companies have engaged in violence and property destruction when faced with citizen opposition to their activities. MJS is committed to nonviolence and will not be engaged in property destruction.
Posted on the MJS website and reproduced again and again in MJS literature, this would serve as both a definition of and a guideline for MJS throughout the summer and beyond.
Shortly after the meeting in Blacksburg, Bo does a radio interview for a station in Asheville with Julia Bonds. (Bonds’s friends call her Judy, and that’s what I’ll call her here from this point on). Judy’s family lived in the same hollow, near Whitesville, for nine generations. Then, in 1994, Massey moved in. Neighbors moved out. Judy’s home was covered with coal dust and rattled by blasting. Fish died in the streams her family had always relied on.
“My grandson lay in bed one night when it was raining,” Judy recalls, “and we knew other dams had failed. He was eight years old at the time, and he tried to reassure me, because he knew I was worried. He said, ‘Mawmaw don’t worry. If that dam [above our house] breaks, I’ve got a path that we can just climb the mountain, and a cave that we can hide in.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandson that we’d never make it.
“My grandson developed asthma, and things became worse and worse.” Finally they moved, the last people in their hollow to leave. Judy would have stayed, but she feared for her daughter and grandson.
“Most Americans simply do not understand where their so-called cheap electricity comes from,” she says. “There’s nothing cheap about it. And Americans need to understand that coal from cradle to grave is dirty. There’s no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ And they need to understand that [with] our materialistic lifestyle, the use of excessive electricity that you don’t need, we’re destroying our children’s future. We’re selling our children’s [future] necessities for our luxuries.”
Bo notes that their local allies against MTR are few—there’s a lot of apathy and intimidation in the coalfields, he says. Massey, the coal company that dominates Coal River valley and mines extensively elsewhere in the region, hires most of its employees from out of state, Bo says, because coal companies would prefer to rid the coalfields of natives who might someday be in their way or complain about what they’re doing. (West Virginia’s population in 1950 was more than 2 million, and had grown each decade for the past century and a half; by 2005 its population had shrunk to 1.8 million. While West Virginia’s population was shrinking, the overall population of the United States nearly doubled between 1950 and 2005. West Virginia’s anomalous population loss is overwhelmingly concentrated in the coalfields in the southern part of the state.)
Bo explains to the radio listeners that a mix of toxic chemicals (and in winter, antifreeze) is sprayed on coal at the plant next to Marsh Fork Elementary School—and that three teachers there have died of cancer in the past few years; a former principal, just retired, now has bone cancer; two girls who went to school there have had ovarian cancer, highly unusual in very young women—one of them has died. Other kids at the school have asthma and blood disorders.
“We’re inviting everyone in,” he says. “There’s a place in this [campaign] for everyone. This is not just an Appalachian problem, it’s a national problem. It’s a worldwide problem, when you come right down to it. America’s cheap electricity does come at the expense of coalfield residents. Why should someone in West Virginia lose their home for the profit of a coal company? That’s not right. That’s not American.”
Around the time of this radio interview, I begin corresponding with john johnson, intrigued by how things he said at the meeting in Blacksburg, coming from an anarchist, eco-centric perspective, so closely connect with Judy and Bo’s sense that MTR exemplifies a rush toward bankruptcy in America’s current way of life. “I agree totally,” john says. “MTR is totally an example of the utter insanity of modern industrial capitalism. I don’t think it’s just America. It’s the whole modern world. The flip side is that America and other cultures also have a lot of ingenuity and creativity when it comes to doing things differently.”
john’s a “damn Yankee,” as he puts it. (Yankees live up north. Damn Yankees come south and don’t go back.) He grew up in the Northeast, then his family moved to Tennessee when he was fifteen. In college, at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he found himself becoming more open to “alternative ways of viewing the world. I’ll be straight with you—part of it was from doing drugs, smoking pot and dropping acid. And part of it was from listening to punk rock music and heavy metal, which has a very rebellious, challenge-authority thing going on. And I started meeting people who were acting on their beliefs.” He began attending protests and meetings of activist groups, and became involved in environmental/racial justice campaigns in Chattanooga. Among the environmental activists he met were people working on forest issues, who eventually connected him with Earth First! “In the early 1990s, I got exposed to EF!, I got exposed to the anarchist movement—I got exposed to the most radical wing of the anarchist movement, the anti-civilization bunch. Those ideas have had a profound influence on the way I view things.” He’s matured enough that he no longer thinks he has The Right Answer for the way the world should run, but “I do know there are slivers of the truth, there are things that I know could and should work, but not the totality.”
In 1993, john and several others decided to reconstitute a southern Appalachian bioregional chapter of the radical environmental movement Earth First!, which they named Katuah, the Cherokee word for the region. Before then, in 1991, he’d decided to drop out of college and become a “full-time revolutionary activist, and to dedicate my life to overthrowing the government, and the corporations, and the whole social order, which I perceive as very wrong.” At the same time, in the early 1990s, he was protesting against the first Gulf War and against police brutality.
By 1994, “I really liked the Earth First! take on things, the ideology of Deep Ecology and biocentrism.”(Deep Ecology holds that humans are first and foremost part of nature, and that living ecosystems have the same sort of value and right to well-being as humankind, regardless of their usefulness to humans.) So john made a conscious decision to focus on environmental issues. Besides, “Earth Firsters are a lot of fun. Even the non-Earth First! [environmentalists], the mainstream conservationists, are great people.
“By 1996, 1997 my environmentalism had transformed from an intellectual thing to a totally heartfelt, passionate—I tell people that not only am I in love with my fiancée, Amanda, but I am hotly in love with the landscape of southern Appalachia.” Before then, “I couldn’t talk to you about the particulars of nature. I could just tell you why we needed to protect it,” as our life-support system. “Now that I have this interest in it, and this love affair with it, I’m trying to learn it. Because I want to talk to people about the particulars, about salamanders, and freshwater mollusks, and the different kinds of trees.”
While I’m enjoying seeing individuals as different as Bo, Judy, and john on the same page, other people are worried that MJS is becoming too radical-fringy.
One of those people is Dave Cooper. Born in Cincinnati, Dave grew up Republican, conservative, middle-class. When he was still in high school, during the Carter administration, the first Arab oil embargo and ensuing “energy crisis” hit home: “It was crystal clear that we needed to do energy conservation then,” he says. “And then we just forgot about it.” Dave went to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, then worked at a General Motors plant in Ohio for seven years as a quality control engineer. When that plant closed down, he went to work for a defense contractor for three years.
During this time, in 1986, he joined the Sierra Club, mostly because he’d gone camping and hiking when he was a kid and missed it. He went on his first national Sierra Club outing that year, and “got exposed to some other Sierra Club people—and they’re all talking about lobbying and writing letters to Congress. I thought they were a bunch of kooks.”
