and how he sees the summer ahead.
“My family’s from east Tennessee,” he tells me. “We’ve been here in Knoxville for six generations.” When Chris was 13, he and his immediate family moved for a few years to West Virginia. Where they lived, near Charleston, “was such a weird combination of massive pollution [from chemicals emitted by industry along the river] and natural beauty. I hated it. The river caught on fire” while he was living there. One time when it rained, the rain ate the paint off their car. Every family he knew had someone with cancer. “And then when cancer started eating my stepfather, inside and out” he found it “unbearable” to be at home, “so I just grabbed my books and I was outdoors constantly,” in the forest near his home. “Then they clear-cut all that forest. And I realized everything was really messed up.”
After Chris’s stepfather died, he and his mother moved back to Tennessee. He started reading about environmental groups and issues. (“Every high school had the guy who wore an Army jacket, lived in the library, and played chess, the quiet geek reader,” and Chris was one of those.) He read more and more through college. He started going to environmental protests and was arrested twice in antinuclear protests at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He joined the Peace Corps and went to West Africa. In the late 1990s, he hopped trains to the Pacific Northwest, where he met Paloma in 1998, when they were both in jail after a forest action. By then he was involved with Earth First!
“[Paloma]” swore she’d never leave the Northwest. I told her I would stay. She saw me mourning my bioregion after a while and gave in, said: Alright, I’ll try the South out for a while.”
A few years ago, in what had become Chris’s practice of monitoring Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation permits (he’d been involved in fighting certain state road-building projects, which require permits from TDEC), “I started getting these cross-ridge mining permits for Zeb Mountain,” saw that “they were turning these streams into industrial drainage ditches,” and wondered why. “I hadn’t heard about mountaintop removal at that point.
“Then I went to this action camp,” in Kentucky in 2002. Larry Gibson spoke there about Kayford, and afterward Chris told Larry about the permits at Zeb. Larry said “he’d seen that before, and here’s what’s going to happen next” in the sequence of destruction that plays out on MTR sites.
So Chris “read everything I could get my hands on, on what was going on in West Virginia.” MTR, Chris saw, was “coming south, following the coalfields.”
By then, Chris, john johnson, and KEF! generally were involved in fighting timber sales on exceptionally biodiverse National Forest land in far southwestern Virginia, at the edge of the same coalfields through which MTR was progressing toward Tennessee. In August 2004, Chris asked a guy he knew there to help him scout and understand MTR in Virginia—and a few days before they were to do this, Jeremy Davidson was killed there.
Chris drove by the Davidsons’ house with his friend, “and we talked about it the whole weekend.” Chris’s friend set up a community meeting, “and they said ‘let’s have a march’” through the town of Appalachia. Chris, back in Knoxville, publicized the march through KEF! and other channels. Dozens of KEFers came from Tennessee and North Carolina, and so did Judy Bonds and other anti-MTR activists from West Virginia and Kentucky. At least 200 people showed up, Chris says. “Coal miners showed up. They led the march.” Chris has focused on fighting MTR, and on organizing the Mountain Justice Summer campaign, ever since.
“I think what will happen [as a result of MJS] is one of these states—I think Tennessee is most likely, because we’re not owned by the coal industry—will pass something that will kill [large-scale strip mining].” Chris believes this will happen through pressure being put on the governor and legislators. “We want [MJS] to appear large and scary to the governor, to the general assembly, and to National Coal.” He thinks chances for banning MTR in Tennessee are good “especially if we can form coalitions with hunters and four-wheelers and fishermen. The environmental community’s not going to do it [alone]. If it ends up being just a bunch of tree-huggers, then we’re going to lose.” If Tennessee does pass such a measure, “I think maybe Kentucky will follow suit.
“So many people through miseducation have been pacified into thinking they can’t fight back. Sometimes all it takes is an example of a few people who successfully do fight back and show that that’s not true. Thoreau said that ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ I think everyone is living that right now. Everyone knows things are really messed up, but we’ve all been pacified into thinking that resistance is impossible—especially people in the coalfields. Not only can we fight back, but we outnumber the bastards ninety to ten, which is one of the secrets they don’t want us to know. And fighting back is a lot of fun. And it’s healthy. Edward Abbey said that the antidote to despair is direct action. It’s not psychologically healthy for us to just internalize things and not fight back.
“A lot of people think that we’re all conservative in these hills. I get that impression from these [activist] groups that are—I hate to say it but often from the North. It’s a form of classism. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told, basically: ‘These dumb hillbillies don’t understand direct action. They’ll just freak out, and they’re super-conservative.’ But when you talk to them, you find out that they were using their pickup trucks to blockade [against mining companies during the strip mining boom of the 1970s]. They think that petitions and stuff are bullshit, but they recognize when you are using your body to lock yourself to the equipment and shut down mines. Too many people, especially college-educated people, have this Beverly Hillbillies crap in their mind.” And the coal companies will use this, telling local people that these “outsiders” coming in “want to destroy your community.”
Before leaving Tennessee, I revisit the woods near Caryville. It looks like early summer down in the valley by the highway now, but up here it’s still spring. Maples are leafed out, oaks showing only reddish leaves. Blackberries are just coming into bloom. The night after I was last here, in April, an ice storm came through and froze the early growth off the trees up on top of the mountain but not down in the valley. The trees and shrubs up here have had to start over with leafing and haven’t yet caught up.
I hear lots of birdsong this morning. The warbler migration has already come through—what I hear today are summer residents wrapping up their mating season and beginning to raise their young. A swarm of tadpoles is swimming in a puddle in the middle of the trail. I see elk prints (similar to whitetail deer but quite a bit larger) in the mud here, but no elk.
Under the thickening forest canopy, the spring ephemeral wild-flower show is mostly over now: I see two fading yellow trilliums, some yellow buttercuppy flowers, patches of purple violets, purple geranium. May apple is now blooming, and a few white anemone. A glorious diversity of herbs has emerged from the forest floor since my last visit, many leaf sizes and shapes and plant habits. And now that the trees have leafed out, I can more fully appreciate their diversity too: buckeyes, maples, oaks, cherry trees, shagbark hickories, tulip poplars, pines. Trees of various ages tell me this forest hasn’t been clear-cut in many decades, if ever, although stumps here and there and the lack of any really old trees affirm that it has been selectively logged.
Elk, tadpoles, wildflowers, birds, and diverse hardwoods tell me that even though this area has been logged repeatedly, and patches of it have been strip mined, the logging was selective enough to leave much of the soil intact and the mining was small-scale and patchy. Enough of the fabric of life here has remained intact for this rich, resilient ecosystem to heal itself and support most of the species that lived here before humans began altering this landscape.
Jim Massengill has told me that for generations local families owned and hung onto and managed much of the forest around here for timber so that it would continue to be an intact forest that could be selectively harvested in the future. He’s
