Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (20 page)

We started coming here, to Church of the Savior, largely because silent meeting for children is a very difficult concept, and at the time, [at] the Friends meeting that I was attending when my oldest daughter was about three, there were no other children. And so pretty quickly I realized this was a way for a child to really hate Sunday mornings—to go somewhere where it's silent, which is hard for a child, or where you're shunted off into a room by yourself where there aren't any other children. So that would not work as a family.

And so, to me, I'm a member of a UCC Church, but I told Reverend Gill before I joined, “You do realize I'm Quaker?” And he said, “That's no problem. In the UCC Church, in the Congregational church, that's okay.”

This church has been wonderful. There's certain areas that this church is probably more liberal on than a lot of other churches, but there's some that it's probably more conservative on than others, and by that I mean doctrinally; this is a pretty mainstream Christian church. There's a cross up front and we use the language.

It's really given me the sense of spirituality that I needed and my children the sense of community that I think is critical.

There's always been a part of me that hates to see anybody left out, just feels this need to have inclusion for a sense of peace around the people that I'm with. I was the kid who cried on Christmas Eve, driving to Christmas Eve services, to see the Christmas trees that hadn't been chosen.

I remember seeing a child in my second-grade class be picked on and it hurt as if it were me, and I wasn't brave enough—because I'm a pretty quiet person in general—to step in myself. Another child did, and I think that made me, at that pretty young age, examine myself and say, “Okay, what was it about me that I
wasn't able to do that? And boy, I want to be like that other kid.” I'd say that was the first time I really even recognized you do have to make choices about how you're going to move through the world.

My parents are very quiet people also. It sounds cliché, but I've really never seen them not be stand-up kind of folks, people who, you know, they weren't loud about it—they wouldn't be on a picket line, probably, they're not those kind of folks—but it was just stressed in our house from day one: treat everybody the way you want to be treated. And when you see that pretty much modeled from day one, I think it's a part of you and you don't even really realize it.

I spent a good chunk of a decade working on sanctuary for Central American refugees here in Tennessee and was part of a church—that was actually a Unitarian Church—where we declared ourselves a sanctuary church and kept a couple from Guatemala. At the time, we knew it was illegal and that we could be facing jail time.
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There were those of us in the group who were pretty sure our phones were tapped. I was younger and I didn't have kids at that point, and so that was an action that maybe now I would be more hesitant to take, but at the time it felt like the right thing to do. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot from that culture about what's enough, about community. So that was an action that we took as a couple, my husband, Sam, and I.

Environmental issues are an ongoing thing in my life. Believe it or not, they were going to site a waste incinerator in downtown Knoxville. Now this is a place that has air quality issues anyway. They were going to site it in a poor neighborhood—surprise, surprise—where we lived on the fringes in one of the older neighborhoods downtown. They were going to put it right near an elementary school that didn't have air conditioning or anything, so their windows were going to be open. And downtown Knoxville sits in a bowl, so we have trouble with air inversions anyway, where everything just settles into the bowl and just sits.

The funding was already in place; the city government was
ready to roll with it. We fought really hard against that and we actually won, believe it or not—it was a group of about twenty, twenty-five of us, I guess, that fought that issue. So that taught me that a small group really, really can have an impact—it was a success story that I think surprised even us. Now, looking back—that's nineteen, almost twenty years ago—what would the city have been like? We aren't in compliance now. The way this incinerator was sized, they were going to truck garbage in from a multicounty area to burn in downtown Knoxville, and the only way that it could operate efficiently was to burn day and night, perpetually, constantly. I think that also taught me that the powers that be don't necessarily have the right answers.

I fail to see how churches have not looked at the environment as a stewardship issue. To me, it's so evident. The reason that we founded LEAF, really, was to try to make what seemed so self-evident to us apparent, or at least accessible, to other Christian congregations in East Tennessee, and to at least spark that dialogue in their congregations, because we realized in many cases that wasn't occurring at all.

For many, many, many Christian churches, it's not even anything that they have even put together or thought about being in combination at all. LEAF brought in Dr. Matthew Sleeth, an evangelical M.D. who wrote a book called
Serve God, Save the Planet
, to speak here to a coalition of a hundred churches. The pastor from one of the largest churches in Knoxville said to a member of his church, “I couldn't sleep for two nights after that presentation because I never thought about faith and environment being connected. Never.”

Most of them simply are not aware. In the two and a half years that we've been working on LEAF, I've seen such a change. It's been remarkable, and I don't mean just here in East Tennessee. I think this says it all: HarperCollins is coming out with a green-letter Bible this fall.
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Can you believe that? I mean, this is a major, national publisher who obviously—they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think it was going to be profitable—realizes that this
issue has reached enough congregations, enough Christians, out there that a green-letter Bible is something that will be profitable for them. I think that's just astonishing.

Look at the faith statements and just take, for one example, the Southern Baptist Convention two years ago versus what's come out just recently—it's like night and day. So it's taken a while, but I believe now that the terms are in place, the way of speaking to each other, the ground of speaking to each other, the foundation for speaking to each other, are there, and I think this is just going to take off from here. It's been really remarkable.

It's really easy to be blind to what you don't want to see or what's uncomfortable to see.

I spent most of the past twenty years, really, traveling the southeast mid-Atlantic as a journalist, and I realize now that I first saw mountaintop removal in West Virginia twenty years ago. And I remember it was south of Charleston, when I was working on a guidebook for the Smithsonian called
The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America
, and so what I was focusing on were these historic sites I had to go from place to place and visit. I remember making a turn on a road, and the mountain was just gone; I'd never seen anything like that. And I remember just driving along the road, and they had this rock that they were trying to hold back the remains of the mountain, I guess, from washing down on one of the main roads, and I kept thinking, “Is this an airport? Are they going to build an airport here?” It was like the end of a runway. “Or is it a landfill? Gosh, it's the biggest landfill I've ever seen.” And I kept driving and driving and driving, and to my great guilt I never asked, I never found out what that was. So twenty years ago, I could've been speaking out all this time if I'd only realized.

