off the road. His cabin was burned down in 2002, after a threat the day before. His dogs have been killed. People have shot up his house. People have come here and shot at headstones in the cemetery—he shows me the marks from bullets hitting a relatively new stone. His camper, parked up here, was shot up so badly he had to put a new door on it. “They ripped the windows out of it, they shot it up, turned it over.” The cap on his truck has been busted up. Mining companies also exercise control through “the flow of money” among locals: “If they ain’t making any money, they wait for crumbs.” They don’t want to rock the boat lest if a job opens up the company won’t hire them. Or, if they don’t wait for “crumbs,” they leave.
We take Larry’s truck up past his home, then continue on along the dirt road past his relatives’ cabins. He thinks there’s likely to be blasting off that side of his property right about now, and he’d like me to see it.
We drive past a sign warning about blasting, and I ask Larry how that can be, are they allowed to turn his property into a blast site just by posting a sign? “What sign? I don’t see no sign,” he says, grinning. “You gotta know, us hillbillies, if there’s not a picture, we cain’t read.” In fact, the sign marks the edge of his property, and we trespass a short ways onto land the mining company has been logging, to see what’s happening. (Seems a fair exchange, since miners’ trucks have been trespassing across the private road through Larry’s property as a shortcut to get here.)
When we get out of Larry’s truck, the land we’re standing on, which Larry says they’re going to drop by several hundred feet, is peppered with flyrock. Some pieces I see are big as bricks—and they came from a blast site 500 yards away, Larry says. Certainly, looking down into the enormous mine site several hundred feet below us, the active mining looks that far away. They’re currently blowing off another 150 to 180 feet of rock to get at an 8-foot seam of coal.
Several times Larry asks: “Do you hear a whistle?” expecting a warning whistle—although they don’t always whistle a warning before blasting. “If there’s a tree still standing and you hear a blast, get behind it. Actually, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a tree now.” After the recent logging, only scattered spindly little trees remain, too thin to offer cover.
We’ll never know whether my being there stopped the blasting that day; mining companies don’t like to publicize their MTR operations. “They don’t know who you are,” Larry tells me. “They know I’ve been at the cemetery with you.” Several mining company pickup trucks have driven past while I’ve been here, their drivers waving at me and Larry. Larry knows they keep track of his comings and goings because they talk about it on public communications radio channels, which he sometimes monitors.
“I want to emphasize to you how dangerous this area is,” Larry says, “not just for strangers but for the people—they have no responsibility toward the people that live here.” Larry is fifty-nine years old. He looks older.
Dave Cooper and others continue to be concerned that MJS isn’t doing well enough at including mainstream environmental groups; the KFTC members Dave invited to the Asheville meeting left early and remain wary.
Others are concerned that MJS is inadequately rooted in local communities, and thus risks doing more harm than good. One organizer, thinking of leaving the campaign, writes in a letter to friends that:
This campaign holds the terrifying possibility of eroding away what foundation for change has been created. [MJS should not be] inciting people from outside of Appalachia to come to our region, while spending a very limited energy towards asking the coalfield residents and organizers what vision they themselves hold.
Direct action in Appalachia this summer, being chiefly organized, or being perceived to be organized, by EF! activists from Knoxville and Asheville will not stop or slow MTR. It will gain attention to the issue, but it will alienate locals and make them less [trusting] of groups like OVEC, Appalachian Voices, CRMW, and the array of others who have spent years planting and cultivating seeds of change. If MJS comes into West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee this summer and attempts to plant, by relative force, grown trees of this needed change, and then disperses, the trees will die. Those residing in the areas where the proverbial trees are planted will not understand the intricacies of sustaining them, but there will be more than a few who are ready and willing to cut them down and use their branches to beat the hell out of OVEC, KFTC, and the rest, and ultimately all our visions of a better world.
Concerns about MJS’s inclusiveness and “outsider” problems come to a head with publication of an article in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette in May, a few days before MJS’s planned kickoff rally in Charleston, at the state capitol. The article begins: “Environmental activists from around the country are being urged to descend on Appalachia this summer for a series of protests.…sponsored and promoted by a Tennessee-based affiliate of the controversial group Earth First!” MJS organizers are most upset by one particular quote in the article: “‘Frankly, OVEC is wary, as we don’t know all the groups and individuals involved,’ said Vivian Stockman, project coordinator for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. ‘We are very relieved to see this note on the [MJS] website: “MJS is committed to nonviolence and will not be engaged in property destruction.”’” The best that can be said of this is that Abe Mwaura, OVEC’s representative at recent MJS meetings, hasn’t adequately conveyed to Vivian what MJS is up to. Many MJS organizers, Bo Webb among them, see Vivian’s statement as a betrayal.
The Gazette article’s most insidious quality, though, is its treatment of violence. It notes the potential for “confrontation” at MJS’s rally on Thursday, asserts that Earth First! is “linked” to “violent ‘eco-terrorism’” with specific reference to tree-spiking and the planting of a pipe bomb by opponents of EF! in an EF! organizer’s car in California in 1990, and notes that in West Virginia, in 1999, “a mob attacked [West Virginia] Secretary of State Ken Hechler and other anti-mountaintop removal activists who were re-enacting the march that union miners made in 1921 during the Battle of Blair Mountain.” (Larry Gibson and Judy Bonds also were among those who were attacked.) The article’s overall implication is that MJS will be a magnet for violence, and that sensible people might be wise to stay away.
Thursday’s rally turns out to be thoroughly civil. MJSers pass out fact sheets about coal and MTR at the Friends of Coal rally being held right next to and just prior to the MJS event. Several hundred people attend the FOC event, many of them miners given the day off from work and a bus ride to do so. A few FOCs (or FOCers, pronounced “fuckers” by some MTR opponents) stay to watch the MJS rally. There are no confrontations, and a few courteous conversations.
After the rally, coal-industry supporters in the region’s media begin to refine what through the rest of the summer will become a persistent labeling of MJS as a bunch of weird outsiders who are somehow both dangerous and frivolous. “We learned this week,” the State Journal’s political editor writes, “that West Virginia will be treated to a visit by the traveling eco-circus.… Until August, West Virginia will be thick with Birkenstocks and patchouli oil. These are the kind of environmentalists who say they won’t use violence but are dangerous enough to have to make that clear. We can expect padlocked gates, people chained to equipment, human shields in front of pine trees, and maybe even a sit-in. Throw in some dried fruit and a glass of soy milk, and you’ve got yourself a party.”
Shortly after the rally, out of the blue, Bo Webb receives an email from Peabody Coal saying they don’t do MTR and shouldn’t be an MJS target. I tell Bo that I’ve been seeking interviews with representatives from several coal companies, and none has been willing to talk with me. (After a few months of this, I give up and rely instead on the companies’ press releases and statements made by their employees at public events.) Bo’s reaction: “It doesn’t surprise me that they won’t meet with you. Now that MJS is out, they have to strategize and work on certain
