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

Introduction

Introduction From Chestnut Strip you can see forever. The mountaintops of southern West Virginia rise toward the horizon like waves on the ocean. Butch, my guide for the day, is a member of the United Mine Workers who has worked underground for more than twenty-five years. Butch worked the morning shift before our Saturday afternoon meeting, when he took me to the place where he used to hunt grouse. Standing on the flat, grassy plateau left after the mountain was strip mined, we watched the slow but ceaseless movement of a dragline nearly ten miles away. Moving 100 tons of rubble with each scoop, the dragline performs mountaintop removal coal mining. Staring at the gray scar on the horizon, Butch told a story. “One Sunday afternoon in Da Nang, South Vietnam, all at once it sounded like freight trains coming over top of our head, and everything around us started blowing up, and huddled in a bunker in the dark I said, ‘God let me get back to West Virginia.’ And then when I got back here and I found out what they was doing, strip mining and stuff . . . ever since the first time I first realized this is what they get away with, this is what they do . . . this [makes] me want to puke.” * * * Living in Appalachia’s coalfields is an experience you feel. Natural forces like the cold of winter and the stifling humidity of summer, the beating rain and the rising river go hand in hand with the human activities that shape and reshape the mountains. Wind rushing off a speeding coal truck slams against an old coal camp house. The ground trembles under the force of distant explosive blasts. My spleen vibrates with the engine of a loaded coal train straining in the predawn. 2 Introduction The visceral experience of living in the coalfields extends far beyond the actual body. Natives of the region often describe an attachment to the land in romantic but vague terms. When someone delves deeper into the special relationship between the people and the land, they often make the connection in terms of bodies. Author Ann Pancake described the Appalachian Mountains as having a “closer likeness to a human body than any landscape I’ve ever seen.” Over the generations, people have come to know parts of the land and the tools they use to work it like they know parts of their own body. The body of landscape, memory, and experience comes alive in the stories people tell about life in the mountains. The offense taken by many residents to mountaintop removal coal mining also has a visceral referent, even beyond Butch’s urge to puke. Coal executives frequently call it hyperbole stirred up by a few extremists and outside agitators . But locally, people often equate the profound violation of the social and physical landscape with rape. Towns that once flourished on Coal’s bounty now languish before its insatiable appetite. Whereas they once housed and sustained the legions of workers that made coal mining possible, these same communities now stand in the way of a largely automated earthmoving process . As companies buy people’s property and make life unbearable for those who will not move, communities experience a gradual, creeping death. Dazed and emaciated, the remains of towns struggle to understand how the once life-giving fuel metastasized into a creeping killer. * * * As a case study, this book is about mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people like Butch have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, this book is about the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Often conflicts of this sort are associated with globalization. In this case, the term globalization may be counterintuitive. Globalization typically conjures images of closed factories and jobs flowing out of the United States to so-called export processing zones in Latin America or Asia. Unlike manufactured goods, coal cannot be moved to another country for mining and processing. Still, the same economic, political, and social forces have reshaped the Appalachian coal industry to create conditions similar to those sought by manufacturers over seas. The process and its driving forces are the same, even if no national boundaries are crossed. I prefer to analyze mountaintop removal as the logical product of neoliberalism—one of the main ideas that has...