This article is part of an actions media for the Senior Citizens March to End Mountaintop Removal. To read dispatches and press releases from the five day, 25 mile March, as well as look at photos and video, visit Climate Ground Zero. It was also published on ZNet.
Herk McGraw drove from the outskirts of Charleston, West Virginia to participate in this week's Senior Citizens March to End Mountaintop Removal. Sue Rosenberg made the trek from Saugerties, New York. They were not solely motivated by the call for elders to join the struggle against environmental devastation in Appalachia; McGraw and Rosenberg are joining the 25 mile march from the State Capitol to the gates of Mammoth Coal Company in part because of young people in their lives. McGraw's granddaughter, Zoe Beavers, and Rosenberg's son, Mathew Louis-Rosenberg, are both active in Climate Ground Zero, a civil disobedience campaign based in the coalfields of southern West Virginia.
“I'm opposed to mountaintop removal, of course,” said McGraw, a Methodist minister and coal miner's son, “But particularly after they arrested Zoe [in August's tree sit at Pettry Bottom, W.Va.], that gave me a little more enthusiasm about coming out and supporting her.” Beavers, 28, served as ground support for the two tree sitters. She was arrested twice over the course of the five day protest; once two days after returning as a liason for the sitters at the request of state police.
Beavers enlisted in the U.S. Army after her high school graduation in 2000 and did not move back to her home state until May of 2009. She credits her return to West Virginia, where she lives with family in St. Albans, to the burgeoning movement for environmental justice in the coalfields.
“My whole life I was taught that nothing can change in West Virginia, we shouldn't fight for it because it's a lost cause,” the Iraq War veteran, who now works with the Student Environmental Action Coalition out of Charleston, said, “We are not powerless.”
Her grandfather's main concern with mountaintop removal mining is the industry's dishonesty.
“What they're talking about mountaintop removal and what actually happens with mountaintop removal are two different things,” he said, “They say that they are putting it back like it was . . . but what's been done with it mostly is the golf course and the prison.”
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Mat Louis-Rosenberg grew up in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. Born in to a family with deep activist roots, his first memory is of participating in a march in his hometown at three years of age. Louis-Rosenberg was raised with a strong appreciation for United States radical history- he learned about West Virginia through family friends' stories of the labor movement.
Louis-Rosenberg moved to the Coal River Valley last year to work as a Sludge Safety Project organizer with Coal River Mountain Watch. His work with Climate Ground Zero includes a May 2009 arrest for playing a support role in a lock down to machinery on Kayford Mountain. In a pre-trial hearing, he was among two of the eight activists involved in the lock down who refused to plead no contest and accept a fine of nearly $2,000. He will be tried by jury on October 15 at the Madison Courthouse in Boone County.
“Mat used to say that he walked in the footsteps and on the shoulders of his grandparents and he was very proud of that,” said Sue Rosenberg, 62, who is in West Virginia for both the March and the trial, “I'm proud to now be walking in the footsteps of my son.” Rosenberg was a Civil Rights activist during her high school years in New York City, and later went on to work against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons; as well as in solidarity with the people's movements of Central America.
Sue Rosenberg was recently arrested at a June 23rd Marsh Fork Elementary School rally. The school, in Sundial, W.Va., sits just below a 2.9 billion gallon coal waste sludge impoundment and next to a coal silo and processing plant. Community organizers, West Virginia Senators Byrd and Rockefeller, and Congressman Rahall are pressuring Massey Energy, who owns the plant, impoundment and silo, to pay for the relocation of Marsh Fork Elementary. Rosenberg has been active in her recruitment of others to the cause, including World War II veteran and anti-war activist Joan Keefe. Keefe, at 88, is the oldest participant in the march.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Zine Review #1: "Being the Adventures of One Fine Summer: A Personal Zine in Photobook Form" {Magpie Killjoy}
Photo by Magpie Killjoy
The photographs, of course, are striking- punks playing guitar and fiddle in a West Virginia family's living room, tattooed fingers bloodied from digging in to roadkill, an abandoned mailbox at a mountaintop removal site, a tintype photographer on a shoot. The anarchist photographer and founder of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness Distro has a knack for capturing overlooked and unusual detail.
Maybe I'm biased because I currently live in West Virginia and fight mountaintop removal full time, but Killjoy is at his peak with his environmental war photojournalism. “O Coal!,” the zine's first chapter, is a photo series of activists exploring MTR sites and cleaning up after a flood in the coalfields, accompanied by text outlining Killjoy's experiences in Appalachia. The chapter ties in contemporary and historical resistance- in one part, the author explores an old mine guard bunker in the woods, once used by a coal company to attack unionized workers. While the narrative veers towards simplistic, his evocative language challenges the reader to go and see the destruction for themselves. As a media maker caught up in press releases and advocacy journalism, it's easy for me to forget just how important personal narrative (from the perspective of both hellraisers and curious outsiders) is in capturing the emotional edges of struggle.
As Killjoy leaves the coalfields and heads west, the narrative falls flat. His talent for mise-en-scene and for conveying the stories he has heard is suppressed in favor of vague perzinish writing. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, he writes that he “ . . .may or may not have cried [because of the square being dominated by condos and a Clear Channel Billboard.]” “Well did you or didn't you?” I want to ask him, challenging him to go further with his writing, “Why does what has happened to the physical space matter so much?” The well-developed essay that begins the zine led me to expect the in-depth writing from subsequent chapters.
The photographs are still stunning, snapshots of lives being lived with a certain transgressive intensity. There is shadow play on a Tennessee River and in “Chapter Three: Butchering a Fawn on a Sunday”; a jarring visual essay of friends carving roadkill. The final photograph in this section is a bloody hand boldly holding the fawn's heart in the air, triumphant.
Photo by Magpie Killjoy
Killjoy's best photographs and writing serve as well-crafted dispatches from radical culture and resistance. By blatantly embracing subjectivity, “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” begins to deconstruct the false paradigm of the objective and distant photojournalist.
There is a stark difference in his work covering environmental atrocities and his other photographs- while the latter work well without much text, he uses essay to string the former together into coherent and alluring stories. It's not that I prefer one style over the other; perhaps “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” should have been two separate projects, not a pastiche of summer adventures having little more than linear time connecting them.
Of course, every new experiment is by its nature haphazard. I hope Killjoy and others continue to work with the photo zine form and the complicated possibilities of anarchistic photojournalism.
Birds Before The Storm
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