17

Mountains Made Low

The New River is one of the oldest rivers in the world and one of the few, other than the Nile, that moves from south to north on the globe. It curves through mountains covered with thick greenery that slants up on either side, and in the spring and summer months professional river guides steer groups of four to twelve tourists straddling bright colored inner tubes through the rapids. After I left Reverend Day near the mining memorial in Sago, I drove south to meet up with some friends in Fayetteville to take a trip down the river. Before my group set off, my friend Greg asked a group of guides why they had chosen their occupation. I was expecting them to mention the danger and the rush of adrenaline or the beauty of working outdoors. One nicknamed Chicken shrugged his shoulders: “You can be a river guide or a coal miner, there’s not much else.”

I dug my paddle into the current. Feeling the push against the muscles in my arm unleashed something gutsy and raw. I am in mountain country. My body awakened. I am alive—this thought reasserting itself with each stroke. I remembered how, along the River Napo in Ecuador, the guide had let me ride through the rapids bronco style, gripping a rope on the front of the raft and balancing with my arm raised high over my head. He had turned over the guide’s oar and let me steer our group through a section of the river. One of the older women crouched low in the tube because she was afraid I would tip us. Chicken had a wild look in his eye, but I knew not even he would turn over the paddle to me—too much liability.

The landscape along the New River was surprisingly similar to the River Napo, tawny colored boulders and trees wound with vines. Forty feet up from the river, a railroad track was just visible, carrying cars full of coal from sites beyond the mountains. The smoke rising from the engine seemed lyrical on first glance, but the mines from which they traveled were likely strip mines.

Erin Thomas, 2007

The New River

Company owned roads block pleasure-seekers who come to camp or raft in West Virginia from witnessing anything but a pristine image of the land. In such dense forest, it takes only few miles of wildness to cover the destruction from the mountaintop removal that is in process behind. This, according to activist and local resident Julia Bonds, is West Virginia’s “best kept dirty secret.”

The New River is like the River Napo in more than just appearance. Ecuador has begun to market jungle tours and rafting to protect its rainforests against the intrusion of oil companies who drill, dig, and send pipeline through the forest, a process that makes it impossible for the local natives to continue their way of life. This sort of industrial invasion is something I tend to associate with communities in developing countries, not in the United States. But in both West Virginia and Ecuador, it is either eco-touring or fossil fuels—there isn’t much else in terms of larger-scale economics. The primary jungle around the River Napo is reputedly the most biologically diverse rainforest in the world, and the growth that blankets much of the mountains and hills in West Virginia is the most diverse hardwood forest. Classified as mixed mesophytic, these woods support over eighty species of trees, where most others sport only two to three. The foliage that blankets West Virginia is the oldest in the United States, and some ecologists believe it is the “mother forest” from which tree species of the eastern temperate zone have spread.

Mountaintop removal (MTR), a practice opposed by two-thirds of West Virginians, begins with clear cutting the tree cover, decimating the plant and animal species that live within. The bedrock is blasted with explosives. In West Virginia, this averages three hundred pounds a day, creating a much larger detonation than the shots used to blast coal in my grandfather’s day. Clouds of coal dust rain down on towns; the foundations of houses and wells crack; boulders are launched into the nearby communities, and occasionally through roofs. After the earth is broken up, draglines—tractors up to twenty stories tall with buckets capable of scooping one hundred tons of soil—remove the overburden, the technical term for up to six hundred feet of mountain that lie between the miners and the coal seam, typically not more than a few feet thick. The removed soil is dumped into valley fills, blocking streams and poisoning water downstream in a state where a third of the residents still draw groundwater. Employing fewer miners and operating above ground, MTR is much safer than underground mines such as Sago, extracting coal with fewer immediate human casualties. Historically, graveyards mark mining sites where all other indications of mining activity have ceased, reminding us of the human cost of carbon energy. In the case of mountaintop removal, the graveyard is the lasting impacts on the land.

