Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (30 page)

We should preach it, about Jeremy Davidson. They're killing us in our homes. They killed the little boy; another two foot and they'd killed his brother. Out of respect to them, none of us want to use that as a theme to do anything. It's a bad situation.

If he'd been a little rich boy, though, people everywhere would know who he is. If it'd been one of A&G's administrators' kids, it'd been all over the news. After all these years, these damn coal operators still have so much influence that the government won't book 'em at all.

But the coal industry is a dying industry. And what do we do then? People can't just pack up and move. We don't have the resources. I'm disabled, on a fixed income, and lots of people are. They can't just pick up and go.

It takes the lowest form of humanity on this earth to do what they're doing to this earth, these coal operators. I'll tell them that right to their face. I
have
told them that.

We have to stop this. If we don't, this area—southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, East Tennessee—we're going to be just one big gob pile. But we're making inroads, we have 140 sponsors on that Clean Water Protection Act. We're trying to get it passed. But our own congressman, Rick Boucher, who professes to be so much for southwest Virginia and does so much for the environment and all this, he won't sign onto this. He's a Democrat. He won't sign onto this because it would probably stop them from shoving the waste—it would change one word in the act, the act was passed, but Bush changed it through executive order, changed it from waste to fill. What we're trying to do right now is to change that one word, to stop valley fills. To stop those valley fills would prevent them from shoving the waste into the valleys, so they couldn't blow the tops off the mountains.

Boucher is coal, he's been a coal advocate since the first. I drove him around to the bathhouses the first two terms he was running, to talk to coal miners to help get him elected. Over the years we've had meetings with him. He's stopped being an advocate for people and started being a full-fledged politician who does what special interest groups—especially coal—wants him to do. He met with us during lobby week, and he wouldn't even talk about it. I hate to say that about him because I had the utmost respect for him the first few terms he run. I've met with him and talked to him personally. He's always been pro-coal; that's not wrong, but don't get it the wrong way, don't destroy the whole universe to get the coal.

We're lobbying up there all the time, getting more and more
people to take notice. The congressmen might not, but there are other people who are noticing.

I'll never quit. It gets frustrating sometime. Especially with the Division of Mines that we have here in Big Stone Gap; they won't help you at all. They're out there supposedly as advocates for the people, to protect the people, but they just enable the coal companies to destroy everything around us. Their primary purpose, I think, today is to act as a buffer. If the federal government was to come down here they'd say, “Our laws supersede…” I'm not saying the feds would even come down, though. This Division of Mines and Minerals in this state, and West Virginia and Kentucky, they're just enabling the companies to destroy people's homes and lives and whole communities, and a mountain range that's centuries old and diverse in so many respects, not just the trees, but the wildlife and organisms that's in these mountains. It's criminal what they're doing to these mountains.

Hopefully it won't all be destroyed before we get something done. We're working under the gun. If we don't get something done pretty quick there won't be nothing left to fight for.

Appalachia, Virginia, July 5, 2008

Text of the Petition Letter Circulated by Coal Companies against the Stream Saver Bill

This letter was handed out at gas stations, churches, and even in school parking lots in the days before the coal miners' rally in Frankfort, Kentucky, on March 13, 2008. It was also circulated by e-mail. Most of the statistics in the letter are incorrect, according to reports from the coal industry itself; others are seriously misleading. The text was most likely written by Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association; almost all of it is directly quoted from a column he published in the
Lexington Herald-Leader
and the
Courier-Journal
on January 7, 2008.

TO: Honorable members of the Kentucky House of Representatives and Senate

House Bill 164, the Stream Saver Bill, will seriously impact surface and underground mining in Kentucky by not allowing excess rock to be placed in streams that only flow when it is raining.
¹

Why focus only on coal? Our fills are no different than those needed for highway construction, real estate development, commercial development, other mineral extraction, and farming.

People living in the flatlands take level land for granted. There is no level land outside the floodplain in Appalachia that hasn't been created by man. We need this land for our future economy.

•   Only a small percentage, 7%, of the Appalachian coal fields will be impacted by surface mining.

•   You cannot surface mine without the surface owner's permission.
The surface owner must agree on the post-mining reclamation.

•   There are only eight active mountaintop removal permits in Kentucky. Only two mountaintop removal permits have been issued since 2005.

