Film and Everyday Eco-disasters

7. Activism in Mountaintop Removal Films

CHAPTER SEVEN ACTIVISM IN MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL FILMS Turn Off the Lights for Sustainability B. J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) opens with an assertion from the late anti–mountaintop removal mining (mtr) activist Julia (Judy) Bonds that restates one argument against mtr, its destruction of the Appalachian landscape. According to Bonds, “a sense of place pulls at you here. It’s a trait that makes Appalachians who they are,” and that sense of place is reinforced by pristine images of forest-covered hills, mountain streams, and wildlife seemingly untouched by the outside world. This is Appalachia, the images assert, and this view of Appalachia as a region, a place, and a way of life is validated with the accompanying mountain music in the background. This idyllic vision is shattered, however, when the scene shifts to reveal gruesome aerial shots of the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining in their end stages, showing mountaintops with browned, crushed trees scattered like twigs. Other mountains, having lost their peaks, are as flat as billiard tables, their remains scattered down on the adjacent valleys as fill. From the distance, a fifteen-million-pound dragline crane looks like a child’s Tonka toy, but the landscape is gray, brown, and completely barren. This is the perfect spot for Gomorra’s (2008) toxic-waste dump- 138 PART THREE ing, except the coal companies have beaten them to the punch. As the film’s narrator explains, the mountains’ “guts [have been] blown out.” By effectively juxtaposing images of the pristine mountains that may become a memory with the hell that mountaintop removal leaves in its wake, Rise Up! West Virginia successfully argues against mtr, but the narrator’s claim, “coal mining hasn’t saved the state yet,” takes the argument further. Although all twelve of the anti–mountaintop removal documentaries we viewed effectively demonstrate the disastrous effects of mountaintop removal mining, only B. J. Gudmundsson’s Mountain Mourning (2006) and Rise Up! West Virginia, and, to a lesser extent because of its attempt to provide a balanced approach, Bill Haney’s The Last Mountain (2011), successfully support arguments against mountaintop removal mining while offering viable non–fossil fuel energy alternatives, alternatives that, according to the films, will eventually end America’s addiction to coal and Appalachia’s overreliance on a coal mining economy. Rise Up! West Virginia: The destructive scale of mountaintop removal Activism in Mountaintop Removal Films 139 We assert then that Mountain Mourning and Rise Up! West Virginia succeed where other anti-mtr documentaries fail. Razing Appalachia (2003), The Appalachians (2005), Keeper of the Mountains (2006), Look What They’ve Done (2006), Black Diamonds (2007), Mountain Top Removal (2007), Burning the Future: Coal in America (2008), Coal Country (2009), and On Coal River (2010) argue to a lesser or greater extent against mountaintop removal mining, but coal remains an economic and political necessity in each film, as long as it is procured differently. Because Gudmundsson’s films support alternatives to coal mining, both mtr and underground, without watering down their rhetoric with an attempt at a balanced approach (as in The Last Mountain), they provide a map toward a solution unbridled by hope in the face of hopelessness, destructive visions of progress, and perpetuation of our addiction to coal-generated energy and the negative environmental and economic consequences associated with the mining and burning of coal. Rhetorical Documentary: Classic and Contemporary Views Like the contemporary eco-food films analyzed in chapter 4, the anti– mountaintop removal mining films we explore here may also benefit from the audience-engagement work of Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee, since almost all the films include a call for action in their conclusions. They also provide clear-cut models of activism with each of the protestors documented in each film, demonstrating well that, as previously noted, “the rhetorical potential of documentary film relies not on an audience who merely provides the rhetor with resources that might be exploited in persuasion but instead on an audience who is actively engaged in judgment and action” (137). Although we do not examine audiences’ reactions to the anti-mtr films we viewed, we do examine protesters’ responses to the mtr activities they see, somewhat as audience members engaged in judgment and action. In these films, because the same protesters appear in multiple films, documentation of their actions seems to adhere to the criteria Karl Heider outlines for ethnographic...