value does grow back even on most clear-cuts. “The mountains are not going to come back. [MTR] is the Final Solution for the forests, and the mountains themselves.”
Meanwhile, at Zeb Mountain, mining is still continuing as fast as NCC wants to do it. “You know,” john says, “we’re probably not going to be able to save that mountain.” But they might make it cost so much to mine it that nobody wants to take other mountains. “We want to send a clear message to the industry that they just can’t get away with this stuff.
“I want to see mass outrage, and public discussion about how electricity is produced and used in this country. MTR is the poster child for everything that is wrong with industrial civilization. And there’s this collective denial in our culture: The president says global warming’s not an issue, so global warming’s not an issue. Global warming needs to be an issue, and all the other environmental issues need to be issues. [Otherwise], at some point, everyone is gonna wake up and say: Oh shit, the ecosystems have collapsed and we’re all gonna die.”
After the meeting in Knoxville, I drive north and catch up with Bo back home in West Virginia. I’ve been thinking about MJS’s potential to encourage a virtuous circle, starting with a few locals like Bo and Judy standing up against MTR, others from elsewhere in the region and outside it joining them and encouraging more locals to stand up, and so on. “That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Bo says. “We’ve been working on trying to get locals organized for a couple years, and it’s like pulling teeth. A lot of the local people are against [MTR]. They just are afraid to speak out.” Bo hopes that getting national news coverage will help a great deal with this. Outside the region, you tell people about Marsh Fork Elementary School and their jaws drop. It’s so egregious. If people here start seeing national coverage of the issue, Bo hopes that will “empower” more of his neighbors to say “You can’t do that!”
He thinks the school is “the right issue” to mobilize anti-MTR sentiment into action. For the next three weeks he and his friend Ed Wiley, who lives a few miles upriver and has a granddaughter attending the school, will be “going door to door, listening to people and talking about the school, to see how they feel about it—and what do they know about it, what do they actually know about the sludge dam above it, what do they actually know about the prep plant, what a prep plant does, and the coal silo, and adding another silo, and the chemicals used, and how much [blasting nearby] can that dam take, the dangers of it.” They’ll hand out free pH testing kits so folks can test the streams by their homes for acid mine runoff. And they’ll ask people if they’d be willing to go door to door and talk about this themselves, or hold a sign up at the school: “Will you stand next to me, and stand up for your child and other children on this river? Because it’s their future. And if we allow it to continue—shame on us, because it’s our responsibility as adults to protect our kids, whether the government’s doing it or not.
“If the government’s turned its back on us, and they’re not going to protect us, we have to protect ourselves. They’re forcing us to be revolutionaries. I hate using words like that. But they are not protecting us. We don’t get the same protections other citizens do.
“We’re all Americans. Look at how many Americans from West Virginia have volunteered in times of crisis and died—per capita, more folks from West Virginia have died in wars than any other state. There’s no such thing as an outsider in America. We’re all in this together. And we’d better start standing up together, because the corporations are taking our country over.”
The “outsider” propaganda directed against MJS this year plays to a deep-rooted and well-founded suspicion of outsiders here, where there’s such a long and pervasive history of outsiders coming in and taking over land and coal and timber rights. Bo points out the obvious counter to that: “If you want to talk about outsiders, let’s talk about the coal companies,” most of whose executives and stockholders live far from the coalfields. “They’re all outsiders. Look at the big four-wheel-drive trucks going up and down the road here along the Coal River—they’re from Virginia, from Kentucky, more and more from Ohio. They’re bringing in outsiders to displace our workers. Because our workers don’t like this” kind of mining, the destruction it entails. The coal companies manage to turn the “outsider” label to their advantage only because “they work on this twenty-four hours a day, three shifts. They have many people, we have few, and we’re going in a lot of different directions.
“The organizations fighting MTR have been doing a protest here, and then six months later ‘Hey, let’s go over there and protest,’ and let’s write this, let’s fight this permit and that permit. I think we need to focus as one whole group of people that comes together, that sees an injustice and says ‘We’re gonna concentrate on this and nothing else, and we’re gonna get a victory here.’” Bo believes that their best shot at such a victory is at Marsh Fork Elementary School “because it’s so atrocious. And I think it’s winnable—and if we can’t win that one, we’re not gonna win any of them.
“I would like to see an awakening in America that there’s something wrong not just in West Virginia but there’s something wrong in Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia—and Pennsylvania and Ohio. As a matter of fact, there’s something wrong everywhere. When it comes to mineral extraction, humans that are in the way are being screwed.
“We need a thought revolution,” Bo says. “A military revolution’s not going to do it. We can’t defeat the government. We have to change people’s minds.”
Bo recently did a presentation on MTR with Julian Martin of the Highlands Conservancy, one of the mainstream groups that MJS hasn’t quite got inside its tent. “Julian said it real well: If you’ve got to blow up a mountain, that’s not acceptable. If you gotta get the coal, do it underground, responsibly. But this is not acceptable, this has to stop, and if we have to turn off the lights to stop doing that, then that’s what we’re gonna have to do.” Actually, MTR provides a small enough percentage of coal used that conservation measures could easily make up for it: We don’t have to turn all the lights off, only the ones we don’t really need anyway.
“MTR is for profit,” Bo adds. “End story. There’s no other reason for it. And if coal companies had to pay for the environmental impact and all the cleanup, of course it wouldn’t be profitable. If corporations have the same rights as citizens, let’s make sure they have the same responsibilities as citizens.
“I do believe that in the end the truth will win. I believe that if you can explain the truth, and get it out there, in the end it will win. And if I thought it wouldn’t win, I’d go start shooting the bastards. Tomorrow.
“You’ve gotta be optimistic to do what we’re doing [with MJS]. We haven’t got anywhere doing it the same way. We’ve got to make a bold change in direction. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what direction to take other than this [civil disobedience campaign]. And I’m trusting that the American people, when they see this, are gonna go: ‘This isn’t right.’ And maybe they will even start understanding that they’re living in slave cities. They’re slaves to the man, too. Maybe we’ll create an uprising all over.”
May passes in a blur of activity mostly aimed at getting ready for and recruiting people to come to the MJS training camp at the end of the month, and at getting the campaign up and running with actions in West Virginia. Dozens of intake forms for people seeking to attend camp are processed; one sent by a West Virginia state trooper apparently seeking to infiltrate the camp is screened out. Fundraisers are held, volunteer lawyers are lined up, logistics for the rest of the summer begin to be sorted out, state water testing protocols are researched, and plans for the campaign’s time in each state take shape. Farther afield, Project Censored begins following MTR among its “news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country’s major national news media.” In
