with government regulations. “It was as if the ‘reclamation’ was a cancer that had finally burst from the skin of the earth,” Chris reports. “What caused [the] megaslide is evident—you can hear it, water. At least four different sources of water were cutting through the shale and coal-blended soil. An unstable substrate combined with water and really steep slopes creates landslides. Ridgetops may be cheap for coal companies to blast—it’s impossible to repair.”
“We see slides fairly frequently, but rarely one this size,” an official with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) observes. And, in fact, on his way to the big slide, Chris saw several other, smaller landslides that he’d not heard about. That such slides could happen on “reclaimed” land at all, let alone “frequently,” calls into question the adequacy of reclamation protocols—and presents an opportunity, as Chris and others in Tennessee see it.
“Normally Katuah Earth First! regards politicians as scum who are not to be trusted on any level,” Chris writes in another email to the MJS listserv. “But tactically at this juncture in our campaign here in Tennessee all the arrows are pointing to our state agencies. TDEC regulates water permits for Tennessee. Mountaintop removal aka cross-ridge mining by its very nature destroys highland watersheds. TDEC has been wavering lately on the wisdom of being a rubber stamp for the final solution for our watersheds.” MJS is aiming to compel them to instead protect streams by protecting their mountains.
In mid-March, MJS organizers from around the region once again gather for a weekend meeting, this time in Asheville, at Warren Wilson College just east of town. Close to four dozen people attend, at least a dozen or so newcomers since the meeting in Blacksburg.
Bo tells the meeting that there’s been heavy blasting behind Marsh Fork Elementary School in the past month. In Kentucky, activists affiliated with KFTC (a few of whom attend part of this weekend’s meeting) are looking to see what their role in MJS might be. Erin from Blacksburg reports on plans for a “Listening Project” in and around the town of Appalachia, Virginia, going door-to-door to hear people’s concerns about mining in their neighborhoods. (Last August there, a three-year-old boy, Jeremy Davidson, asleep in his bed, was crushed to death by a boulder off an MTR site above his home.) Listening Projects have also been done or are soon to begin near Zeb Mountain in Tennessee and in Coal River valley. College students from several states are expected soon to visit Larry Gibson’s place at Kayford Mountain, to see MTR firsthand, in the hope of drawing them in to MJS for the summer. Paloma reports that the MJS internet listserv now has 267 members, and that 2 or 3 people are signing up at the website each day, volunteering to help this summer.
“Looks like we’ll have more people than we know what to do with,” john johnson says.
Chris Irwin responds, “We’ll know what to do with them.”
Much of the weekend is devoted to working out a rough-draft calendar for the summer, and to meetings of and report-backs from working groups focused on Listening Projects, training camps to be held early in the summer, finances, art, intake process for volunteers, media and outreach, logistics of housing and feeding and transporting volunteers, music, and scouting for possible actions sites and to learn what’s happening with mining in various places. Informally, in conversations during breaks in the meeting, activists are still considering a mountaintop occupation sometime during the summer, with possible locations to be scouted in the next few weeks and discussed at the next monthly meeting, in April.
Kayford Mountain in West Virginia is five hours of fast driving from Asheville, mostly on highways. There’s a network of wide, well-built highways throughout this region (thank you Sen. Robert Byrd), but when you get off these roads you’re often quite quickly on narrow, light-duty roads with no shoulders and steep drop-offs, not built to withstand heavy truck traffic but subjected to it nonetheless to suit the convenience of mine operations. Coal trucks pound the hell out of roads running within a few yards of people’s homes, and come tearing around blind curves too fast for anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment to get out of their way. Dozens of people on foot and in cars have been killed this way. Sharing the road with coal trucks is scary, and people who live in the coalfields live with that fear every day.
When I visit Kayford one afternoon in late March, I meet Larry at the Stanley family cemetery, near the top of the mountain, amid a constant din of working equipment from the surrounding mine sites. Trees around the cemetery are still winter-dormant. On the back of a white-painted rock marking the entrance to the cemetery Larry has painted a Bible verse, Psalms 95:4: “In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.” Larry’s family has been burying relatives here since the early 1800s.
Members of the Stanley family have lived here for 220 years, Larry tells me. (Larry’s grandmother was a Stanley.) They lost most of their land a century ago, in 1906, as so many other southern Appalachian families did when land companies greedy for timber and mineral rights moved in. “We had 566 acres. We now have fifty. A crooked land company and a crooked notary cheated my family out of [the rest] because they couldn’t read,” he says.
Gesturing to the trees at one side of the cemetery, Larry says: “Before they started this, in ’86, you could come in here and above the trees there you could see a pasture, with cattle and horses in it. Above the trees.” Now there’s nothing but sky there. The mountainside where the pasture was located has, like all the mountains for miles around now, had its top blown off and been reduced in height by hundreds of feet, with the rubble pushed aside into valley fills. “This here [Kayford] was the lowest point. Everything around me was higher, about 300 feet higher than this.”
The strip mining that surrounds Kayford stretches for seventeen miles. Larry’s little fifty-acre island in the middle is the only place that isn’t controlled by mining companies. “Thirteen permits, 7,538 acres, several different companies,” Larry says.
As we’re walking up the private access road to the cemetery, we stop to look at tire tracks from a big mining truck that’s been using the road without Larry’s permission, presumably to dump something beyond the edge of the cemetery. Similarly, mining trucks tear up the private dirt road that goes through Larry’s property past several cabins maintained by relatives, because it’s a shortcut to property a mining company controls and has been logging just beyond the cabins. Flyrock from blasting has landed in the cemetery and its parking area from as far as 1,500 yards away. In fact, Larry’s picked up flyrock all over his property—on the road, in his yard, plenty of places where he or someone else could easily have been standing when it fell. “We’ve had rocks coming on our property as heavy as five tons,” Larry tells me. Later he’ll show me photographs, and tell me to look for flyrock boulders along the road I’ll take down the mountain. Some are as big as easy chairs.
For all the land that’s being torn up by mining here, there are very few mining jobs. “When I was a boy, in 1960,” Larry says, “they had 25,000 men. Now 500 men take out five times as much coal as the 25,000 did.” The coal companies hire just a few locals “so they can tell people: Well, we’re hiring. But you go sit at the mine site and watch the cars when they’re coming out—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri [license plates].”
Just a few hundred people live in the hollow below Kayford now, all clustered along the road by the creek, none up in the hills. There used to be a high school here for 1,500 students, but it closed. “We have one elementary school in the hollow, and they’re talking about closing it down. [Since 1960,] we lost sixteen schools that I remember.”
I ask why people around here aren’t angry about all this. “They feel powerless,” Larry says, adding that the mining companies have succeeded in dividing and conquering. “They’re very good at keeping them fighting amongst themselves. The people that they hire intimidate the people that they don’t hire. Fear is so thick you can cut it with a knife.” There’s good
