Uneven Ground (43 page)

Ironically, the political culture that had evolved with the arrival of industrialization decades earlier now proved to be the greatest barrier to structural change. Mountain residents had always felt a sense of separateness from mainstream society that reinforced their passion for freedom and independence. This pride in things local and familiar was more than just a defensive reaction to outside stereotypes, for it fueled a cooperative community spirit that allowed families to survive during
hard times. It also provided a pretext, though, to resist change, and eventually it was utilized by mountain elites to maintain long established political dynasties. A certain deference for authority, for example, sustained by religious traditions and gender roles, strengthened the power of influential local males, who often controlled access to jobs and family security, and it contributed to an acceptance of the political process as an extension of private economic interest. In a world of uncertainty and economic insecurity, challenging existing patriarchy could be especially risky. The good old boys who still dominated much of Appalachian economic, cultural, and political life at the end of the twentieth century disdained criticism, innovation, and wider participation in civic life just as much as those who had controlled the political system on behalf of outside corporate interests decades earlier. They continued to use patronage, fear, and prejudice to maintain privilege and power in their modern little kingdoms.

Most Appalachian families tended to separate public from private life unless some imminent threat challenged their fragile security. As a result, the old cadre of power brokers continued to dominate local governments and institutions, too often utilizing the public sector to achieve personal gain or to reward relatives and friends. Despite increased oversight by state and federal authorities, corruption and election fraud persisted in many mountain counties, and advocates of political and economic reform found their efforts repeatedly frustrated. Programs to improve the quality of leadership and enhance civic participation blossomed in the 1990s and met with some success in bringing women, youth, and minorities into the public process. The ARC even added civic capacity to its list of regional development goals, but these programs were limited and slow to alter the prevailing political culture.

Fraud, corruption, and self-interest were not unique to Appalachia, but in a region plagued with persistent social and economic inequalities, the paucity of honest and creative leadership added an additional barrier to systemic reform. Politicians in some of the most distressed counties of the region were accused regularly of complicity in tolerating poor schools and social services to maintain their control over the local job market, which in turn assured their own political survival. The consolidation of schools and the growth of federal human
service programs provided an ever expanding pool of patronage jobs and government contracts that could be channeled to friends and family, and control of the law enforcement system afforded additional cover for other profitable but illegal activities. Mingo County, West Virginia, for example, attracted national attention in the late 1980s when sixty-two local officials were indicted for corruption within a two-year period. Among those convicted of drug trafficking were two sheriffs, a police chief, and the fire chief. Federal prosecutors charged another local leader, who served as the president of the school board and the director of the poverty program, with drug conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and fraud. The man had personally handed out more than 2,400 jobs in a county where the total number of jobs was 8,700.
³⁷

In other mountain counties, elected officials were charged with bribery, the illegal use of public funds to pave private roads, nepotism (including the extension of no-bid contracts for county services to relatives), and theft of public property, but the most frequent indictments were for election fraud. A grand jury in Appalachia, Virginia, in Wise County, indicted the mayor, a council member, and twelve others for buying votes to elect three members of a five-member council. Once in office, the new council members had helped to appoint the head of a police department that trafficked drugs and took money and personal possessions from residents.
³⁸
Across the border in Knott County, Kentucky, the county judge executive was convicted of voter fraud and sent to jail. Two years later the county was under new leadership, but the Kentucky state auditor accused the new Knott County fiscal court of gross mismanagement of public funds. An audit found more than $13 million of questionable expenditures for illegal activities ranging from the use of public money to pave private roads to the overpayment of contractors, some of whom were related to county officials.
³⁹