•   In the 24 eastern Kentucky coal-producing counties:

•   6,055 surface miners mine 45.5 million tons of coal

•   $354,629,000 is paid in direct wages

•   23,000 trickle down or extra jobs

•   $1.9 billion in gross sales of coal (79.5% is exported out of Kentucky)

•   $1.5 billion brought back to eastern Kentucky where 85 cents on each dollar stays and circulates

•   $87 million paid in severance taxes ($43 million back to 24 coal counties)

Coal provides high paying jobs and delivers cheap, dependable electricity. Kentucky has the 4th lowest electrical rate in the U.S., which is critical not only for attracting businesses like aluminum plants and auto manufacturing plants but also for our low income and elderly residents.

The elimination of surface mining will end future farms, airports, housing subdivisions, industrial parks, recreational areas, commercial sites, golf courses, and a host of other actual uses of reclaimed coal mine lands.

Don't let your common sense be swayed by broad-brush, emotional statements. This is about the future of eastern Kentucky, not about remembrances of the past.

[Signature]

House Bill 164, the Stream Saver Bill, as Introduced in February 2008

AN ACT relating to surface mining.

Amend KRS 350.450 to change requirements relating to restoration to original contour of surface mines, and to require that when all requirements of the amended KRS 350.450 are met that the configuration requirements of KRS 350.410 and 350.445 may be altered, but that overburden must be returned to mine area to the maximum extent possible and that other overburden is to be disposed of in permitted areas or previously mined areas, and that no overburden is to be disposed of in the waters of the Commonwealth; amend KRS 350.440 to provide that no spoil be disposed of in the waters of the Commonwealth, and that any spoil not returned to mine area be disposed of only in previously disturbed areas on lands eligible for reclamation under the abandoned mine land program.

Introduction

  
1
. “Robert Kennedy at Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky, February 13, 1968,”
http://www.rfkineky.org/library/what-happened.htm
.

  
2
. Tom Vanden Brook, “Recruits Hungry for Good Jobs Head off to Coal Mines,”
USA Today
, Feb. 14, 2006.

  
3
. This exception led to permits for mountaintop removal sites being issued to companies that promised to convert the land for public use, such as airports, subdivisions, golf courses, and industrial parks.

  
4
. “Mountaintop Mining/Valley Fills in Appalachia: Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
http://www.epa.gov/region3/mtntop/index.htm
.

  
5
. Vicki Smith, “Activists Slam EPA Decision on Mining Rule Change,” Associated Press, December 3, 2008.

  
6
. “Survey Shows Most Americans Oppose More Mountaintop Removal,” Civil Society Institute,
http://www.700mountains.org/release091307.cfm
.

  
7
. “Stream Saver Bill: HB 385,” Legislative Research Commission,
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/RECORD/07RS/HB385/bill.doc
.

  
8
. In addition to serving as a state representative, Gooch is also vice-president of West Kentucky Steel Construction Company. The company's Web site boasts of “erecting the world's largest dragline, ‘Big Muskie,'” and notes that Gooch himself is “active in running the business on a day to day basis.”

  
9
. This political ambush has not quelled Gooch's opposition to the bill. He has accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the coal industry, including $2,700 in the 2006 primary election cycle alone. He also opposed a hearing for mine-safety legislation in early 2007 in the wake of mine collapses in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. More recently, Gooch was instrumental in passing a $260 million tax incentive package during a special legislative session called by then-Governor Ernie Fletcher to entice energy companies to construct coal-to-liquid gas plants across the state, according to the
Louisville Courier Journal
. In February 2008, newly elected Governor Steve Beshear announced that he had canceled a $400,000 grant to Peabody Energy Corporation, as “the company has made no visible progress toward studying the feasibility of a $3 billion coal-to-liquids plant in western Kentucky,” according to the
Lexington Herald-Leader
.

10
. As chair of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, Moberly cleverly attached the Stream Saver bill to a measure in his committee that would provide tax breaks for camel feed.

11
. Don Garvin, “Sen. Hunter Introduces Bill to Ban Mountaintop Removal,”
Winds of Change Newsletter
, March 2008, West Virginia Environmental Council.

12
. Phil Kabler, “Mountaintop Removal Foes, Supporters Speak,”
Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette
, Feb. 28, 2008. Retrieved July 21, 2008, from
http://www.wvgazette.com
.

