heedless clear-cutting began here in the late 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s as chip mills moved into the region, spreading north and inland from the coastal pinelands much as MTR is now spreading south from southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Where the two creeping catastrophes meet, an ugly synergy is created: If there’s little point in saving trees for their potential gain in value, when the only market you foresee is a chip mill, there’s even less point in saving any when the land is about to be blown up under them. Prices for the low-grade wood fit only for chip mills are low right now, though—low enough that, as I’ve seen, sometimes timber clear-cut off MTR sites is simply burned or bulldozed aside. This makes a lot of people who love these forested mountains sick—and mad as hell.
A few days later, back in West Virginia, in Naoma, near where Bo lives, I stop by the house that’s just been rented for the summer internship program. There I talk with Hillary Hosta, who’ll be living there and managing things this summer. Plans for the program are focused along the Coal River and up the still-inhabited hollows branching up from the river. The hope is that once people elsewhere in West Virginia’s coalfields see what’s happening here, CRMW and OVEC and other activists will start hearing from them about what they want to do in their own areas and how the developing network of activists can help.
Hillary was born in Los Angeles and moved to Canada with her family when she was twelve. In the mid-1990s, when Hillary was still in college, she attended the first Ruckus camp, an activist gathering arranged by a founding Earth Firster, Mike Roselle. Five weeks later, Hillary hung her first banner, off a bridge in Seattle, and has continued as an activist ever since.
She moved to Appalachia this spring, and she’s falling in love. “The landscape I am definitely loving,” she says. “It’s growing on me, very much. But it’s the people who really, in a way, have broken my heart. Because you fall in love with them, and then your heart is broken because of what they’re dealing with daily.”
Hillary thinks change will begin to happen “when people here are aware that this relationship [between local Appalachians and coal companies] is inequitable and unnecessary. Many people here really feel like there are only two options: They live with this abuse and receive very, very little in return. Or they don’t live with this abuse, they receive nothing, and they will have to leave their homes because they will have nothing. And then the coal companies can just come back in after they’re gone, and strip it all. And they really don’t believe that there’s another option, and that’s what so sad.”
Coal River valley is “simmering” right now, Hillary says. “Maybe it’s been simmering for some time, and I just got here and am noticing the undercurrents. Maybe people have been bubbling for a long time and just haven’t had the spark, the event hasn’t happened that’s really made it bubble up over the top.
“Marsh Fork Elementary could be that [spark]. I think that’s asking a lot from Marsh Fork as a campaign tool. I think that Marsh Fork will help us gain momentum, grow in size, grow the ranks of coalfield residents who have had enough. I think Marsh Fork is [also] a tool that can be used effectively to reach out to other people in the nation and the world. What makes it a beautiful campaign tool is how horrible, how terrible, what an atrocity it really is.
“One of our challenges is going to be when people from the outside world [who’ve learned about Marsh Fork] come in here and go: Why are you standing for this? Why are you taking this? Why is this happening? People [here] will want to defend their position—just like a wife will defend her [abusive] husband.” What Bo calls the slave mentality, Hillary sees as the mentality of a battered woman defeated by her circumstances.
Recently Hillary watched Matewan, the John Sayles movie about coal miners’ struggle for a decent life in Appalachia early in the twentieth century. She was struck by how “the power dynamics in the relationship between coal and these communities has not changed at all,” and how then as now coal companies used much the same rhetoric about “outsiders” (then, mostly exploiting ethnic differences) to divide people who might otherwise be allies. “They’re using that tactic today, using already-existing cultural prejudices and differences and fear about one another. Fear: the all-powerful tool of oppression. They’re using fear of loss of economic stability, fear of loss of [jobs] to divide the community so that they don’t unite and rise up as one to resist the oppression. Because they would win. Because the possibility of the power dynamic shifting [would] exist then.”
Using fear this way also deflects anger at the coal companies toward other targets—toward those outsiders. “They’re using the same tools because they still work. They’re putting out propaganda saying: Oooh, be afraid of the ecoterrorists. These beautiful people who’ve given of themselves to do public service, some for ten years or more. Beautiful, harmless people who care about community and the world they live in. And they are putting the label ‘terrorist’ on them. It’s really outrageous. And then they’re hitting on the really cheap points where they know that there are social hang-ups that people have with one another,” such as with hairstyle and clothing. “They’re saying you need to be afraid about these differences, so you should be afraid of these people. They’re using stereotypes that are easy homeruns for them because they’re already there. The Birkenstock-wearing, patchouli-smelling hippies that don’t pay taxes—those are some pretty strong stereotypes. It’s not difficult for them to reinforce.”
Hillary doesn’t intend to remain an “outsider” here—she hopes she can stay for a while. Since she was eighteen, she’s never stayed in any one place for more than ten months. But funding for the Naoma house and intern project runs out in September, and she says, “I need to be able to sustain myself. I own nothing. I don’t own a TV. I don’t own a bed. I would like to stay here beyond September, because I have so many campaign ideas. So many. They go beyond what I can accomplish in three months. And I do care about this place. I’d like to be here maybe for a few years working.”
Judy Bonds recently attended a formative meeting for a new organization, Christians for the Mountains. “We talked about the need to have [churches] and religious leaders play a part in the care of the Creation,” she tells me. “The care of the Creation is on the back burner [for most churches in America], and I’ve noticed a move on the religious right side [toward playing] a part in this. And I’m just thrilled. I believe that that is the salvation of the religious right. The religious right now is absolutely going against Jesus’s teachings. And it breaks my heart. Not only that, it makes me ashamed. They actually are turning people away from Christianity instead of bringing people into the fold. A lot of activists have lost their faith because of the religious right. I’ve tried to tell people in the religious community: There’s a lot of people out there who think we’re hypocrites. [Where] the teachings of Jesus of love and understanding, caring for the sick and the elderly, caring for the people that are in prison, people that are lost [are concerned], it’s as though the religious right has been hijacked by Satan.
“I honestly think that God cares a lot about that Creation—not just man, but everything He created. Everything in the Bible tells me so,” Judy says. The Bible says that after God created everything else but not yet humankind, he looked around and saw that it was good. “Genesis 9:12 is one of my favorite scriptures,” she says. “God said this is a covenant made between you and me and every living thing on Earth for perpetual generations—not just between myself and man, for now. I don’t just care about man. I care about every living creature on this Earth. I think man has ignored that because of his own greed.”
Judy was raised Free-Will Baptist. “Of course as I got older I went on my way and forgot about the church. I always believed in God, I always was a Christian, but it was something that didn’t cut into my everyday life. This journey [fighting MTR] has taken me right back into my spirituality and to my Christianity. I truly believe that for any type of movement, particularly environmental movement, to gain momentum and to present its case effectively to the people of America, Christianity and the religious aspect [have] to be
