Monday, August 31, 2009

on cook mountain: a look at mountaintop removal

{earth first! journal, sept./oct. 2009: volume 29, issue 6}

on cook mountain
A look at mountain-top-removal



Madison Cook’s miniature hands were covered in the sooty remains of a lump of bituminous coal. She had been collecting treasures all down the road—a yellow spotted salamander, a turkey feather, a magenta leaf—and this was her latest find. But unlike the other members of her Sunday afternoon collection, the coal wasn’t found in the biodiverse Appalachian forest that blanketed part of Cook Mountain. Rather, chunks and pebbles of the infamous fuel littered the top of the high wall that marked the edge of an advancing mountaintop removal site.
Several hundred feet behind us sat the Cook family cemeteries, where 29 of Madison’s ancestors lay at rest. In late June, her uncle, Danny Cook, discovered the access roads—required to be maintained by West Virginia law—blocked by five steep, human-made berms of mud and tree trunks. On the dirt road directly alongside the cemeteries, Horizon Resources LLC, the company mining Cook Mountain, drilled holes to ascertain how deep down the coal seams lay. Should Horizon get its way, explosives will blast away the bones of the dead, exposing a thin strip of coal that will be mined and loaded onto a train, to be burned quickly and cheaply in a factory or plant. Because the Cooks do not own mineral rights to their ancestral mountain, and are unsure of their surface rights, Horizon Resources is free to decimate it.
From the high wall, mines stretch almost as far as the eye can see. They are barren wastelands of brown earth, with dramatic drop-off points where machinery digs in to the heart of the mountain to reach the coal. Mountaintop removal mining began in the 1970s, prompted by the 1973 and 1979 petroleum crises, and became widespread when the desire for high-sulfur coal increased in the 1990s. Since then, bulldozers and draglines have plagued the mountaintops of West Virginia and Kentucky, laying waste to a stretch of mixed mesophytic forest and ridges comparable to the size of Delaware.
The mountain Floyd and Mary Walker Cook settled in the 1840s is part of the Appalachians, born 480 million years ago, during the earliest North American orogeny. Megaflora peat bogs and wetland marshes that bordered the ancient coastline prior to the mountain-forming plate collision became buried under the range. As climate and life eroded the young peaks—which once rivaled the Himalayas—into rolling hills, plant and tree remains deep under the surface metamorphosed into West Virginia’s most valuable fuel resource: bituminous coal.
The southern Appalachians escaped the glaciations of the Pleistocene epochs and have been harboring life for over 200 million years longer than anywhere else in the United States. When the glaciers receded, this pocket of mixed mesophytic hardwood served as the mother forest for all of North America. Today, the second-growth hardwood forest that has swallowed the remnants of the Cook family barn and fence line is part of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the continent. Oak, maple and white pine are among the 30 tree species that shade the forest floor in a single patch of woods. The understory is choked with ground cover, ginseng and ramps, punctuated by mushrooms and berry bushes. White-tailed deer and black bears traverse these forests, and over 100 species of fish once filled West Virginia’s streams.
Ninety-five percent of Appalachian forests have been logged or cleared—primarily for agriculture and industry—in the past 200 years, and only a few hectares of old growth remain. Where agricultural land has been widely abandoned, second-growth forests have taken root. While they do not rival the biodiversity of old-growth ecosystems, the pioneer forests of the southern Appalachians have come back strong, replenishing the mountainsides with unusual numbers of plant and animal species. While the forests survived extensive logging, they will not be able to survive the physical removal of the land by explosive-wielding strip-mining machines the size of several-story buildings. And neither will Appalachian culture.
The Cooks that traversed the mountaintop that Sunday afternoon were raised in James Creek Hollow down below, but they still climbed the mountain throughout their childhood and adolescence to have picnics, to visit their ancestors, to hunt and to forage. In the Spring and Summer, they search for morchella esculante, the gourmet mushrooms colloquially known as Molly Moochers or morels. The Cook family and friends set up hunting platforms in trees, putting venison on the family table. West Virginia’s most renowned medicinal plant, ginseng, and its beloved and stinky allium, ramps, have been gathered with aplomb by mountaineering families for generations.
In the hollow, the Cooks grew gardens, from which they harvested fresh produce and herbs. Vickie Cook Stewart, Danny’s sister, recalls long afternoons gardening when elementary school let out. All along the windy roads that criss-cross the coalfields, abundant, well-maintained gardens are planted next to homes. Self-sufficiency has been characteristic of Appalachian mountaineering culture for generations; southern West Virginia was—until the construction of train lines and the introduction of industrial coal mining around the time of the Civil War—virtually inaccessible to outsiders.