Appalachia is a Native American word for “endless mountain range,” a term used to describe the land as well as the folk culture that inhabits it. Over two hundred years old, this culture was first developed by either the Scotch-Irish or London’s outcasts—the tale varies—and was added to by later immigrations of Germans, Poles, Italians, and other ethnicities recruited by the mines. Being removed, or separate from the mainstream, characterizes Appalachians, who are independent and close to their neighbors and the land that surrounds them. Although in some ways estranged from the rest of America by their culture, location, and mistrust of outsiders, they self-identify as Americans more readily than any other group of people in the United States.

Beaten brass stars adorn many houses snugged into mountain valleys. Emerging off a mountain road, I spotted a tin roof painted to resemble Old Glory, a proclamation of patriotism to any fowl or aircraft above. At a campground a week before the Fourth of July, my Appalachian neighbors had already begun their celebration with music, laughter, and fireworks into the wee hours of the morning—my humble plea for taking it down a notch resulted in a drive-by bottle hurling directed at my tent as the party broke up for the night and an injunction to “go get a cappuccino.” It was possible I had violated some regional cultural norm of courtesy. In any case, I was an outsider telling them how things should be done. In the context of the many years of abuse by coal companies, I understood why they were wary of strangers. In this case, the fatal flaw of the Appalachian people has not been mistrust, but trusting outsiders too well.

Marfork Hollow, Blair, White Oak, and Kayford Mountain are names of towns destroyed or partially destroyed by mountaintop removal. In these towns, fathers passed their land on to their sons, and their sons built homesteads, generations living side by side, preserving their traditions of living off the forest. Planting, gathering, and hunting follow a yearly schedule. In winter lands lie fallow. March is planting season and brings wild greens, maple syrup, and ramps. Ramps, or wild leeks, are harvested in the spring with such local zeal that they have their own festivals in towns across the Appalachian Range, where plates are piled high with ramps and other local foods, such as potatoes, fried apples, beans, and cornbread. Summer is berry and bass fishing season. Falls brings the harvest not only of gardens, but also of wild nuts—hazel, hickory, and butternut. “Gathering” in the Appalachian forest is usually for personal use, but there are a number of products harvested for profit; among them is wild ginseng, called seng by locals.

Ginseng is a plant that has never been domesticated and must grow wild or in circumstances that simulate a hardwood forest. It takes five to seven years to mature and will only grow under specific conditions of shade and moisture. Those who can follow the signs of Solomon’s seal, cohosh, wild ginger, snakeroot, and spleenwort to a seng plant poking up out of the mulch, sporting its red berries, can earn an average of $450 per pound of dried root. In 1994, the year for which the most recent statistics are available, West Virginia exported a total of 18,698 dried pounds. American ginseng is highly sought after in China due to its cool yin quality, and collectively the industry earns seventy million dollars per year in exports.

But, like many indigenous cultures before them, the Appalachian people are being driven off the land. Although state policies of supplying natives with diseased blankets and outright extermination are considered shadows of the past, the coal companies are backed by nearly every politician in West Virginia. In towns as close as one hundred feet from MTR sites, periodic dynamite blasts crack the cement foundations of houses and wells. Coats of dust accumulate on porches, and once clear mountain streams swirl darkly with coal sludge, topsoil, and silt from the overburden. Behind homes, the forest that once supported the seasonal gathering of wild honey and berries is obliterated. After the surrounding natural areas are destroyed, the coal companies often go after the towns. Some residents finally sell out, and some of the more stubborn are driven out by the courts, which in large part support the coal companies. In 2006, Patriot Coal wrangled with courts to buy out the Caudill family property hiers, who lived in Laurel Branch just outside of Hobet 21, which at the time covered over twelve thousand acres and was the largest strip mining project in the world. When some members of the Caudill family refused to sell, Massey contended that “coal mining was the highest and best use of the property.”