So it's hard for me to point a finger at somebody else and say, “Why aren't you speaking out?” Well, each of us finds the issue at the point, I think, where we're supposed to find the issue, and each of us is given a task at the point where we're up to the task. You know, I can't beat myself up for maybe not asking those
questions then, but what brought me to the issue again was that I have, since 1982, gone to Hindman
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every so often—not as often as I would like—and watching what has happened in Eastern Kentucky and seeing that place that I thought of as this peaceful retreat, this place that's kind of my Shangri-La or my Brigadoon, you know, the place that's almost mythical to me.

From the air, mountaintop removal is like this little creeping cancer that's come a little way into Tennessee, but you get over into Kentucky and it just explodes. And I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. If I had only been speaking out sooner.

I have a piece of coal that I picked up on the faith tour
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off the edge of Mr. Sumner's
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property there, standing on the remains of his land that had been destroyed, and I keep it on the windowsill in my kitchen, 'cause whenever I do dishes—that's sort of my contemplative time, to stand at the sink and do dishes and look out at the green outside my window and realize that so many people now are living with just destruction outside their windows. To stand on the remains of that ridgeline that just dropped off to nothing, and to be standing there singing “Amazing Grace” and have the mountain across from you just blow up while you're standing there, I mean, I don't see how anybody could've been up there and be the same. That was just heartbreaking and soul-wrenching and life-changing. Although I had been working on the issue for a year at that point, boy, that just galvanized me. For me, that was the point of no return as far as saying, “This is the issue I'm going to work on until something changes.” And so we came back and began talking about trying to raise awareness, but is that enough? Do we have to wait until Tennessee is facing this very same sort of devastation? We are facing it now, but it hadn't happened yet to that degree.

It hasn't taken hold here because it hasn't been profitable up till now. We have a little different type of coal here in Tennessee, and it hasn't been something that TVA, for example, can burn and stay anywhere close to compliance.
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That's going to change, and the reason that this is coming to Tennessee very quickly is because
TVA is getting ready to put scrubbers in some of their coal-fired power plants.
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And when that happens, and this kind of coal can be burned—the kind of coal that's in Tennessee—the push is going to be on. It already is on, but it's going to be strengthened. So while I'd love to say that, oh, we here in Tennessee are so much more enlightened, that's just not the case. The majority of people in Eastern Kentucky, the majority of people in West Virginia, love this land ever bit as much as Tennesseans do.

Frankly, it comes down to economics.

We heard the president of the largest coal company in Tennessee say in front of a legislative body that he'd come here because they'd heard that Tennessee was a pro-business state. Well, that's true. But what we didn't want to have happen here in Tennessee is that it snuck in through the back door, that it came in kind of riding this pro-business attitude that is the basic attitude out there before the legislature really realized what they were allowing in the back door.

Appalachian Voices now has the place on their site where you can type in your zip code and see what mountaintop removal coal, if any, you are using.
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Well, guess where the mountaintop removal coal that my electricity comes from? It's from Montgomery Creek.
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And I'm thinking:
How do you live with yourself?
There's a part of you that says you'd like to just turn off all your lights and go live in a cave—that would probably be the most honest thing to do—but that's not real feasible. So you minimize. My kids are always hollering at me saying it's too cold or it's too hot in the house. You do the best you can to make your footprint as small as you can. But there isn't a day that goes by now that I'm not aware of that. There's a face, now, to all that electricity in my house, and it's Mr. Sumner and his lost property. It's hard.

Besides stewardship of the earth, there's also this idea of taking care of your neighbor, what's good for your neighbor. That's so biblical, that's so basic. If you're polluting somebody else's water, that's not good stewardship and it's not being a good neighbor. If you're decimating somebody else's land because you want
to power your television set or whatever, that's not being a good neighbor. At every level, this issue is an object lesson in how not to be a good neighbor, how not to be a good steward, how not to be a good Christian, frankly. I think it's really so clear it's hard for me to see how—if people would pause long enough to look at it, and pause long enough to see their part in it—that they wouldn't be appalled at this particular type of environmental degradation and also appalled at themselves, and I think you have to have equal measures in that.

Again, most people aren't aware of mountaintop removal. Most of the legislators we talked to weren't aware of it. It's very hard to go in and enlighten people quickly on something this complex, and the fact that this legislation that was proposed this year got as far as it did, I think, is a testament to how horrified most people really are when they understand what they're looking at. And so do I have hope that the government, that the state legislature, will make steps this next year to stop it? I really am hopeful. Do I realize that could possibly be a naïve view? Yeah, I'm aware of that, too. Am I aware that business is the tail that wags the dog, so to speak? I mean, sure it is. When you work in the legislature you see some of the legislators, a lot of the legislators, do come from small-business backgrounds, and they're very hesitant to want to regulate, and they're very hesitant to want to put more onerous regulations on fellow businessmen. So there's a mind-set there that's very difficult to get beyond. But many of them are also east Tennesseans, and they love the mountains, too. To see their faces, some of them…we carried around a little portable DVD player to pop a little four-minute DVD from
Kilowatt Ours
with the mountains blowing up, and the looks on some of their faces! They had no clue that this was going on and no clue that this was headed their way. So it's been an effort to enlighten folks that's going to take some time.