With the influx of coal operations and miners, gardens became both a tool and hindrance in resistance to tightly-controlled company town life, which edged on totalitarianism. Homegrown vegetables and fruit afforded miners nutritional autonomy from the company store and its inflated prices (in some cases three times the market rate). Simultaneously, gardening contests were organized by coal operators to occupy the miners’ time, preventing them from organizing with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
Miners in the unincorporated towns of southern West Virginia rented two-family company houses, purchased their goods at the company store in company-issued scrip tokens, attended company churches headed by coal-paid preachers, and were disciplined and bullied by company mine guards. Where the police weren’t willing to enforce the whims of the operators, mine guards and company-hired detectives were called upon to kick families out of their homes and, in some cases, assassinate UMWA organizers. The fascist nature of life in company towns led to a difference in priorities between southern West Virginia union men and UMWA miners elsewhere. A high demand for workers afforded miners decent pay and ample job opportunities—if the company dissatisfied them, they could often move to another town and coal operation. The miners in West Virginia—a few from the old hill clans, and many migrants from other parts of the country and world—focused on fighting the mine guard system and demanding fair weighing of their hauls and political clout.
UMWA members in southern West Virginia sought the autonomy that was a cornerstone of mountaineer history and culture. Some of labor history’s proudest moments—including the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection in United States history since the Civil War—played out in the coalfields. And yet, King Coal continued to run rampant through the hills and hollows, uprooting the Earth and laying the groundwork for environmental degradation and economic impoverishment.
Pro-coal proponents argue that coal fuels West Virginia, although mountaintop removal and strip mining only employ three percent of all West Virginians and mining jobs have dropped about 30 percent since the wane of underground mining. The destruction of the mountains prevents the development of new industries, including agriculture and eco-tourism. Coal is impoverishing most West Virginians, not enriching them. Abandoned buildings line West Virginia Route 3, which winds through former company towns in the Coal River Valley.
Examples of health risks are never ending: Prenter Hollow is just 21 miles by road from James Creek, where residents drink water poisonous enough to tarnish new pennies in minutes and leave five-year-old children toothless. Eleven thousand acres of mining sites have cracked family wells, and slurry injections have seeped into the main water supply. Ninety-eight percent of Prenter Hollow adults suffer from bladder problems, and bizarre cancers are disturbingly common. Marsh Fork Elementary School, in Raleigh County, is nestled between a plurality of dangerous coal operations. Elementary school students sit 150 feet from a coal silo and train tracks, next to the Goals Processing Plant and just below Massey’s leaking Shumate Sludge Impoundment. Strip-mine blasting is to begin just above the impoundment, increasing the risk of flooding exponentially, although mine officials deny that possibility.
It’s happened before. In 1972, a 30-foot-high, 132 million-gallon wall of water cascaded into Buffalo Creek Hollow, Logan County, from the flooded sludge dams that sat above the community. The dam burst—just four days after a US mine inspector declared it satisfactory—taking 125 of the hollow’s 5,000 lives with it. This past May, the Rawl and Thacker mines in Mingo County caused extensive flooding. Luckily, no lives were lost. Coal CEOs and politicians have taken to calling the dangerous surges catalyzed by mining operations “acts of God.”
What is happening on Cook Mountain is happening across Appalachia—King Coal is leveling four hundred million years of geologic work with draglines, bulldozers and explosives. It’s destroying livelihoods and tearing up gardens, cemeteries and ancient forests. It moves swiftly and forcefully, exempt from laws and reason, with a single goal: the maximization of profit before the thin coal seams beneath the mountains run out. When all the plunder has been taken, the companies will leave, a trail of destruction in their wake.
But His Majesty is scared—his actions have not gone unnoticed. In the hollows, locals are organizing and fighting for clean air and water, employing science, publicity and the courts. Others have gone up to the mountains, locking themselves to machinery and trespassing on company property. Coal company executives have publicly likened the movement against mountaintop removal to war and being under siege; newspapers have referred to it as “another Mine War.”
The hills of West Virginia echo with a rich history of resistance. It was in these coal fields that thousands of miners battled on the slopes of Blair Mountain. That battle was preceded and followed by hundreds of smaller skirmishes—the miners of West Virginia could not be quieted. As King Coal makes his last stand in these hills, let’s go by road and railroad track to stand in solidarity with the people of Appalachia. With creativity and a diversity of tactics, let’s fight until the last piece of machinery has been driven down from the mountaintop with nothing left to do but rust.
To learn more about the ongoing action campaign in southern West Virginia, visit
www.climategroundzero.org.