look to the hills and find strength if all we can see is a landscape of destruction.

4
Touching the Earth

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all these things. I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

Lorraine Hansberry
To Be young, Gifted, and Black

When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. The ancestors taught me it was so. As a child I loved playing in dirt, in that rich Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. Before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land. I could stand with my grandfather Daddy Jerry and look out at fields of growing vegetables, tomatoes, corn, collards, and know that this was his handiwork. I could see the look of pride on his face as I expressed wonder and awe at the magic of growing things. I knew that my grandmother Baba’s backyard garden would yield beans, sweet potatoes, cabbage, and yellow squash, that she too would walk with pride among the rows and rows of growing vegetables showing us what the earth will give when tended lovingly.

From the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation run-aways, the “Seminoles,’ methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we grew up eating came to our black southern diet from the world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth, black and red people helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone. Listen to these words attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people… We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.

The sense of union and harmony with nature expressed here is echoed in testimony by black people who found that even though life in the new world was “harsh, harsh,’ in relationship to the earth one could be at peace. In the oral autobiography of granny midwife Onnie Lee Logan, who lived all her life in Alabama, she talks about the richness of farm life — growing vegetables, raising chickens, and smoking meat. She reports: