Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal

Denise Giardina: Mother Jones’s Great-Granddaughter

Denise giardina Mother Jones’s Great-Granddaughter The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. —H. L. Mencken I’m Mother Jones’s daughter and she taught me to stand tall For the rights of working people and justice for us all. —Sue Massek, “Cosby” Denise Giardina is a radical. Perched on the worn couch in her cozy home in Charleston, West Virginia, Giardina doesn’t shy away from this term, a death knell in modern politics. She certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype. Her wardrobe doesn’t consist of military fatigues. There are no pictures of Che Guevara on her walls, no “Lyndon LaRouche for President” fliers lying on her coffee table. That’s just not her style. Instead, Giardina looks to Henry Thoreau, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mother Jones as her guideposts for revolutionary change. Mother Jones is of particular importance to Giardina. Nearly one hundred years ago, Mary Jones was called before the United States Senate after organizing thousands of miners in a series of bloody strikes against the coal operators, most famously in Paint Creek, West Virginia. Senator Nathan Goff, a West Virginia Republican and a longtime supporter of the coal industry, scorned Denise giardina. Photo by Page hamrick. DEnISE gIARDInA  her in front of his colleagues as “the grandmother of all agitators.” Mother Jones smiled. “I hope to live long enough to be the greatgrandmother of all agitators,” she replied with defiance. Giardina is one of these spiritual grandchildren. Now in her fifties, she has been building on Jones’s legacy of agitation against the coal industry since the 1970s. In the 1990s, she became one of the first public figures in Appalachia to publicly oppose mountaintop removal mining; this was an unpopular and risky stand for a writer with “favorite daughter” status who continues to live in the region. Since then, Giardina has been on the forefront of the issue throughout Appalachia, inspiring other artists to fight back. So groundbreaking were her early protests that she is often referred to as “the godmother of the anti–mountaintop removal movement.” The forcefulness of her advocacy sometimes catches her admirers by surprise. A self-admitted introvert, Giardina is a writer more in the tradition of Harper Lee than Truman Capote. Shy and reserved, she doesn’t court publicity, doesn’t enjoy being in front of large crowds, doesn’t relish making small talk at receptions . Instead, her passions come alive in more intimate settings. Her living room invites a level of ease. Hers is a writer’s house, unapologetically lived in and worked in. Books and other objects of importance dominate; a copy of Ian McEwan’s Atonement lies on her end table. Giardina is a West Virginian to the core; a DVD of the recently released movie We Are Marshall sits on a bookcase. Her beloved animals—one dog and three cats—creep around corners and hide under tables at will. Phyllis, her loyal mutt, rests her black-and-white speckled head on Giardina’s lap. “Phyllis is just full of love,” Giardina explains, scratching behind the dog’s ear. “That’s how she got adopted. I went to the pound and all the puppies were playing, but she came and just looked up at me, like, ‘Play with me.’” Such compassion is surely behind her objections against the coal industry; compassion for her people, compassion for her native land. Giardina’s is a Christ-centered identity: “to bind up the SOmEthIng’S RISIng  broken hearts and set at liberty them that are bruised,” in the words of Isaiah. But her theology of mercy has its limits. Out of this river of sympathy runs a steady stream of righteous indignation more akin to Christ’s cleansing the temple. It’s certainly something she’d like to see happen in West Virginia. “I will be as blunt as I can be,” she once wrote in the Charleston Gazette. “Mountaintop removal is evil, and those who support it are supporting evil . . . I puzzle over the modern-day difference between a terrorist and someone who supports mountaintop removal . One destroys with...