It’s Getting Hot In Here

This past weekend I found myself spending out my time in Price Hall at Virginia Tech,  the University’s oldest building and currently home to the entomology department. Amongst display cases full of bugs and big refrigerators presumably also filled with bugs or bug-related paraphernalia I sat with friends, old and new, to discuss past developments, present status and future plans of the Mountain Justice Campaign to end Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining. MTR is a method of mining coal by which up to a thousand vertical feet are blasted off of Appalachian Mountains and dumped into the adjacent valleys in order to access underlying coal seams. The process is eco-cide and culture-cide destroying not only some of Earth’s most biodiverse temperate forest ecosystems, but also upheaving and displacing those human communities where such mining occurs. It was late in Winter 2004 that folks from the four Appalachian states where MTR occurs decided it was time to do something big in defense of our mountains, our communities, our past and our future. Inspired By SNCC’s Mississippi Summer project in 1964, and Earth First!’s Redwood Summer in the early nineties, Mountain Justice Summer was born. Linking up communities across Appalachia and issuing a call out for volunteers from near and far, we would coordinate a summer of action and organizing to confront the coal industry in our ancient, sacred mountains.
    Some two and a half years later, sitting in a cramped little room with fifteen or twenty other people, I am amazed at the power of caring, knowing and doing. The meetings aren’t parliamentary. The campaign is not funded (and I mean seriously not funded). The people aren’t so-called experts. Mountain Justice is a non-heirarchical, decentralized movement of people who believe in their own power and since it’s inception we have made a tangible change in Appalachia. Not only have we done this by interfering with this or that mine permit, or this or that company’s dealings; for we have challenged and altered the power dynamics between King Coal and the people.
Just yesterday, after the Mountain Justice planning meeting concluded for the weekend, some of those old and new friends and I visited the ruins of a burnt-out cabin up on a steady slope along one side of a wide valley in Giles County. We were there to remember and honor our friend Sue Daniels who just over two years ago died up there on that slope at the hands of another friend whose evident mental illness had grown too severe for a happy ending. It was a big story in the Roanoke Times and the New River Free Press in November of 2004. Just like the inception of Blacksburg’s local Mountain Justice group and the initial actions taken by Sue Daniels and others involved with this group had been one month prior.
After those of us who had known Sue said some words and we all stood around in silence burning insence the group made it’s way back down the mountain except for my good friend Erin and myself. We stayed. Sue Daniels is a big reason that Erin and I are such close friends in the first place. We sat and cried and talked. We related how we each felt about Sue’s impact on our lives and we understood one another and knew that we felt a lot of the same things. She was smart. She was solid. She taught us that rage is a natural and positive emotional response to the rape of life on Earth. She showed us that action is the logistical next step when coming to understand a problem. She challenged us to accept that responsibility and act to our fullest potential.
The beginning of Mountain Justice can in some sense be traced to the death of a child in Wise County Virginia in late August of 2004. Some men expanding a haul road on an A&G Coal Company MTR mine at 3 in the morning dislodged a boulder. The rock rolled down the mountain into a trailer and killed Jeremy Davidson in his bed. The company was fined a maximum of $15,000 for operating without the proper permits – fines that A&G chose to appeal making evident just how much King Coal values a human life. After this tragedy the local community held a march and a vigil. Folks came from all over Appalachia, and orchestrated largely on the gumption of Sue Daniels, this gathering was followed up by a meeting between Earth First!ers from Tennessee and North Carolina and Coal River Mountain Watch, a community group based in WV’s southern coalfields. I suppose the rest is herstory.
And now the present moment…
What came out of the meeting this past weekend? In 2005, MJ’s inaugural summer, we hosted a “traveling horde” of activists who moved throughout Appalachia supporting the work of the local groups throughout the region. While this worked great at gaining media and injecting a major shot of energy into the movement, organizing in the most directly-affected communities was to large-degree overlooked. In 2006 the pendulum swung and the “traveling horde” model was switched out for an intake process that matched volunteers with specific communities in which they would work for the whole summer, a few weeks or whatever time they could give. While this has produced well in terms of cultivating local organizations, our numbers went down in terms of volunteers and public exposure. Now for 2007, we will be combining the best from each model, community-focused organizing projects, but plenty of mass-mobilizations and actions in the cities. In addition to the summer influx of energy, there’s the Mountain Justice Spring Break coming up in March and plans for a 2nd annual ‘Post-Coal Economic Convergence, date TBD (this is a conference focused on building sustainable economic alternatives to coal in Appalachia). In 2007, like the two years before, Mountain Justice Summer will kick-off with a training camp conveniently occurring right around the time most of y’all will be finishing up with exams. (again, exact dates TBD)
Keep checking www.mountainjusticesummer.org for more info on how to get involved in Mountain Justice, and www.climateaction.net/mjsb to plug into the Mountain Justice Sprig Break project.