On a january evening in 2003, coal river mountain watch codirector Judy “Julia” Bonds was home with her grandson when the telephone rang, and the caller ID revealed that the incoming call was from California. Bonds answered, and the man on the other end of the line identified himself as Richard Goldman, phoning to inform her that she was the 2003 North American recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.1 Bonds, who knew nothing about the Goldman Foundation or this prestigious prize that annually gives monetary awards to one environmental justice activist from each continent, casually responded, “Oh, okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate that.”2
During their brief conversation, Goldman gave Bonds a web address and encouraged her to read more about this prize. She explained, “I looked it up on the computer and then I was in total shock. . . . It took my breath away.”3 Bonds learned that she was one of seven environmental justice activists in the world that year to win $125,000 for her work with the Coal River Mountain Watch.4 She said winning this prize was personally monumental but also significant for her organization and the anti-MTR movement, as “people began to realize who CRMW was. They began to realize what MTR is, and it started a snowball effect” of more people becoming educated about MTR and its impact on Appalachian communities and, as a result, wanting to join the fight to end it.5
Five years earlier, in 1998, Judy Bonds went to the CRMW offices looking for help after being forced off her land in Marfork Hollow, near Whitesville, West Virginia, by coal operations that rendered the area unfit for habitation. Bonds, whose family has lived in this area for ten generations, noticed dramatic changes in her environment when Massey coal operations began there in the 1990s. She witnessed color and consistency changes to the water sources in her backyard, and was particularly alarmed when her grandson, playing in a creek behind her home, asked, “What’s wrong with these fish?”6 His innocent question alerted Bonds to fish kills in the water, and she then knew something was horribly wrong. After this, Bonds said, “I started to notice as my neighbors moved out, there was coal trucks running constantly, and it just . . . devalued our property, our quality of life. We were in danger . . . and it was basically the quality of the air and water that made me find out more about what’s happening in my own holler, and the coal industry.”7 Feeling under siege from MTR blasting, the persistent presence of coal trucks, and the inability to drink water in her home or visit the family cemetery, she moved nine miles away to Rock Creek, West Virginia. She was the last resident to leave the community of Marfork.
Prior to joining the CRMW, Bonds had no experience in grassroots activist politics, but at an early age she began to develop a deep sensitivity to economic and social injustice. All the men in her family, including her father, grandfather, ex-husband, cousins, and others worked in nearby coal mines. She spent her childhood in Birch Creek, the upper reaches of Marfork Hollow, where her family grew large gardens, foraged for edible plants in the surrounding mountains, kept livestock, and hunted animals for their own subsistence. Bonds lived in Birch Creek until she was seven, when a coal company forced her family off their land. They settled nearby in Marfork Hollow, and her father worked for Bethlehem Coal Company.8
She recalled seeing one of her father’s paychecks, and the anger she felt upon learning his weekly compensation was a meager $15. She said, “Fifteen dollars for a man risking his life and his health. Fifteen dollars is what he gets for that?”9 Even though Bonds had no political activist experience before joining the CRMW, she credited her mother with imparting a strong sense of justice in her: “She was a very strong willed, opinionated woman. I remember listening to my mother rant and rave about Buffalo Creek. . . . And I remember hearing my mother talk a little bit about Mother Jones, and John L. Lewis and about Matewan. . . . So, a little bit of that outrage against injustices was instilled in me at an early age.”10 In the anti-MTR movement, Bonds had a reputation for speaking bluntly, motivated by an angry passion that was not palatable to all people, particular coal industry supporters. However, she was unapologetic, saying, “That’s who I am. I can’t apologize for that. I lost my diplomacy a long time ago.”11 She, like other grassroots activists in the movement, was the victim of threats and intimidation for speaking out against coalfield injustices, but she remained unwavering in her position.
Arguably, Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, and Maria Gunnoe are the faces of the MTR movement. West Virginia natives with deep historical ties to the region, they, along with other people profiled in this book, have felt the negative impacts of Big Coal firsthand. All have refused to remain silent while this industry obliterates their communities. Bonds, in particular, took a firm stand on the issue and believed other people should as well. She argued, “If you do not raise your finger to stop an injustice, you’re the same as that person doing the injustice.”12 She has been called a “folk celebrity” for her work with the CRMW,13 a coalfield Erin Brockovich. However, Bonds was quick to say that she was just one of many, “a reflection” of Big Coal’s impact on southern West Virginia and of the numerous people taking stands against the coal industry in this era of mountaintop removal coal mining.14 She said, “I’m just the first one out there, because there’s a lot more women that have deeper and bigger and more compelling stories to tell. . . . That’s what makes it so good is that the rest of these women are now telling their stories because one woman had the courage to step out.”15
Bonds and Gunnoe are representative of many Appalachian women who have become politically active to save their homes, communities, and the lush Appalachian Mountains literally from obliteration. They occupy an area of the country known as an energy “sacrifice zone,” where the lives and environment of the few are sacrificed for the greater good of the many; in this case through the production of coal, which provides most of the electricity in the United States.16 While they work to protect the land and quality of life, women environmental justice activists in West Virginia are cognizant that MTR is not solely an environmental issue. Rather, these women position the problems associated with MTR within a holistic framework, highlighting the political, economic, and environmental linkages to this destructive form of coal extraction.
MTR is a controversial form of coal extraction, polarizing state citizens, many of whom defend the practice and the industry, because of Big Coal’s long history in West Virginia; because of the cultural belief that this area “is coal country”; and because of economic reasons, as the industry provides most of the good-paying jobs in the coalfields today. Those critical of the coal industry, particularly mountaintop removal mining, are fewer in number given the overall population in West Virginia’s nine southern coal counties (Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Nicholas, Raleigh, Logan, McDowell, Mingo, and Wyoming), which in 2007 had a combined population of 476,996, while the total number of people residing in the state was 1,812,035.17 While working in environmental justice groups, these grassroots women activists maintain a transformative vision focused on ending the coal hegemony in West Virginia and preserving local communities and the natural environment by promoting the use of alternative energy forms. In doing so they find themselves deeply lodged within the long-standing jobs-versus-environment tensions between those who protect coal in this area and others who seek a new direction for the state. This chapter examines the material conditions of working-class West Virginia women in the age of MTR, gender ideologies shaped and utilized by the coal industry, and how women’s anti-MTR activism challenges and defies established gendered prescriptions.
In the Shadow of a “Resource Curse”: Material Conditions of West Virginia Women and the Hegemony of Coal
The coal industry rules supreme in the rural coalfields of southern West Virginia. In this nine-county area, the heavy manufacturing of this fossil fuel provides one of the best means of employment, with adequate wages and health benefits for many coal miners and their families. West Virginia is typically characterized as a mono-economy, reflecting the prominence of coal in the state’s economy and also its long history as the most influential industry in West Virginia. While the number of mining