13
. Art Jester, “Mountaintop Removal Bill Won't Be Considered,”
Lexington Herald-Leader
, Feb. 10, 2007. Retrieved Oct. 13, 2007, from
http://www.kentucky.com
.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Stephen George, “High on a Mountaintop,”
LEO
, Feb. 19, 2008.

16
. Critics charged that the miners were coerced to attend the rally, citing some miners who claimed that buses were supplied by the coal companies. Just before the miners' protest, several workers—mostly women who claimed to be the wives of miners—showed up at small grocery stores, schools, and even churches, to hand out petition-style letters that people could sign and send to Frankfort with the miners. The letter, reproduced in Appendix A, charged that the Stream Saver bill would shut down the entire industry instead of simply impose sanctions to protect water. The miners' rally received widespread television news coverage.

17
. Although located in a non-Appalachian city, the
Lexington Herald-Leader
is, at 141,019 readers (Audit Bureau of Circulations, 2006), the largest newspaper that is widely read in the central Appalachian region.

18
. “Rein In Rapacious Coal Industry,” editorial,
Lexington Herald-Leader
, July 29, 2008.

19
. Doris A. Graber,
Mass Media and American Politics
(Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997), 99–100.

20
. John Gaventa,
Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 106.

21
. Ibid., 107–108.

22
. Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder,
Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972), 43–44.

23
.
www.projectcensored.org/censored_2006/index.htm
.

24
. Erik Reece, “The Facts Aren't Pretty,” in
Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop but It Wasn't There
, ed. Kristin Johannsen, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall (Nicholasville, Ky.: Wind Publications, 2005), 61.

25
. Information on the Exxon-Valdez oil spill retrieved Oct. 14, 2007, from
http://www.valdezalaska.org/history/oilSpill.html
.

26
. “Coal Silo Protest,”
Charleston Gazette
, March 17, 2007. Retrieved Oct. 13, 2007, from
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2007031633
.

27
. Rebecca Bowe, Jon Elliston, David Forbes, and Brian Postelle, “Protestors, Police Amass in Downtown Asheville,”
Mountain Xpress
, Aug. 13, 2007. Retrieved on Oct. 13, 2007, from
http://www.mountainx.com/news/2007/protestors_police_amass_in_downtown_asheville
.

28
. Don West, “Romantic Appalachia; or, Poverty Pays If You Ain't Poor,”
West Virginia Hillbilly
, March 29, 1969.

29
. “Coal Production in the United States—An Historical Overview.” Energy Information Association, U.S. Department of Energy,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/coal_production_review.pdf
.

30
. Energy Information Administration,
www.eia.doe.gov
.

31
. Gaventa,
Power and Powerlessness
, 53.

32
. Jeff Biggers,
The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America
(New York: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), 45–46, 56.

33
. Robert Shogan,
The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004), 4.

34
. John W. Hevener,
Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 45–47, 177.

35
. Biggers,
The United States of Appalachia
, 162.

36
. Hevener,
Which Side Are You On?
, 33–35, 60–61.

37
. Ibid., 66.

38
. Personal interview, Anne Shelby, Aunt Molly Jackson scholar.

39
. The school is now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center.

40
. John M. Glen, “Like a Flower Slowly Blooming: Highlander and the Nurturing of an Appalachian Movement,” in
Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change
, ed. Stephen L. Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 31.

41
.
Harlan County USA
, dir. Barbara Kopple. DVD. 103 min. New York: First Run Features, 1976.

42
. Carol A. B. Giesen,
Coal Miners' Wives
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 13.

43
. “The ‘Widow' Combs, Who Made Stand against Strip Mining in '60s, Dies at 88,”
Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal
, Feb. 26, 1993.

44
. Melanie A. Zuercher, ed.,
Making History: The First Ten Years of KFTC
(Prestonburg: Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, 1991), 67–68.

45
. Ibid., 77.

46
. Richard B. Drake,
A History of Appalachia
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 205.

47
. Gerald M. Stern,
The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the Survivors of One of the Worst Disasters in Coal-Mining History Brought Suit against the Coal Company—and Won
(New York: Vintage Books, 1976), ix–x.

48
. Ibid., 302.

49
. “Service Today for Coal Country Activist,”
Lexington Herald-Leader
, Aug. 11, 2007.

50
. “Saving a Mountain” by Silas House,
http://www.discoveret.org/tnleaf/materialsforyouth.htm
.

51
. “Kind Kids Save a Mountain,”
http://www.kindplanet.org/kindkids/kidsstory.html
.

