Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (27 page)

Lynne:
We dealt with coal a lot when I was living out here in the seventies. All the coal trucks and the damage to the roads. More and more trucks. That's when I first became aware and knew that the industry was getting bigger and bigger and that they obviously didn't care about anything but getting at that coal.

Anne:
When we were little and Dad was a soil conservationist, we'd be going down the road—

Lynne:
—singing and going on—

Anne:
Yeah, singing and not paying much attention, but he'd be looking at the gardens and the land. He'd be talking about contour plowing, and he'd knit his brow and frown if there was somebody who had their field on a hillside. This was a major concern of the government, if there was a little farmer plowing on the hillside in such a way that the soil would erode. Because they knew that if you did that, the soil would wash away and there would be no ground cover. So they taught everybody about that. We all knew that very well. They taught it to us in school, and he taught it to us. He was always talking about that, so now it seems absolutely incredible to me that the same government—state and federal—would be allowing this massive erosion to occur with mountaintop removal. It makes no sense.

Lynne:
Dad was real proud of “the service,” as he called it. At that time, small farms, controlling erosion, and crop rotation were promoted, and the government was concerned with that too. So was the education system. But not anymore. Energy has trumped conservation. So-called conservatives make fun of environmentalists as being weird and weak-minded. The saddest thing in thinking about Dad is that he thought federal oversight was effective and needed, he had faith in that, in federal oversight. He believed that if there was an environmental problem the government would step in and get things right—as opposed to now, when they watch out for business interests. Our father would be real disturbed to know that we can't trust that anymore. He and Mother both had a lot of love and respect for the mountains, and they knew the mountains produced people of good character and humor and strength. Mom used to tell the story of when the commodity program came along. They had everybody go down to the voting house, down at the mouth of the creek, where they were handing out meal. They said that Pa—our grandfather, her father—who was a very strong and silent person, he went over to get a bag.

Anne:
This was during the Depression, and the Democrat politicians were the ones giving it out. And right when Pa—who was a Republican—got up there to accept his cornmeal, one of the politicians said, “Maybe you'll vote right next time.”

Lynne:
So he just took his pocketknife out and sliced the bag of meal open and left it there.

Anne:
Our uncle and mother had that type of character. They'd tell you off in nothing flat if they thought you were in the wrong. I think that was a real traditional mountain characteristic. Our grandfather had never been out of the mountains. He was from up on Buffalo and coming this far, to him, was like coming
out
of the mountains.
⁸
They had a lot of pride. That sort of speaking out, fighting back, was thought to be part of the Appalachian character. But people don't know about their own history anymore. They don't know that mountaineers stood up and fought in
the union struggle, and against the broad-form deed, and against strip mining. So maybe that's why more people don't stand up against mountaintop removal. But I think it's also because we're a society of conformity these days. It's the larger culture we live in, a culture that portrays people who stand up for what they believe in as nuts. Around here, there's a lot of pressure to conform. There's this attitude of “Well, nice people don't speak up. Nice people don't stir and make trouble. They just mind their own business; if it's not bothering you, stay out of it.”

Lynne:
And the worse times get, the less people have, the less they're going to risk losing a job. Even to the point of not listening to an argument about something this big. I think it's strange that more people don't fight back, but people are busy, they're making ends meet. They only see what's in their neighborhood. They don't fly from here to West Virginia; they don't see mountaintop removal enough to get mad about it. There are buffer zones where people don't see the really ugly stuff from the road. And besides, people are not connected to the land. We just drive past the mine sites and go to Gatlinburg if we want to see some mountains. We don't even notice our own. We're not taught about erosion in school as much. I'm not sure they're teaching in schools about how hard it is for topsoil to regenerate, that it takes at least a hundred years for it to come back.

Anne:
And the coal companies do a real good job of making people be afraid, and of painting anyone who challenges them as nut-cases or agitators or troublemakers. And they're real good at making people afraid of losing their job. Because when you have a job in Eastern Kentucky and you lose it, you may not be able to get another one. Ever. So the companies use that fear that people have of not being able to put food on the table for their families. They've always done that. They did it with the broad-form deed. They certainly did that with the union, to the point of killing people. They've always made it out like, well, if we're regulated, if we have to follow safer regulations at all it'll ruin the coal industry! We won't never be able to mine coal again! We'll all starve
to death! In the seventies they acted like if they had to go by new regulations they'd be destroyed, that no mining would be able to happen. But once those regulations were enacted they managed to struggle on somehow—

Lynne:
—from their mansions on the hilltops.

Anne:
And they're acting the same way nowadays, with mountaintop removal. They act like if they have to go by any kind of new regulations then little children in Eastern Kentucky will starve to death. Now surely to God there's some kind of middle ground. It can't be either blowing up the mountains or starving children. There's somewhere to meet in the middle, but the coal industry doesn't even want to talk about it, they don't want to meet in the middle. Most of the time, with these politicians, it's Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Most of the time, even if they're not corrupt when you elect them, they'll be corrupt before they leave. We'd love to have some honest, creative, intelligent candidates.

Lynne:
I believe most of our representatives don't represent us properly because they get their pockets lined by the coal industry. They say their constituents don't want mountaintop removal stopped, but I don't believe that's true. Lots of people don't know about it and some people don't care about the land, so sometimes people vote stupid or uninformed, but I don't believe most people are
for
it. Politicians'll say anything to justify their support of big money.

Anne:
We can get energy in other ways than taking down our mountains. It scares me. Eventually they'll want at the little seams of coal like that are in this country here.
⁹
It seems to me that mountaintop removal is a violent and unprovoked attack on living things. That's not justifiable. We know what some of the short-term effects are—we know it leads to flooding, that it pollutes the water, there are certain things that we can measure—but we don't know the long-term effects or consequences. I worry about what those will be.

