Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (15 page)

Her love for the place and its culture is palpable when listening to Mattea's
Coal
, which at this writing is the #2 album in the nation on the Billboard bluegrass charts and is being embraced as one of the best records of 2008 by reviewers from the
Boston Globe
to the
Los Angeles Times
. Her work on this album, which was produced by fellow traditionalist Marty Stuart, has helped Mattea to better understand her relationship to Appalachia, its mountains, and the way the place shaped her as a person. No matter that she had eighteen top-ten country hits under her belt, Mattea says that she really learned how to sing by doing the songs on
Coal
. Although she says she had to dig really deep to get to the dark and light places that held the power for her to let these songs come forth, she also found them to be “almost too effortless to
sing.” When Stuart heard this, he said this didn't surprise him a bit. “That's because it's in your blood, pal,” he said.

Mattea likes this explanation. “I think there's a mystery there: that somewhere in me, in my DNA, there's my great-grandmother singing, and my grandmother, and my people, singing through me, with me,” she says.

And that's yet another reason why she'll keep fighting for Appalachia and her mountains by raising her voice in song, and in protest.

Kathy Mattea talking…

I had heard about mountaintop removal, but it didn't really register.

Then I trained with Al Gore to be part of a group called the Climate Project that he started, which was a grassroots movement as a service project that he initiated to train a thousand people in this country to go give the slide show that
An Inconvenient Truth
is based on.
⁶
And so when we trained it was very intense. It was a weekend, and they encouraged us to personalize the slide show and make it our own and find our own kind of point of view so that we all weren't just trying to be Al Gore. It had to be more personal than that. I found this Web site, ilovemountains.org. And I was blown away. I made a slide for the show, of the Hobet Mine.
⁷
I took a picture of the footprint of the Hobet Mine superimposed over the island of Manhattan. And it took up half the island of Manhattan. I was dumbstruck. And when I began to put this in the slide show, you could hear audible gasps in the room. People couldn't believe it. Well, it sort of opened up a can of worms for me, and I began to meet people and learn more about this.

I went up and did this flyover with Mari-Lynn [Evans] and the Sierra Club, and then it turned into a press conference and all this stuff.
⁸
And if I had known, I might have done it differently, only because I felt a little bit like I didn't have time to process my reaction. It was sort of like not kind of getting to catch your
breath. I literally had twenty minutes before I had to stand up and say something, and I was still pretty emotional. So when I went up with them, immediately Bill Raney, who's the head of Friends of Coal, kept saying publicly, “Well, we'll take her up. We'd like to show her the other side.”
⁹
But I didn't hear from him. So I called him up one day. I said, “Take me. I'll go with you.” So they took me up and I got to see a working site. I got to have lunch at a mountaintop removal mine with all the miners, I got to ride in some of the equipment and see how it's done. They showed me some of their environmental stuff. Some of the guys who do studies on the water and all that, they were there, telling me some of their stories. And so that sort of brought me to today.

The next thing that happened was
Blue Ridge Country
asked me to do an article on mountaintop removal. And I went back and read the articles, and basically what I keep finding is there is this set of people who are very active and then there's this other set of people who are like, “Hey, this is going on and isn't it sad and I hope they do something.” And I feel like I don't want to just add my voice to the war. I don't want to keep screaming, “They're wrong, they're wrong, they're wrong, they're wrong, they're wrong.” And I don't want to just say, “Wow, I sure hope they do something; I hope somebody does something.”

And so I've really done a lot of soul-searching about where I feel like I can be of service in this whole thing, and I think somehow—just for me and the way I want to do this—when I decided to go and take a look at what the coal guys had to show me, I decided I didn't want to walk in with the idea that they're my enemy. I really wanted to try and be open. They showed me some reclamation that looked really good. I mean, you couldn't tell. And they showed me some reclamation and I was like, “That is
not
beautiful to me.” But I tried to not villainize anyone.

Then I started learning about how coal contributes to global warming. All of a sudden, every rock I turned over had coal under it; that was kind of the way I described it. It is all put together. One of the thoughts that I had—and I don't know, I'm a chick
singer, what do I know?—but when you fly over these mountaintop removal sites and even the reclamation sites, as you know, they're all flat on top and you can only build so many malls and airports and parking lots and shopping centers and golf courses. Especially when the grass won't grow. But, you know, you think, okay, it's decimated already and it's all flat. What if you just filled it with solar panels? What if you just filled it with wind turbines? It's like, okay, what could we do with this? We could create a whole other industry that could be something that would not have been possible before, but could be something that could move us forward to a point where…what if you built those things in West Virginia? What if you maintained them? What if you trained people to maintain them? You'd have a whole other industry that was sustainable, yet made something positive out of what's left from this negative impact. And I had this thought…I was talking to one of the people who was there, one of the activists, and he said, “I thought the exact same thing.” And you think, who am I to throw this forward? But you just never know where a solution will come in.

Some friends of mine have come in contact with this guy who does conflict negotiations all over the world and has for thirty years. Palestinians and Israelis. People in refugee camps whose families have been murdered by their neighbors and they're trying to figure out how to live in this situation. Inner-city gangs and the police. Inner-city teachers and their students. Just people fighting for justice and the systems they're fighting against. His technique is called nonviolent communication, and it's in the tradition of Martin Luther King.

I've been learning a lot about this ability to communicate even when you don't agree. That's the space that I want to try and hold in this. If I can try to understand and let them understand where I'm coming from,
that's
where a new understanding comes in. And this guy, this negotiator, says when people can truly hear each other and hear the human need, the universal human need, behind why they are doing what they're doing on either side, it's
amazing. Solutions tend to present themselves. And so I seem to be one human being who knows all these people, and I somehow feel like that that's a way I can help. I don't know if I can get coal operators and miners and the governor and legislators and activists and residents all together in a room with this guy or someone who does that kind of negotiating, but that's the best thing that I would be able to do. I don't have the skills to do it myself, but I sort of see myself as one person who knows all of these people.

