Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big Coal

8. Commons Environmentalism and Community Activism

8. Commons Environmentalism and Community Activism During the 2004 session of the West Virginia legislature, a prominent Senate committee chairman sought advice on how he could legally bar “environmentalists” from committee meetings. In response to the idea, Patty Sebok of Coal River Mountain Watch said, “That’s okay. I’m not an environmentalist; I’m an activist.” The distinction is not superficial. Challenging conventional and stereotypical ideas about environmentalism found in the public imaginary, in common political discourse, and to some extent, in the literature on the environmental movement, is a defining characteristic of CRMW and the Friends of the Mountains network of activists. In this chapter, comments from activists, their opponents, and selected arguments from literature on environmentalism illustrate activists’ treatment of the environment as a kind of commons that emphasizes myriad social and cultural relationships. This view includes how activists understand environment, community, and activism, and how all three are intertwined with a perspective on social justice. Employing this form of commons environmentalism, activists construct themes of community and identity as distinctive features of their various forms of activism. From this perspective, I argue that CRMW transcends four common problems in environmental and social activism. First, by framing their activism in terms of community and identity rather than under the rubric of organized labor, they evade labor regulations and neoliberal authority over labor, and also challenge claims to prosperity based on neoliberal models. Second, the approach to commons environmentalism within the Friends of the Mountains network, with its emphasis on lived experience in the environment, challenges the common mythologies of industrial progress and wilderness Commons Environmentalism and Community Activism 139 preservation, both of which exclude humans from much of modern western environmental thought. Third, by including lived community experience, their activism breaks free of portrayals of environment and economy as an either-or, zero-sum game. Fourth, the network approach to activism transcends the exclusivity of the local by building solidarities between localities and regions and by laying bare the trans-local lines of power and capital that link them together. * * * Speaking at the United Mine Workers Labor Day Celebration during the 2000 gubernatorial campaign, Republican incumbent Cecil Underwood, a former coal executive, charged that growing calls to end mountaintop removal were the work of “extreme environmentalists.” Several outspoken critics of mountaintop removal were in the crowd that day, but none fit any readily available definition of an extreme environmentalist that the governor seemed to employ. Activists at Coal River Mountain Watch were the daughters, wives, and sisters of coal miners. Some were coal miners themselves. All had grown up in a region with strong environmental and labor sensibilities—but those sensibilities are very different from discourses about environmentalism and labor found in mainstream American politics. In short, they are not “tree huggers,” despite efforts by the coal industry, state, and sometimes the union, to paint them as such. Mountaintop removal is certainly an environmental issue, no matter if you speak to a coal miner or a member of Greenpeace. Local sentiments, reflected in CRMW’s activism, do not root environmentalism in abstract concepts or ideologies. Rather, their environmentalism is rooted in the lived experiences and contingencies of everyday life in the coalfields. Environmental and class issues are especially salient in communities struggling to overcome chronic economic woes. As the controversy over mountaintop removal grew in the 1990s, economic circumstances operating on multiple scales effectively cleaved local sentiment into three camps: those who supported the industry because of the jobs it created; those who opposed Coal’s practices, but did not act out of a perceived lack of alternatives or inability to challenge the powerful industry; and those whose outrage moved them to action, including forming groups like CRMW. But are these people environmentalists? I asked Patty Sebok to describe what she meant when she described herself as an activist and not an environmentalist . “Well, you know, most people when they think of environmentalists , they say, oh, they protect lizards and frogs and salamanders and that’s all they’re worried about. And they eat vegan, or vegetarian, and they recycle, 140 CHAPTER 8 and I mean, you know they’re different than us—you know they are. And a community activist is just an ordinary, everyday person that has to go out in the community and do something because your damn government is doing you wrong.” Freda Williams made the distinction by saying that an...