has to act on behalf of his life-support system, the ecology of his home bioregion. But he also believes that we should listen to local voices in sorting out how.
Bo sees the inclusiveness issue as related to the ugly rhetoric about MJS “outsiders” poised to invade the coalfields—and he’s angry about it. Coal companies have used this sort of rhetoric about “outsiders” for a hundred years, he says. “There are no outsiders in America.”
After lunch on Saturday, regional report-backs are full of specific plans for the months ahead. In West Virginia, CRMW has learned that Massey is requesting a permit from the state DEP to build a second coal silo right next to the existing silo beside Marsh Fork Elementary School. CRMW and others are requesting a public hearing on the application; MJS’s schedule for its time in West Virginia this summer should stay loose until they know when that hearing will be scheduled. A Listening Project has begun in the neighborhoods near Marsh Fork Elementary, and letters about the school have been published in Charleston and other West Virginia newspapers. Speaking events with Judy Bonds and other coalfield activists are scheduled not just around the region but around the country. Abe Mwaura’s been busy organizing in Logan County, ordinarily a place very hostile to any efforts to hold coal companies accountable. And OVEC and CRMW are setting up a house in Coal River valley for half a dozen grant-supported summer interns as well as additional traveling MJS activists.
In Tennessee, plans are being made for MJS time in Nashville, in the Knoxville area, and in the coalfields north of Knoxville, near Caryville and Zeb Mountain, including a “variety of ideas” for direct action. In the past month, they’ve been working to get hearings on MTR-related permits, and working on fundraising. Lawyers are being contacted for legal support this summer.
After the meeting is over, I sit down for what becomes a long talk with john johnson about the state of the campaign against MTR and how he came to be so involved in it. He tells me he first heard about MTR in the late 1990s, but at that time he was already stretched pretty thin as an activist and didn’t think he could take on another issue.
“But then we found out about this project on Zeb Mountain” and he thought: “Holy shit, it’s in my backyard now.” Here in Tennessee, john reminds me, “technically it’s ‘cross-ridge’ mining, because they’re going to put the mountain back together, supposedly. If you go to the Office of Surface Mining, [they say] ‘There’s no mountaintop removal in Tennessee.’ But it’s still massive strip mining, and really disgusting.”
Unlike southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, which have seen so much MTR that most of the landscape is now affected by it, in Tennessee so far there are only a few islands of MTR (such as the Zeb Mountain site), with the natural fabric of most of the landscape still sufficiently intact to support normal forest regeneration. MJS’s goal in Tennessee is to keep it that way, to prevent MTR’s spread.
After he found out about Zeb Mountain, john helped arrange to bring Dave Cooper and Judy Bonds to Tennessee for anti-MTR roadshow presentations in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Crossville, alongside himself and other Tennesseans talking about how MTR was moving into Tennessee. More Tennesseans got involved, and they met more people fighting MTR elsewhere in the region.
In 2003, john and two other activists affiliated with Katuah Earth First! blockaded a road at the Zeb Mountain site by locking themselves to large metal drums filled with concrete. (Unfortunately, they’d decided to mix the concrete on site, to avoid having to move large drums full of it. When police arrived, the concrete hadn’t yet set, so disassembling the blockade was ridiculously easy for them. Next time, they’ll know better.)
Then, in August 2004, Jeremy Davidson was killed by MTR operations in Virginia. KEF! “had already been working with some people in that area on [trying to prevent] a timber sale in the Jefferson National Forest.” So when people in Virginia suggested the idea of organizing a protest in response to the boy’s death, KEFers came up and joined in. “The Jeremy Davidson murder was really a big catalyst for [MJS]: Omigod, a three-year-old kid, killed in his sleep by a boulder from a strip mine.”
Around this time, Chris Irwin and others were talking with Sue Daniels, a biologist at Virginia Tech, about the idea of a “Mountain Justice Summer,” a campaign to address MTR the way Mississippi Freedom Summer and Redwood Summer had used nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to address racial injustice and forest destruction. Chris started talking up this idea among KEF! people in Tennessee. Judy and Dave and other folks in West Virginia and Kentucky thought it was a good idea, too. (Sue Daniels provided much of the initial energy and vision for MJS. It was a great shock when, toward the end of 2004, she was killed in a murder-suicide committed by a man who had apparently become personally obsessed with her.)
“If I had my druthers,” john says, noting that Chris Irwin would disagree with him about this, “we’d wait until next year to do MJS, because it would give us more time to organize for it.” Better still, “instead of saying ‘wait until 2006,’ I wish that we’d started thinking about it in 2003,” to be better prepared for doing it now. “It’s a super-pressing issue. But if we had another year, we would be avoiding some of the issues that have come up, about people not feeling good about being invited, and about us not putting enough energy into grassroots organizing.” More time would have made it possible “to build more relationships with more people.” Still, john believes that MJS has now, at this point, got enough of this done to be on track for pulling off a successful summer.
john would like to see more people who have concerns about MJS raise them out in the open, in meetings. And he notes, about “some of the people I’ve been a little worried about,” worried that they’re creating an unhealthy power dynamic within the group, “I’ve heard them acknowledge that we need a bigger tent, and I’ve heard them acknowledge—a little bit, not as much as I’d hoped—that we have to address the power dynamics, and that we have to keep reminding people that we want them to be full participants. And that we want a community of equals, not a community of leaders and followers.” I don’t know this at the time, but later learn that there have been ongoing problems of this sort within KEF!, mostly involving Chris and Paloma.
I note that in this month’s meeting, he and Chris were a lot quieter than in previous meetings. “Yeah. That was totally intentional,” john says. “It’s hard, because we care so much. And it’s not like we have bad ideas. But there does come a time when we have to recognize that we are talking too much, to not just pay lip service to making space for other people but to really make the space. If we have this thing where Paloma says something, Chris says something, I say something, then everyone else says OK, I feel uneasy about it.
“Regardless of all that, I think things are really moving in a good direction. I think we did open up some space this weekend, and I hope that that continues.”
This summer, john says, “I want people to come here and fall in love, and maybe decide to stay. I want to see people [who grew up here and left] come home and fall in love. I want to see people who live here, both in the coalfields and adjacent to the coalfields, become empowered to really challenge King Coal. So I want to see several high-profile, pretty intense, nonviolent direct actions throughout the summer. I want to see a lot of people helping out with grassroots organizing and listening.” And he wants to be able to say at the end of the summer something that can’t honestly be said today: that “mountaintop removal is an internationally recognized environmental issue—and if not quite internationally then a nationally recognized environmental issue,” so that Americans everywhere recognize that “there is a conflict in the coalfields, because the way coal is mined fucks up the land and fucks up people’s lives.”
john believes that the direct action component of MJS is poised to do this “the same way Earth First! created more tension around the logging of the old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest—a lot of people know about that because people blocked roads and