The superlative highest reveals language usage about coal particular to West Virginians. Appalachian folk have a deep sense of spirituality. Among West Virginians, 86 percent identify themselves as Christian; consequently, in terms of what should or should not be done with mining, God’s stance is invoked frequently. “The good Lord put coal in these mountains for us to take advantage of it,” claims William R. Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, as if this is the final word. But this is not what many of the residents believe. Judy Bonds compares the physical rape of the land to a spiritual rape: “These mountains are in our soul. That’s what they’re stealing from us. They’re stealing our soul.”

Mountaintop removal began just a few years after 1971, when the West Virginian legislature, spurred by broad citizen support and activism, nearly outlawed strip mining. This “strip mining on steroids” was developed as the most cost and labor efficient method at getting to the deep deposits of low sulfur coal in the Appalachians. Since then, fifty thousand acres of land have been decimated, 1,200 miles of stream covered, and 2,500 peaks destroyed. Environmentalists predict that in twenty years, half of the mountain peaks in West Virginia will be leveled.

Political protections against MTR consist of the Clean Water Act of 1977 and the Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act of 1977, both passed under the Carter administration. The Clean Water Act prevents industries from dumping waste into waterways and requires them to obtain a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers for any kind of “fill.” The Mining Reclamation and Control Act, commonly referred to as SMCRA, requires companies to obtain permits before surface mining and to place a bond to cover the cost of reclamation. According to this law, the land is supposed to be restored to an “approximate original contour”—defined as within fifty feet of the initial elevation—and to be stabilized with grasses and shrubs. Streams are also protected by the stream buffer rule, where no land can be strip mined within one hundred feet of a stream.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, companies largely ignored these regulations, and inspectors turned their heads until a lawsuit was filed by the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy against the Army Corps of Engineers for giving permits to MTR companies who dumped waste into streams. A federal judge backed the environmental group’s complaint, thus threatening the existence of all MTR sites in the Appalachians. At this point, the Clinton administration stepped in: the environmentalists agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the promise of tighter federal scrutiny over mining projects.

On February 2, 2005, President George W. Bush proclaimed the following before Congress and the nation: “To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home—including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology—from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough: I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.”

Listening on the radio, I latched onto the expressions “environmentally responsible energy” and “alternative” and was surprised to find myself in a rare moment of agreement with the former president. Examining the statement later, I saw that little pointed to what I considered alternative. “Alternative” and “environmentally responsible” meant one thing: coal.

During the 2004 presidential race, the coal lobby donated $1.5 million to the GOP, and the Bush administration faithfully chipped away at the protections in the Clean Water Act and SMCRA by adding exemptions and altering words. The refuse prohibited in the Clean Water Act was clarified as “fill,” paving the way for companies to gain permits to dump the overburden into streams. The stream buffer rule was emended to suggest that companies use “the best technology currently available to prevent, to the extent possible,” polluting streams when they fill them. Companies are currently allowed to dig ditches to replace the covered streams, washing silt and toxic chemicals downstream, where fish have been discovered to contain high levels of poisonous selenium.

The diverted runoff has caused flooding that, during the particularly bad flood years of 2001–2, killed fifteen West Virginians and damaged over $150 million in property. The reclamation required by SMCRA usually consists of spraying hydroseed: a mixture of seed, water, fertilizer, tackifier (glue), and green wood fiber mulch. This is just a step above green paint—concerned locals assert that hydroseed would sprout on a picnic table. A popular treatment for commercial and roadside areas, hydroseed precludes the possibility of trees ever growing. Although it has been suggested that the topsoil, dumped bottom first into valley fills, be saved to be spread back over reclaimed land, companies argue that this solution is too expensive.

Under SMCRA, due to the impossibility of truly restoring the MTR sites to their original contours, mining companies were offered a blanket exemption, provided they converted the land to public use. Over the past thirty years, out of MTR’s fifty thousand leveled acres, reclamation efforts have culminated in the regional contribution of flat land for two high schools, two golfing greens, a jail, an FBI complex, and a hardwood flooring plant. Blair Gardner, legal counsel for Arch Coal, describes these reclamation efforts in typical West Virginian rhetoric: “I believe in God, so I am reluctant to say we are improving what the Creator made. But more pertinent is, are we doing something inherently good? I think we are.”