Lynne:
I think mountaintop removal takes advantage of diversions and shifts in population and loss of ties to the land and
community to drive its own values into the culture; the values of the coal industry are basically nil. It deprives people of a living land, a place with a store, a place with a history. It brings on depression in an economic and emotional sense. If your neighbor's land is torn down, how does that make you feel? That land has no value any more. Its essence, as Kate says,
¹⁰
has been taken. The whole changing of culture from a viable and colorful and definitive thing to an economic and marketable thing is a terrible thing that's happening in our country.

Anne:
The rest of the country never can quite make up its mind about us. Sometimes they think we're interesting, that we make pretty quilts and have quaint stories and make good music, so they patronize us for a while. But then, when it comes down to it, they think of us as inferior.

Lynne:
They think of us as gun-toting and sorry,
¹¹
but I think we're welcoming and docile people, to the point of letting people run over us. We let them come into our country
¹²
and not show us respect. We do let that happen. We are beaten down, as a people. We keep taking hit after hit.

Anne:
But I think that wherever industry—no matter where it is in the country—if industry wants something, they'll run over the people to get it. The same kinds of labor struggles that went on here in the thirties went on in other places, too. And mountaintop removal is happening in other places, too. With that said, however, I think that it's handy that they have such stereotypes of us—that we're poor and not doing good—that they have these excuses to take down our mountains, that we need more flat land for economic reasons. I've lived in Eastern Kentucky for fifty years, and I've never heard anybody else but the industry say we need more flat land.

Lynne:
Climbing to the top of the hill up here is a spiritual thing. I remember Mom talking about her father going up there to pray. I walk up there by myself. Anne and I walk up there together. We've trudged up there as a family, to the graveyard. You can see the whole farm from up there. I started thinking a
lot about that, and it gave me some way to express my anger and sadness and frustration about mountaintop removal mining to write a song about it. So that's why I wrote my song “Holy Ground.” I had just been so frustrated to discover that mountaintop removal existed, when people had exhibited such outcry about strip mining just a few years before. I can't speak out very well, but I can try to write something by myself, to articulate the way I feel.

Anne:
I wrote a song, “All That We Have,” soon after the author's tour. I wrote it for the
Missing Mountains
book because I thought we needed a song.
¹³
I was working along on it, and I wrote that part “The land and each other was all that they had.” And I thought, well, that's all we really have still, even though we
think
we have all kinds of stuff, like computers and such, but those things are not even real, in a way.

And, you know, I love Aunt Molly Jackson, and she would've written a song about it, no doubt. I had always heard of Aunt Molly Jackson, but I had only a vague idea of who she was—something about Harlan County, the labor struggles, something about Theodore Dreiser. I started doing some research on her and found out she was born and raised right around here in this part of Clay County. And she was a nurse and midwife, that was what she seemed to be most proud of, and she was apparently very good at that. She talks about how many babies she helped bring into the world and about using herbs to cure the sick. But, like so many others, her family left their farm and went to the mines, and after that they were completely dependent on the mines, on the vicissitudes of the coal market and the generosity—or lack thereof—of the coal operators. And then she married a coal miner, so she spent most of the first fifty years of her life in coal camps in Eastern Kentucky: in Laurel County, Knox, Bell, and Harlan. She came from a musical family—Sarah Ogan Gunning was her half-sister and Jim Garland was her half-brother—so when the miners went on strike in the late 1920s and early 1930s she wrote songs to rally the miners, most of them using traditional tunes that she
wrote the words for, describing conditions in the coalfields; “Hard Times in Coleman's Mines,” “Only a Miner,” “Hungry Ragged Blues” are probably her best-known songs. But she wrote a lot, and the songs were poetic and very articulate about the way the miners and their families were being exploited. When the Dreiser Committee came into Bell and Harlan counties to conduct hearings, they were so impressed by Aunt Molly's testimony, which included her singing “Hungry Ragged Blues,” that they asked her to come back to New York with them and work as a spokesperson and fund-raiser for the miners and other workers. So she did that, and spent the rest of her life in New York and then in California. For a time she performed with, and was friends with, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and other folk musicians of that time. I think she was a brave woman and a brilliant artist who used her talents well. We need that kind of role model now. People are afraid to stand up. We've forgotten that a lot of the rights we have now, somebody had to fight and sacrifice for them.

Lynne:
Reckon what Aunt Molly would have thought about mountaintop removal, Anne?

Anne:
She'd a had a thing or two to say about it. It would've just made her so mad. But, like I was saying, people are afraid to stand up. It's the pressures of conformity, I believe. The church is very much an agent for conformity in that way.

Lynne:
These days, they don't preach stewardship much in the churches round here. When we were little, they did preach that, they preached respect for the land, and service. I've been to some churches here where the coal operator contributed to the church, too. So that plays a part in it.

Anne:
That concept of stewardship of the earth, we heard a lot about that in church in the fifties. The coal industry is an agent of the status quo, and so is the church. The coal association takes that verse from Isaiah and uses it literally.
¹⁴
As if the prophet were talking about MTR rather than the coming of the Messiah. It's condescending. It's saying, “Take this, you little people with your little Bibles that you take literally.” It's revealing, though,
that sometimes they're desperate, to resort to that. They respond to everything.

Lynne:
There is ownership, but even in law there is the idea that we're not supposed to waste the land, and our directives from the Bible are to respect the creations of God. It's just so self-centered and short-sighted, to think that if you own the land, if you paid for it, then you can do whatever you want.