they are.
Although most people here believe that King Coal’s destruction of the mountains and their people is wrong, few are willing to stick their necks out to say so—and for good reason. People who stick their necks out often get whacked in the head, particularly in Appalachia’s coalfields, where power has long been maintained by violence in many forms, all of them ugly. And besides, why bother? Why take care of your home if your only hope for a decent life is to leave it? Why take care of the mountains if they too will soon be gone? Those who do speak out against mountaintop removal have done so regardless of the odds against stopping it. Standing up for what’s right is part of who they are, and doing so—whatever the cost—makes them more fully themselves, more fully human and free.
Likewise, across the country Americans know that the way we live has gone wrong. We sense that our use-it-up-and-move-on way of life is in its endgame. If we think about it at all, and are honest with ourselves, we know that in a finite world fueled by a finite amount of sunlight, we can’t forever have unlimited amounts of whatever we want to consume. If we haven’t yet reached a point where our consumption and waste are beyond the limits of nature’s capacity to support them, surely we’re headed in that direction and accelerating toward it. And if, in the endgame of our current way of life, we use up or render unusable everything we can get our hands on, without much regard for the future, then somewhere very much like the deathscape of an MTR site is where we’ll all be living in the future.
Most people don’t stand up and speak out about this either, let alone try to do anything about it. Why bother? Why stick your neck out? Those who do, like their compatriots in Appalachia, do so because working to make change for the better makes their lives more meaningful and worthwhile. They know that our future, like it or not, will unfold in a world in which we’re aware that we do live within natural limits. Life in that future can be better than what we have now—more honest, satisfying, just, graceful, and beautiful. These goods need have no limits.
In the past few years, hundreds of such people from all over the country have joined local Appalachians to stand up against strip mining and open the door to better ways of living for Appalachians and all Americans. Their work is for our future, for all of us. This is their story.
Mountain People
In early January 2005, I received an email about a new campaign against strip mining from Bo Webb, a coalfield resident fighting mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia. I had first met Bo the previous summer, when I was trying to write about MTR and couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the hills and valleys of the coalfield landscape are similar in scale to those near the Coal River, where Bo lives, and I knew about the smaller-scale strip mining of decades past: My great-grandfather’s farm had been stripped half a century ago. When I read about MTR, I couldn’t make sense of how such huge mining operations could take place in such an intimate jumble of small and swervy mountains. I needed to see it for myself, and when I sought guidance from Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), a group of local people seeking to end MTR and sustain their community, Bo volunteered to show me around.
Bo was born in West Virginia, he later told me, as we sat by the river at his house, “in a coal camp house, near Whitesville, about eleven miles from here. My dad worked at a coal mine, and he got paid in scrip, and we used that scrip at the company store and paid grossly inflated prices for all the products.” When coal’s boom-and-bust cycle went bust in the mid-1950s, Bo’s dad went to work in Cleveland, but the rest of the family stayed in West Virginia. As soon as his father could come back and work at another coal mine, “he jumped on that, because he loved the mountains.” During another bust, in 1960, he went back to Cleveland and started working for General Motors. “So we moved to Cleveland. I was twelve years old.” After graduating from high school there, Bo joined the Marines, was sent to war in Vietnam in January 1968, and came back to Cleveland the following year. “I got an apprenticeship as a tool and die maker,” he says. “I had to have a career, and I didn’t want to be a coal miner.
“The whole time I was in Cleveland we always came ‘back home’ [to West Virginia] on the weekend and holidays. And I continued to do that after I came back from the Marines. I brought my wife right here, to this property—this was my grandmother’s property—and she sat on this rock right over here [by the river], and she fell in love with this place.” After his grandmother died, Bo bought the land. He put a mobile home on it, for vacations, in the mid-1980s.
Meanwhile, he and his wife, Joanne, had a son and a daughter. In 1981 he’d started his own machining business, still in Cleveland. After a fire in his shop in 1998, Bo decided, “Let’s move back to West Virginia and relax. I just want to fish and hunt, and I’m young enough to enjoy it. I’m not going to have any elaborate type of lifestyle, but we’ll be OK. We’ll be fine.” So they moved here in February 2001.
“That first summer, boy I enjoyed this place. Had a big garden. I kept hearing this thing about mountaintop removal, and every now and then I’d hear these little rumbles in the mountains. I started doing some research on the internet about it, and lo and behold I found out they were blowing my mountains away, and they were moving closer. And I heard about Coal River Mountain Watch.” Bo began helping them out from time to time.
Bo called the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) after a flood in 2001, asking for a water test at the river in front of his house, “because I was getting a funny smell, and all the smallmouth bass in this river—they’re gone. I used to be able to catch three-, four-pound smallmouth.” A few miles up the river, there’d been a blowout from an old underground mine, and all the mud and whatnot from that blowout came downriver to Bo. (Blasting for MTR often cracks previously stable abandoned underground mines and hillsides so that water that’s collected in the old mines comes gushing out.) Bo complained for three weeks before someone from the DEP came out. “That’s the response we get,” Bo says, “because we don’t count.” According to the guy from the DEP, the stream’s pH was a little low, “but he never explained anything,” Bo says, and of course three weeks earlier the reading might have been a lot different. “The bass are not back yet. Last year [2004] I saw a few fingerling. It killed the fish.” This got Bo riled up and ready to fight.
It never occurred to Bo not to fight MTR’s effects on his home place. “I think that’s because I got out of here,” he says. He moved to Cleveland when he was still young, “and shed the oppression, the atmosphere here. I guess the worst type of oppression is when you don’t know you’re oppressed, so you just follow along. I’ve heard it many times: ‘Well, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it always will be. The coal company’s gonna get the coal and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ I don’t come from that school—especially [after] being in the service and being in Vietnam, and thinking I was doing something for the country. And I come back and it looks to me like the country’s turned its back on its citizens, and it made me angry. I saw a lot of violations of human rights in Vietnam, and I started looking at this, and it reminded me of that. So I wanted to do something about it.”
When I met up with Bo in the summer of 2004, our first stop was Marsh Fork Elementary School, a short drive downriver from Bo’s home. There we saw a coal silo looming over the school, close to the edge of the schoolyard, part of a coal processing operation run by a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Coal dust and the toxic chemicals used in this facility’s method for processing coal settle on the playground and seep in through the school’s ventilation system. Several children and teachers have contracted unusual cancers, Bo tells me, and headaches, respiratory problems, and other illness are far too common among the schoolchildren there. All this is hard enough to believe. What were the government officials who allowed this to happen thinking? What were the coal company executives and their lawyers thinking? But worse still, right behind the processing plant, just a few hundred yards from the school, a 385-foot-high earthen dam holds more than a billion