According to the Bush administration, the loosening of restrictions on MTR was consistent with a policy that sought to gain American independence from foreign oil, ensuring a steady supply of cheap, domestic energy. And although the Obama administration has promised to regulate mountaintop removal, it has not yet removed the wording changes in the Clean Water Act. Consequently, powering the nation’s energy needs come at the sacrifice of one of the America’s most unique endemic cultures and the self-sufficiency of some of our poorest citizens. But, as one of West Virginia’s top coal CEOs reportedly explained, lounging in his office chair behind a sheet of bulletproof glass, it all comes down to the bottom line.

West Virginian politicians know this well. During his terms of state governor, Joe Manchin changed all the welcome signs on the borders of West Virginia from “West Virginia. Wild and Wonderful” to “Open for Business.” Coal profits from mountaintop removal only benefit a privileged few—1 percent of West Virginia’s workforce makes a decent living as a result, but the bulk of the cash lands in the hands of the legislature and out of state companies.

In 1981, the Appalachian Alliance released the Appalachian Land Ownership Study, which revealed the startling level of displacement in land ownership: “Of the 13 million acres included in the survey, nearly 75 percent of the surface acres and 80 percent of the minerals were absentee owned. Forty percent of the land and 70 percent of the mineral rights were held by corporations—mostly coal.” Because state governments in the Appalachian region discount property taxes for extractive companies, 53 percent of this land, which is held by the companies, generates only 13 percent of the property taxes. This results in underfunded schools and municipal services, as well as communities with high poverty rates, low median incomes, low high school graduation rates, and high levels of substance abuse.

“In simple terms it is either fatalism or the coal industry,” Appalachian sociologist Helen Lewis asserted about the cause of poverty in this region. The poverty of extraction-based economies has recently caught the attention of economists, and Harvard University researchers Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner identified a relationship between natural resource-based exports and the decline of GDP in 1995. The only way that this trend can be mitigated is by an investment in education and a transparent political process, but dirty politics practiced on a population with relatively low educational levels is leverage that West Virginian coal barons have been unwilling to give up.

Massey Energy Company CEO Don Blankenship is a West Virginian boy, raised and educated in the state. Like the Crawshays of Merthyr Tydfil, he rose from humble origins and built himself a “castle” on top of a local mountain from the spoils of his industry. Combined with its subsidiaries, Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the world and dominates the coal business in West Virginia. Although he is the highest paid coal executive in the country, Blankenship, unlike the Welsh ironmasters, has built no schools or hospitals. Instead, Massey’s culpabilities include having the worst fatality rate for miners and the top ranking for violating environmental standards.

In order to preserve his position of power, Blankenship vacationed with West Virginia’s Supreme Court Justice Elliott “Spike” Maynard and poured $3.5 million into a fake nonprofit, “And for the Sake of Kids,” to unseat Justice Warren McGraw, who ruled against Massey Energy. Journalist Michal Tomasky wrote that Blankenship was “famous in West Virginia as the man who successfully bought himself a state supreme court justice in 2004 and then tried to buy himself the state legislature, failing spectacularly at the latter effort.” Few civilian lawsuits have won against the coal baron.

The Army Corps of Engineers, the Surface Mining Board, the Department of Environmental Protection, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been lax in defending the law, while the federal government has chipped away at their environmental protections. Appalachia remains one of the least educated and poorest regions in the United States, and MTR robs the people of access to the knowledge of the mountains, which has sustained them for more than two hundred years.

To the rest of us who neither mine nor profit from coal, coal means energy. The industry often claims that the United States is the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” touting the statistic that we have sufficient resources to last for 250 years at current energy consumption rates. When we speak of the energy crises, in terms of coal we’ll most likely make it though the next century. Excluding the concerns of climate change and mining mortality rates, there is still one major obstacle to exploiting this national bounty. This coal, threaded in seams through the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains, lies under natural areas and towns. It lies under people’s lives.