November 2, 2007
by CommonDreams.org
Mountaintop Removal and Kitty Genovese
by Robert Shetterly
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.
—- Robinson Jeffers
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by
bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world;
the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin
of the soul.
—- Edward Abbey
Last week, as I drove north on I-64 in West Virginia from Beckley toward
Cabin Creek, I was stunned at how beautiful the Appalachian Mountains
appeared. The day was cool, gray, and rainy. Maple and oak and tulip trees
were in full color, glowing gold and rust against the dark green of pine and
hemlock. Tattered scarves of translucent clouds lay draped over the
mountains’ shoulders giving the steep heights an alluring look of exotic,
primeval mystery.
I was not in West Virginia, though, to gawk at the beauty strip of mountains
still standing along the interstate to entice tourists. I had come to see
Mountaintop Removal first hand. As I drove, I found myself remembering Kitty
Genovese. In 1964, 28 year old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death and raped
on a street in Queens. Her murder prompted a national outcry because, as she
screamed for help, no one came to her rescue or even called the police. Why
were Americans so passively uncaring for the plight of their neighbor? As a
young idealistic person, I was nearly as ashamed as if I had failed to act
myself. Of course, I lived in Cincinnati and was somewhat out of earshot.
But I vowed that if ever I were witness to something like that, I would get
involved.
What’s happening in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia to our
mountains is rape and murder. If only the mountains had voices to scream,
the world would quake with the sound. The coal companies, like Nazi doctors
preparing a patient for an experiment, shave the mountains first, clear
cutting the oldest and most productive habitats in our hemisphere.
Frequently they dump entire forests into the valleys and bury them under the
blasted rubble of the former mountains. So hungry are they for the coal,
they don’t even have time to eat the lumber hors d’oeurve.
I was headed for Kayford Mountain, the home of Larry Gibson who has refused
to sell out to the coal companies. The mountains for three hundred and sixty
degrees around Kayford have been removed. Once Larry looked up at the
surrounding peaks. Now he looks 1000 feet down. It’s radical, mountain
mastectomy for as far as the eye can see. Mountaintop Removal is the
surgical mining technique that Massey Energy and Arch Coal and other
companies are inflicting on the Appalachians. The tops of the mountains
(euphemistically called “overburden”) are blown off. Then the
“overburden” becomes “valley fill,” mega tons of rubble shoved over
into the valleys, destroying lush habitat and burying over 1000 miles of
streams. Judy Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch says, “We’re in a war
zone. We’re being bombed. They’re using 3 ½ million pounds of
explosives a day to destroy our mountains.”
People often say that the decimated area looks like the moon. It’s true
that where rounded, tree covered mountains once soared is now ragged, gray
plain. Two million acres blown to bits. An area the size of Delaware. But
nowhere in the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, not yet anyway, would you see a
twenty story machine with an insatiable appetite for coal gnawing at the
stripped ribs of a mountain side. Nor on the moon would you see a cavalcade
of coal trucks, each hauling 120,000 pounds of coal, rumbling through
switchbacks down the flanks of the remaining lower slopes and terrifying the
local drivers. The moon is placid and beautiful except for some garbage and
flags left by the Apollo astronauts. The moon doesn’t have billion-gallon
toxic, coal-slurry ponds precariously contained by earthen dams that can
fail suddenly and bury whole towns under twenty feet of poisonous sludge. (
It’s happened twice.) One is leaking right now above the Marsh Fork
elementary school. The moon isn’t causing incredible rates of asthma and
cancer, isn’t cracking the foundations and walls of poor people’s
houses, poisoning wells, filling their houses and lungs with coal dust, and
forcing them to move. The moon doesn’t have streams full of dead fish. And
the moon doesn’t have devastating floods that wash entire communities away
because all the vegetation and topsoil have been removed. And I don’t
think the moon has 450 of its mountains unaccounted for.
Compared to the destroyed mountains of West Virginia, the moon is a field of
dreams. One might complain that the moon is a little short on culture, but
the coal companies are making sure that southern West Virginia is, too.
It’s much easier for them to do their business if no one’s around. No
witnesses. The people flee for their lives and take the remnants of their
mountain lore, their knowledge of animals and medicinal plants, their
history, and sense of place. Larry Gibson calls it genocide.
So, what does it look like if not the moon? Like the mangled body of a
torture victim. Or, metaphorically, like our Constitution does now to anyone
who once believed in it. The Robinson Jeffers’ quote above comes from his
poem Shine, Perishing Republic. It seems sadly ironic to me that Jeffers
would advise his children that when corruption in the cities overwhelms
them, they can escape to the mountains. Where does one escape to when the
mountains are gone? When the mountains have been ground up for profit? Larry
Gibson says he used to laugh at people taking pictures of the mountains. He
told them, “Why take a picture of a mountain? It’s going to be there
forever.”
Where does Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, think that he is going to
escape to?
There are crimes and there are crimes. Here in Maine, where I live, we often
are appalled by paper company clear cuts. But, given enough time, poplar
will be succeeded by spruce and pine, and the softwoods in turn by maple,
birch, and oak. It’s even sadly comforting to imagine that if the human
species eradicates itself by its insistence on dominating and destroying
nature rather than living in harmony with it, nature will, after a good
scouring by fire and ice, recover. However, the Appalachian Mountains will
not recover. They will not re-grow. When we think of cannibalism, we think
of a ritualistic or desperate practice that is morally repugnant. But,
imagine a cannibal who eats portions of his own body. It’s hardly even a
question of morality. It’s psychotic. Such is the consumption of the
mountains.
Bill McKibben has said that we no longer live in an environment, we live in
an economy. If the economy is your standard for reality, then it is also
your standard of ethics, just as nature would be if you lived in an
environment. If the economy is your reality, your ethic is profit. If your
reality is nature, your ethic is conservation and sustainability. Which
reality will actually determine whether our species survives?
As Judy Bonds says, Mountaintop Removal is a practice with which we cannot
compromise. It must stop. There is no nicer way to destroy the oldest
mountains in the world, mountains that began their lives three hundred
million years ago when North America and Africa were nudged up against each
other.
Many people in the West Virginian and Kentucky have heard the cry of the
mountains and the displaced people. They are courageously fighting King
Coal. Their lives are threatened frequently. Ever since Massey Energy
bulldozed his family cemetery, Larry Gibson has dedicated his life to saving
the mountains. Judy Bonds, a former Pizza Hut waitress, won the Goldman
Environmental Prize in 2002 for her efforts. Visit the website of Coal River
Mountain Watch (
www.crmw.net) and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
(
www.ohvec.org ) to find out what you can do. This is not just their fight.
The U.S. has plans to build 150 more coal burning plants. Coal is the worst
of the fossil fuels for CO2 emissions. The forests being buried in West
Virginia valleys once absorbed CO2 and mitigated climate change.
Kitty Genovese is now screaming in the West Virginia mountains. She’s screaming for our lives as much as hers. Judy Bonds says, “We’re selling our children’s feet to buy our fancy shoes.”
