Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice

11. "I Want My Great-Great Grandchildren to Be Able to Live on the Earth!": The Legacy of

chapter 11 “I Want My Great-GreatGrandchildren to Be Able to Live on this Earth!” The Legacy of the Courageous Julia “Judy” Bonds August 27, 1952 – January 3, 2011 Judy Bonds on Kayford Mountain, August 2006. A moment before I took this photograph, Judy reached down and picked up the handful of leaves and soil shown in her hand. Bringing the handful to her nose, she inhaled deeply, exclaiming over the wonderful smell of the earth on her beloved West Virginia mountains. Photo by the author. Winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2003 and appearing in dozens of films, books, and articles, Julia “Judy” Bonds is one of the most well-known faces of the anti–mountaintop-removal movement. The Appalachian activist family suffered a heart-breaking loss on January 3, 2011, when Judy died of cancer. Hundreds—if not thousands—grieved her passing across the nation. Fierce and strong, brave and proud, Judy tirelessly defended her mountains, her community, her heritage, and her family from the injustices of the coal industry. Judy lived in the community of Rock Creek in Raleigh County, West Virginia. I had the honor of formally interviewing her in July and August 2006. As a testament to the incredible impact she had on so many people, I have also included excerpts from her memorial service in Beckley, West Virginia, which was held on January 15, 2011. We have lost a brilliant and beautiful light in this world with Judy’s passing. From Coal Miner’s Daughter to Environmental Justice Activist I was just a regular person minding my business. I’m used to coal mining—I had an intimate relationship with the coal-mining industry. My father and grandfather, my brother was a coal miner, cousins, my ex-husband was a coal miner. They’ve been mining at Marfork—my homeplace—for forever. When Marfork Coal Company and Massey [Energy] moved in [in the 1990s], I thought it was just going to be a regular old [underground] coal mine. [After the mining began], I started to notice my neighbors above me there moving out. I noticed coal trucks twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They built a helicopter landing pad all of, oh, I’d say six hundred yards from my house, and there was coal dust all over everything. The way [the coal companies] treated the people that lived in Marfork Holler and in Packsville and up in Birch Holler—they wanted people out of there. They bought out a few people and gave them good prices, and then they just ran over top of everybody else. Every morning I’d get up, I’d see dust all over my cars, it was all over our house, it was in everything. My grandson started to get sicker and sicker with asthma and childhood diseases, mostly colds and things like that. And more and more of my neighbors were moving out. The train started loadin’ [coal] right in front of our house. It loaded so loud, it shook our whole trailer—it set off alarm clocks. Like I said, coal dust was everywhere. And I was just frustrated. I made a phone call to a lawyer to see if I couldn’t get them to cover [up] the coal trucks, to cover the railroads, to keep the railroad cars from loading at certain hours of the day. The lawyer told me, “Well, Ms. Bonds, this is a coal-mining town.” I said, “Well, Mr. Atkins, you ain’t the lawyer I’m lookin’ for, I reckon.” legacy of the courageous Julia “Judy” bonds 149 My cousin Micky told me, “You need to look at the water, they’re starting to get black water spills.” There was fish kills—there was two fish kills up there. My grandson was standing in the stream when one of the fish kills happened. He was six years old, standing in a stream full of dead fish. He asked me, “What’s wrong with all these fish?” That was the stream that my family had been going to for generations. [Massey Energy] blasted out the side of the hill [above our community], and I remember watchin’ my grandson playing in the alley there the day they blasted off the hill. And when the first blast sound went off, he dropped his toys and ran in the house. I had been around mining all my...