Creation, and our souls. I truly believe that.”
Judy believes that Americans today are “a generation that’s addicted to comfort, to instant gratification, addicted to technology, addicted to everything that makes their life really easy,” all of which creates a barrier, a buffer between the comfort-seeking individual and the natural world. “And I do think it’s designed to be that way,” she says, “particularly with the TV dumbing people down, particularly our children. All the games and technology that children have is to take their minds off nature and get back to what’s ‘really important,’ and it keeps them in the house.
“I would like to bring Earth First! and the religious community closer together. Earth First! are doing God’s work, they just don’t realize it and they won’t acknowledge it. I know a lot of people think this is funny.” Judy doesn’t. She respects the spirituality of john johnson, for example, and wants some of the legitimacy associated with conventional religion to rub off on Earth First!, which she thinks gets an unfairly bad rap. Judy believes that the pagan Earth Firsters doing God’s work are going to have a much easier time of it with God in the next world than, say, the operator in Tennessee who hangs a giant “Jesus is Lord” sign on his coal silo.
“I’ve seen the look on some Earth Firsters’ faces when you talk about God. But no matter where I go, I’m going to talk about the care of the Creation, because that’s who I am. And when you quote Genesis [about the covenant between God and humankind and all the other creatures on Earth], you can see something in their eyes go: ‘What? What? It says that in the Bible? That’s pretty radical stuff.’”
In the 1990s, Judy and other anti-MTR activists could plausibly believe that momentum on this issue was going their way. Joe Lovett’s lawsuits were resulting in settlements and rulings that, it seemed, would start to rein in MTR. Even in West Virginia’s notoriously pro-coal state government, in spring 2001 a fellow named Matt Crum took charge of the DEP’s enforcement of environmental regulations violated by coal companies in West Virginia. Crum actually enforced the law—for example, by encouraging inspectors to shut down mining operations responsible for blackwater spills (spills of chemical-laden liquid waste from processing coal) until they fixed the problem causing the spill. In the past, inspectors had felt pressured to turn a blind eye to such violations.
Around this time, Judy recalls, “We [anti-MTR activists] had decided: Now is the time for civil disobedience, and people of faith need to be the first people to do this. We all agreed on that, and we were in the process of picking a place, and the perfect site, and the perfect circumstance for this to happen—because you don’t just pull something out of your hat.” And then terrorists took down the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. “It set everything back. It seemed like that was all everyone could think about. The newspapers, the media paid no attention to anything but 9/11.”
Still, she was anxious to move forward with their plans. MTR was continuing, accelerating, and delay meant more and more destruction. “I was impatient, and everyone said no, now’s not the time to do this, let’s just wait a while. So we got back into our comfort zone—fighting permits, going to permit hearings, a lawsuit.”
By 2003, Judy and other anti-MTR activists knew that testifying at hearings was getting them nowhere, and that anti-MTR lawsuit results were apt to be overturned on appeal. By then, it was also increasingly obvious that the Bush administration was failing to live up to previous settlements and apparently hellbent on weakening the mining regulations that they already were systematically failing to enforce. At the state level, things looked no better: In August 2003, incoming DEP head Stephanie Timmermeyer fired Matt Crum and restored cozier relations between the DEP and coal companies.
Matters did not improve in 2004. Apparently not content with failing to enforce the stream-buffer-zone rule, in January 2004 the Bush administration proposed changing the rule to grant mining companies variances that would let them off the hook if they tried not to mine closer than 100 feet from streams “to the extent possible, using the best technology currently available.” The best technology imaginable can’t make it practical to stay a hundred feet from a stream if a valley fill is planned, so in effect what the Bush administration was proposing was to exempt mountaintop removal operations from the buffer rule.
The pattern of anti-MTR legal rulings heading for slapdown on appeal continued through 2004 as well. Back in October 2003, Joe Lovett had filed suit in federal court seeking to bar the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing any more of its Nationwide 21 permits for any proposed MTR operations, regardless of the size of the proposed valley fill. (Both CRMW and OVEC were parties to this suit.) In July 2004, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin ruled that such permits violate the Clean Water Act and could no longer be used anywhere in his district, the Southern District of West Virginia. In September, the Bush administration announced that it would appeal Judge Goodwin’s ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the Corps was failing to obey Judge Goodwin’s ruling, and the judge refused Joe Lovett’s motions to compel them to do so.
In November 2004, President George W. Bush won re-election. The coal industry could count on four more years of proven friends in power in Washington. Judy and others fighting MTR couldn’t afford to wait those four years out. MTR was destroying their home places. They needed to act now. And so the Mountain Justice Summer campaign began.
The coming summer is filled with unknowns, and Judy is reluctant to predict how it might turn out. “The biggest vision I have is bringing it to a national level, working the religious component, working with Mountain Justice Summer and all the [volunteers from] different states coming in,” while she and Bo and Dave Cooper and others continue to work the roadshow outside the coalfields. “I see all these components working together. I’m not placing my hopes on one thing. You have to make them all happen, and they have to fit together.”
Judy would like to see MJS in West Virginia drop banners and stealthily put signs in strategic places—“because, believe me, people in the coalfields appreciate humor, and appreciate a little bit of an outlaw, people who dare to stand up.” This shouldn’t really be seen as “outlaw” behavior, but instead as free people being free to express themselves openly. In the coalfields that makes you somewhat an outlaw. “A lot of people, particularly if they’re not from Appalachia, have not figured out that central Appalachia’s a banana republic, plain and simple. It is not like being in America. The same rules do not apply.” That’s why the effort to bring national attention to mountaintop removal and all its ill effects is so important. If Americans outside the region understand that this is happening in America, Judy and other coalfield activists hope and believe that good people everywhere will find that unacceptable and won’t allow it to continue.
Judy has believed for years that civil disobedience is a key for bringing this to national attention. “We know we’re taking a chance,” she says, “but what else do you do? If you continue to do what you have done,” plug along in your activist comfort zone of writing letters and going to permit hearings, “and you come up against a stone wall, and every option that you have is blocked, you’ve got to go to the next step. We’ve run out of options. And so it’s come to MJS.”
I ask Judy how is it that she, unlike most of her neighbors, is willing to stick her neck out and fight MTR? “It was the protection of my family, my grandson and daughter, that got me involved in this. And my home place. And the outrage and the anger. The outrage turned to anger then back to outrage then to frustration and anger again. Then it led to understanding, and education. Every morning I’d wake up with coal dirt on my car. And then I got to looking in my house and the coal dirt was everywhere. It permeated everything. And then I got to thinking: Does everybody live like this? And then I educated myself and I became even more outraged.
“My mother was a very strong Appalachian woman, very outspoken.” Both of her grandmothers “were also very strong, very outspoken.” She attributes this partly to Cherokee culture, as her