It's very scary, because you can sort of feel the pressure to take a side, and I have very strong opinions. But I don't know that me just stating my opinions is going to be helpful, and I want to try and do something that's real and helpful. I think that if we can learn to say, “This is wrong. These are the facts and this is wrong,” and have the discipline to keep from going to a place of hate, then that's the way the world changes. That's the way we don't have to have wars, either in our families, in our marriages, in our friendships, in our fighting against social injustice, or from country to country around the world. I've come to believe that that's the key. That's my fifteen cents.

It's a very scary thing for me to be able to sit here and say this. I don't feel equipped to do this. I don't feel that I know enough to do it, but it feels very much like what I'm being
called
to do. That's my prayer, that's my hope, is that that can be the template. Those kinds of struggles, that picture of that kid lying down in front of that tank in Tiananmen Square, or the picture of the marches with Martin Luther King that were peaceful. The pictures of Gandhi and how they did it over there. It is not accepting the unacceptable, but refusing to be a part of the violence, and there is a sacred space in that paradox that is where divine intervention happens.

I have experienced it in my life too much and it's miraculous. I do believe it can be done. I do. But I think that there has to be people in leadership positions that can understand that and can keep articulating that in the face of very high emotions—really, really high emotions.

I don't pretend to have some picture of some universal right or wrong. I don't think any of us do. The best way I can put it—I was thinking about that this morning when I was thinking about you coming—is I can remember when I was a kid and I was growing up in the Vietnam War. It was every night. And I can remember being like eleven and twelve and thinking, “This is going to go on for my whole life. Every night it's a report on the war and this is going to go on for my whole life. And the people who are grown-ups think this is okay. This is crazy.” Then I got older and I thought, “Well, this is just the way of the world, and there's nothing you can do about it.” And I think it's kind of the same with mountaintop removal. It takes a lot of discipline to hold the longer view. When we destroy our treasures in the name of the short-term goal, it's a stupid way to live. It's a stupid way to live.

I was reading somewhere where someone in the industry said, “Well, this is a very small number of people that we're affecting,” but you know there is this thing about the people who choose to live in these places, and I know it because my family is really rooted there. It's an attachment to a sense of place like many, many people don't have anymore. And someone has to steward this land for us or we'll be out of everything. It'll be gone before we realize what we've done.

I have a friend who says, “Corporations have all the rights of an individual but not the responsibilities of an individual.” So when it comes to a corporate environment, the success or failure is determined by the bottom line, financially. But how do you measure human costs? How do you measure environmental costs? How do you measure that other stuff if it's not even in the equation? And I think that's where we've really gone wrong not just in this industry, but as a culture, as a society, so that the people who are screaming about this can be looked at as Pollyanna or tree-hugger types or painted in certain terms when really every spiritual leader on the planet advocates going back to nature in order to stay centered and grounded. No matter what you believe, if you go for a two-hour walk in the woods, it changes something
fundamentally in your point of view if you do that regularly. I don't know. That's the best way I can put it without villainizing anyone.

When I first got into this, I called one of my cousins, and I was talking to her and she said, “Kathy, the point of view around here is that they're disposable people.” Nobody has to be disposable if we take the long view and we start looking at renewable energies and other alternatives. Okay, maybe we can't fix it tomorrow, but if we start to say today, “What can we do?” at least it makes us feel like we're not trapped. We have some sense of responsibility for where we're going.

We've gotten so far away, most of us, from a sense of connection with the outside world, nature. We live in our cars, we live in our houses, we go to office buildings, we ride elevators, most of us. Lots of people spend hours commuting to and from their houses, and much of the time don't have windows that can open in their house. So it cuts you off from something fundamental about being human and when that happens, you start to not see it anymore. You start to just not even notice it.

Nature will renew itself, but we have the ability now to do damage beyond nature's ability to repair itself. And that's the thing that's so scary. There are so many of us and we have such awesome technology that that's the reason that it's more important now than ever. And I learned that from the
Inconvenient Truth
slide show.

How can we find the balance? I think it's always about that. It's always about balance. But if we don't even have stewardship of the environment in the equation, and we're completely blinded by this kind of insatiable appetite we've built up for “success” and for energy, and to just feed this parasitic beast of our doing-ness as a culture, we're in danger. We're in danger in all kinds of ways.

And the danger of mountaintop removal, well, I think it's just because people don't know, but I do think that it's getting out there more and more. Even though I feel like there are days I'm so afraid I'm going to do more damage than good, I really want
to add my voice in a way that makes a difference. But what I've found is when I'm being called to something I never feel like I'm ready. And when it's really what I'm supposed to be doing, it's like you put your foot up and the ground comes up to meet you. You have what you need when you need it, and you didn't know you had it sometimes.

Here's the thing: this is the crux of it to me. If I try to say, “Well, if I was a coal operator, how would I feel?” I'd be like, “Holy crap, they can't take us off coal. What am I going to do if coal goes away?” Well, I can relate to that because I'm passionate about the environment and global warming and what do I do? I transport my band around in a diesel bus. I can't afford a biodiesel bus; I don't own my own bus. So the lease company that I lease from doesn't have biodiesel buses, and when they get them they send them out on the big rock 'n' roll tours. So I'm getting eight miles to the gallon when I go out on the road and I've got a bus spewing diesel fumes and I'm thinking, okay, how can I be on the road and be responsible at the same time? There are things I'm doing, but this is a place where I haven't figured it out yet. Well, someone can come along and point a finger at me and say, “Well, see? Who are you to be able…you're not doing it perfectly.”