Jean Ritchie

1
. The Hindman Settlement School in neighboring Knott County, Kentucky, was the first rural social school in the nation. Such schools offered social services in impoverished areas and grew out of the “settlement movement” that began in England in the late 1800s, which focused on educating the poor instead of simply offering them charity. Founded in 1902 by May Stone and Katherine Pettit, the boarding school provided education, health care, and social services. The teachers there—many graduates of schools like Wellesley—encouraged students to further their education. The Hindman Settlement School is now known for its programs in adult education, an outstanding dyslexia program, and such yearly events as the Appalachian Writers Workshop and Family Folk Week.

2
. Now known as University of the Cumberlands.

3
. The Henry Street Settlement School has provided social services and arts programming to New York's Lower East Side since 1893.

4
. Pickow (pronounced
Peek
-o) is an acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, instrument builder, and artist who has been integral in Ritchie's career. A native of Brooklyn, Pickow was drawn to folk music and became a close friend of such artists as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. As a book illustrator, he worked with Ritchie on her many publications of Appalachian music and later became a partner in recording endeavors. During the folk explosion of the early 1960s he became one of the leading photographers in the nation for album jackets (most famously the cover of Judy Collins's
Golden Apples of the Sun
in 1962). He was also an ardent documenter of the folk music scene. Pickow served as an associate producer and cameraman on the Oscarnominated film
Festival
. His other films include films include
Oss Oss Wee Oss
and
Ballads, Blues, Bluegrass
. A collection of his photographs taken in Ireland in the early 1950s is permanently housed in the Pickow-Ritchie Archives at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Pickow's photographs of Appalachians are especially notable because of their lack of stereotype, as noted by the
Washington City Paper:
“Above all, Pickow's photographs are respectful, betraying no condescension despite his Northeastern upbringing—a refreshing reminder
of common ground so often missing in today's ultra-polarized age” (vol. 25, July 2005).

5
. A ceilidh is a traditional Gaelic social dance held in Ireland and Scotland.

6
. David Noebel,
Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles
(Tulsa, Okla.: Christian Crusade Publications, 1965). The book was later repackaged as
The Marxist Minstrels
(American Christian College Press, 1974).

7
. The song is a whimsical look at the relationship between the Virgin Mary and Joseph, who, when asked by Mary to gather her some cherries, says that the father of her child can gather them for her. Christ commands the tree to bend down to Mary's hand and it obeys, proving Christ's divine parentage.

8
. Subsistence farming, as the term implies, raised crops or livestock to maintain the farmer's family, usually not leaving any surplus to sell or trade. Only natural fertilizers were used, and rarely any kind of machinery.

9
. Subscription schools were schools that children could attend when their parents paid a monthly fee. After the public school system became more widespread, subscription schools died out.

10
. A common Appalachian way of referring to the Hindman Settlement School.

11
. According to the Web site of WSGS, a Hazard, Kentucky, radio station, Davis “was one of the most popular personalities ever heard on WKIC and WSGS. He sang songs he composed and worked as a disc jockey on the radio stations in Hazard from 1947 until 1969. But first he was a coal miner, operating a coal-cutting machine from 1920 to 1949. Davis began singing and playing the guitar about 1933, when Eastern Kentucky coal mines were being organized by the United Mine Workers of America. He would practice on his front porch, and miners would gather around his home to listen. The Singing Miner went on to hold shows at schools, theaters, and anywhere he could get an audience. Davis began his career at WKIC with fifteen-minute shows sponsored by various local businesses. At one time he had five shows a day.”
http://www.wsgs.com/singing.htm
.

12
. Lines from a traditional song alternately called “In the Pines” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” that dates back to the 1870s and has always been especially popular in Appalachia. The song was brought to a national audience most famously by Bill Monroe in the 1940s and by the alternative rock band Nirvana in the 1990s.

13
. These lines would later become a catchy refrain in the chorus of one of Ritchie's most popular compositions, “Blue Diamond Mines.”

14
. As Ritchie explained in an interview with the authors, “Than Hall was a pseudonym I took during that time. My mother was living then and ‘protest' was a bad word, not for me in New York, but I didn't want anyone bothering
Mom about it. I was with BMI at the time, and they refused my use of my grandfather's name, John Hall, because that was the then-BMI president's name, so I took the end of ‘Jonathan' and became ‘Than.' Around home that was a common way of shortening that name.”