I have been aware of strip mining, in one form or another, since I was about 8. That was when they brought the dozers into the Phesant Fields next to the homeplace, to doze up earthen dams, to hold and filter the sludge dredged from the bottom of Mud Creek. So that those who had keeled sailboats and big draggin' inboard/outboards could navigate the creek without having trouble. The property was being re-zoned too, for housing development.
My first stab at public speaking was over that. I was so upset! Mother nutured me, guided me, and when I froze, at my time to stand up to tell the Board of Supervisors about my problem, she gently pushed me into the asile, and quietly said, "It will be ok. Just tell them what you told me." And I did.
Although the dredging went on, it was several decades before they built the McMansions. It was long after I hit the road.
Let me tell you the tale of 25 years after that, and then the one about 45 years after.
Fast forward........
I rambled, oh yeah, then settled in the Appalachians, right on the edge of the Coal. The deep and the stripable both.
1973 or thereabouts. I hooked up with some of the early
Appalshop folks. It was a wild and crazy time. One night, a bunch of us, and
Mutsmag, took ourselves up on Pine Mountain, on the boarder of Virginia and Kentucky.
We ambled around the outcrops, in the partial moonlight night. We were Owls, and All That is Nocturnal, and it was Good. A couple of us might have been spoken to by God, but if we were, we didn't talk much about it, we just incorporated it into our lives. What little lives some of us had left.
It got toward dawn, and Lice said "We've got to go!" I said, "Let's wait. It's almost time for it to get light, let's wait." I looked out into the darkness, where dawn would break over the incredible lands of Eastern Kentucky.
There was silence. And then Lice said, with this strange choking sound in his voice, that I had never heard before....." You don't want to see it. Believe me. This is my home. I was raised out there. You don't want to see it."
Some years later, I saw my first strip mine. At that time, I was told that under 10 percent of the surface of Eastern Kentucky was gone. GONE.
At this point in time, in West Virginia, it is estimated that 15-25 percent of the mountains no longer exist. GONE, Not coming back. EVER.
First the trees
Then the soil, the rocks, the rest of the life...then the explosions, the dust, rolling boulders, the roaring coal trucks. Poison water, and the death of Communities. I had no voice, and so was silent.
Fast forward.
I learned from faithfull that there is a contingent of people who will be heard by the United Nations. These are my Brothers and Sisters, my friends.....forget that we've never met. These are the displaced, much like the Katrina folks....only it has happened to them for 50 years. Floods? Yeah Boy!.
Take a virtual flyover of MTR.
Toxic waves of the contents of holding ponds with old dams a breakin',
Jack Spadaro is an expert on coal slurry impoundments, and was on the federal investigation team that examined the Martin County disaster. It was a 1972 slurry dam accident at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia that has defined Spadaro's career in mine safety. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed and 4,000 left homeless in that accident.
...boulders rolling down what used to be the mountainside, and fear of being killed in your bed.
Maria Gunnoe lives in Bob Whites in Boone County, WV. Since the mountain behind her house was torn down, her children sleep with their clothes on when it rains, afraid the mountain is going to come down on them; they have been flooded five times since the year 2000. What were once clean streams now flow around her house with toxic run-off from the mountain top removal sites.
Maria Gunnoe is one of the citizens going to the UN. The link above also contains some other bios on who is getting this chance to be heard.
They've been yelling as hard as they can. Keeping the tragedies documented....
Chaining themselves to dozers, while the elderly do all they can, even if it's only sitting on a lawn chair on a bridge. (A little cheat here, this is actually a pic from a timber protest in the west. I like to pretend that is me in that chair. It could be any little old Appalachian grannie!)
So now we have a chance to speak to the world. Will you help?
I have 2 envelopes sitting on my desk. There's five bucks, and a penny, goin' in each one.
One is to the fund for Valle Vidal.
One is to President Fire Thunder.
I am writing a new one out as soon as I finish this little rant, and get it posted.
To OVEC, tagged "for UN trip".
This May, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development will meet in New York to discuss international energy strategy. Most government officials continue to ignore the atrocities of mountaintop removal, coal sludge impoundments, and underground injections of sludge, so it is up to the people to let the world know the harsh realities of an economy built on "cheap" electricity.
The United Nations needs to know that we cannot have sustainable communities without the mountains on which we rely for clean water, clean air, our health and our children's futures. It is the people of Appalachian coal mining communities who are most immediately paying the true costs of coal, and so...
The first Coalfield Delegation to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, a group of inspiring coalfield residents, is prepared to take the truth to the UN, but we need your support if we are going to make it. Please help us raise the $7,000 so we can get to New York this May and ensure that the international debate on sustainable energy development includes the voice of the people of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
Send checks to OVEC, PO Box 6753, Huntington, WV 25773-675. Be sure to write "UN delegation" in the memo line of the check.
I can't afford this, but I can't not afford it either. I want my people to speak to the world. I want to help send them to do it. I hope you do too.
I am finding my voice. Practice makes perfect, they say. Sometimes, particularly on sunny Sunday mornings, I subscribe to the old saying from New England though. "There's good, and there's good enough. And that's good enough."
Inspired by faithfulls excellent diary of several weeks ago.
Nemaste.