In spite of the persistence of corruption and the continued power of special interest groups such as coal and banking, a few of the new leaders were able to rise above the quagmire of mountain politics and, for a time, attempted to chart a different direction. One former coal miner in Letcher County, Kentucky, Carroll Smith, brought door-to-door recycling to county homes and union representation to county employees when he was elected county judge executive in the state's
fifth-largest coal-producing county. Soon after taking office, Smith, a Republican, proposed an ordinance to limit logging that was damaging county land and roads. He also proposed a bottle recycling bill, an ordinance to ban smoking in public buildings, and a bill to raise the minimum wage above the federal level. None of the latter proposals won the approval of the fiscal court, but Smith developed a strong regional reputation for independence and for his efforts to promote open government and economic diversification. Unlike other politicians in the area, Smith refused to take donations from the coal industry.
⁴⁰
He was narrowly defeated by a coal-supported candidate in 2006 after three terms in office.

Community leaders like Smith increasingly challenged the old political structures in Appalachia at the turn of the twenty-first century. They represented a rising number of residents who were frustrated with poor schools, insufficient job opportunities, inadequate health care, and deterioration of the environment. Many were professionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists. Some were new to the mountains, but others were native sons and daughters who had been educated outside the region and returned home to raise their own children. A few ran for office, but frequently they chose to avoid the sullied political process and to join citizen-based associations for change. For example, after the fifth congressional district in southeast Kentucky was identified as the least-educated congressional district in the country, more than 1,500 local people joined Forward in the Fifth, a grassroots organization established to work with teachers and children to improve educational outcomes in the schools.
⁴¹
Others joined multi-issue groups like Western North Carolina Tomorrow, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Kentucky Appalachian Council. Many focused their efforts on protecting the region's fragile and threatened environment, forming multistate networks such as the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and the Citizens Coal Council. More and more these organizations provided countervailing voices to the calls for growth at any cost, and they helped to draw public attention to the neglected problems of the region.

Nowhere was opposition to the old order greater than in the arena of the environment. Land, water, and forest resources had always shaped
the quality of human life in the mountains, and this relationship was even more evident at the end of the twentieth century. Nothing brought out ideological conflicts over the future of the region more than disputes about land use, and nothing reflected old disparities of income, health, and political power quite as vividly as efforts to enforce environmental regulations. As America confronted the challenges of global warming, energy dependence, and urban sprawl, the mountains of Appalachia once again provided a stage for national debate.

The pursuit of quick and easy profit and the insatiable demand for cheap energy and developable land fueled the physical devastation of the mountains at an even more rapid pace than earlier in the twentieth century. The rising cost of foreign oil and the escalating demand for electricity increased the price of coal and expanded production from surface mining across central Appalachia. The growth of regional service centers and shopping facilities, the spread of suburban neighborhoods, and the explosion of recreational and second-home development intensified pressure on traditional land use practices and threatened sensitive ecosystems. Efforts to preserve the landscape and to protect the natural environment challenged head-on the modern values of growth, individualism, and consumption. Environmental battles often pitted giant corporations against private individuals and community groups, but more often than not the conflicts cut across class lines. In Appalachia, as much as in any other part of America, the false choice between jobs and the environment divided communities, pitting personal economic interests against the common good, short-term gain against long-term survival.

Some of the most dramatic examples of this conflict over land use occurred in the wake of the heavy rains that periodically drench the region. One of the oldest and most diverse forest ecosystems in the world, the Appalachian range contains the headwaters for most of the streams that drain the eastern United States. Blanketed by a forest that includes more species of deciduous trees, other plants, and wildlife than any other region of North America, the Appalachian woodlands functioned for thousands of years as a natural sponge that filtered and harnessed water resources and moderated runoff and soil erosion. The impact of industrial development in this temperate rain forest during the past century left increasingly large portions of the landscape cutover by logging, strip
mined for coal and other minerals, and paved over for roads, housing, and suburban growth. Flooding became a major problem in mountain communities after the turn of the twentieth century and played a role in the establishment of the national forests in Appalachia during the 1920s, the TVA in the 1930s, and the special Appalachian development programs of the 1960s. The absence of logging regulations on private land, the lack of zoning ordinances, and the expansion of strip mining, however, led to persistent disasters from periodic flooding and revealed deep social and political anxieties about environmental protection in a growth-oriented economy.

The great Appalachian flood of 1977, for example, contributed to the passage of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, but the compromise legislation did little to slow the destruction of mountain hillsides, and the act contained within it the seeds of an even more devastating mining practice, mountaintop removal. Coming just five years after the Buffalo Creek disaster in Logan County, West Virginia, that killed 125 people, the April 1977 flood ravaged four Appalachian states, destroying more than 1,700 homes and displacing almost 25,000 residents. Striking fourteen counties in the middle of the coalfields, the record flooding was most severe along smaller tributary streams at the heads of hollows where strip mining was most intense, but state and federal officials were reluctant to attribute the loss of life and property to mining practices for fear of alienating the coal industry. Governor Julian Carroll of Kentucky acknowledged that silt and debris from mining might have clogged up the streams and reservoirs but claimed that “farming, housing development, and the wind, which scatters soil” had contributed equally to the flooding.
⁴²
An intensive investigation by the group Appalachia—Science in the Public Interest later found that strip mining had played “a significant role” in the latest disaster, especially on tributary streams where heavy sediment and the absence of vegetation had caused floodwaters to rise faster and without warning.
⁴³

Twenty-five years later, residents of the coalfields still complained about the ineffectiveness of the 1977 legislation, and the region continued to suffer from the destructive effects of mining on mountain water resources. After another massive flood ripped through the central Appalachian coalfields in the spring of 2001, killing six and wrecking
4,600 homes in West Virginia alone, that state's governor, Bob Wise, ordered state authorities once again to investigate how much of the devastation was attributable to rapid runoff from mining and timbering sites. Ten months later, after flood waters had ravaged poor communities in McDowell County, West Virginia, for a second time in a year, reporters found that legislators had refused to attend the committee hearings that Wise had established and that state regulators had resisted federal requirements mandating flood runoff protection on mining sites for the past twelve years.
⁴⁴

The failure of regulators to enforce existing mining laws was tragically illustrated again in October 2000, when a 2.2-billion-gallon coal slurry pond in Martin County, Kentucky, collapsed, spilling 300 million gallons of sludge into two neighboring creeks and creating what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called one of the worst environmental disasters ever in the southeastern United States. One of hundreds of coal slurry ponds constructed in the mountains to hold residue from washing coal before shipment, the Martin County impoundment was similar to the earthen dam that collapsed at Buffalo Creek in 1972. After the Buffalo Creek disaster, the Mine Safety and Health Administration had begun regulating the design and maintenance of these coal waste dams, which contained toxic heavy metals and which frequently leaked or overflowed. The Martin County impoundment, owned by a subsidiary of Massey Energy, broke through the abandoned mine over which it had been constructed and spewed toxic, black sludge up to eight feet deep along tributaries to the Tug Fork and the Big Sandy River, contaminating drinking water for eighty miles downstream. The spill was twenty times larger than the 1989
Exxon Valdez
oil spill in Alaska. Investigators later determined that Massey Energy had failed to follow up on recommendations to repair the slurry pond after a smaller leak in 1994, and regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration had failed to enforce their own recommendations. Although the coal company claimed that the accident was an unfortunate “act of God” and denied legal responsibility for the disaster, a team of engineers appointed by the Mine Safety and Health Administration afterward to investigate the spill found sufficient evidence to issue citations against the Massey subsidiary for willful and criminal negligence. Before the investigation could be completed,
however, the new George W. Bush administration replaced the team leadership and narrowed the scope of the investigation. A final report eventually cited the company for two minor violations and issued a fine of $100,000. A judge later reduced that fine to $55,000, but not before a member of the original investigating team, Jack Spadaro, revealed the government negligence and the cover-up of the violations to the national media. Spadaro, who had served as an investigator following the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972, was demoted from his position as head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy and forced out of government for his criticism of the administration and the coal industry.
⁴⁵