EOLIA, Ky. — Sam Gilbert made his living mining coal from the mountains of eastern Kentucky — that’s how he fed his family and paid his bills. He lives in the hills along Rocky Branch on Black Mountain and loves this piece of heaven.
He also sees what’s happening at the top.
Before he retired, Gilbert was a strip miner. Now, in the push to dig the coal out faster, driven in part by consumers’ incessant push for “cheap” energy, the coal companies have speeded up the process by blowing off the tops of mountains to get at the coal seams. It’s a technique, aided by big machinery, known as mountaintop removal. It is transforming the landscape in these hills.
On an overcast Friday afternoon, Gilbert — tall and lean in his blue jeans — stood in his neighbors’ front yard, leaning against a tree, telling visitors from Yale University and from Crescent Hill Church in Louisville about his efforts to take on the coal company and protect his property. This spring, Gilbert and his wife, Evelyn, pushed elected officials from Letcher Fiscal Court to block Cumberland River Coal Company from dumping debris from the top of Black Mountain down the creek behind their house, and also into another nearby creek.
The Gilberts and their allies from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (www.kftc.org), a grassroots group working on justice issues, prevailed this time — but stopped the dumping of mining debris into these two creeks only. The debris will be diverted to places where the coal company had already been at work.
Across Appalachia the blasting continues. Trees and vegetation are bulldozed, leaving unsalvaged timber. Boulders and rock tumble down into the valleys, raising the dust that covers the houses. The blasting cracks building foundations, the sulphur and lead from the mining process leach into stream and wells.
“Coal companies look upon us as being throwaway people, people who don’t count,” because they can’t flex enough political muscle, Gilbert said that day.
“I would love to drive up here on this mountain, and see it the way it was three years ago.”
Environmental learning
For the dozen people who came to Black Mountain from Crescent Hill Church, this was an “environmental learning tour,” an opportunity to see the impact of mountaintop mining on eastern Kentucky up close, in a part of the state these Presbyterians don’t often visit.
The leaders of this environmental tour included Sharman Chapman-Crane, a Presbyterian elder who has lived in eastern Kentucky for more than 20 years and works for the Mennonite Central Committee, and Duane Beachey, a Mennonite Central Committee service worker on a five-year assignment in the area.
It’s also a journey made in recognition of some other realities:
“¢ Increasingly, people of faith are speaking out about environmental issues, with the push coming from both evangelicals and progressives. In May 2007, for example, a group of religious leaders issued an “Interfaith Statement on Mountaintop Removal,” saying in part that “care of creation represents a common thread for all people of faith.”
For Chapman-Crane, this land is covered with memories. It’s where she got married, raised her son, planted her gardens, found her place. To her, the devastation of mountaintop removal is to some extent a spiritual or a moral issue. As she sees the mountains being bulldozed, she asks, “What is happening to their souls that they can do this?”
“¢ Mountaintop removal isn’t a concern just for eastern Kentucky. The water polluted in that area feeds into the water supply in nearby regions. Little of the coal mined in eastern Kentucky stays there; it’s shipped across the country and sometimes overseas, to help fuel ever-increasing demands for electricity. One of the questions front-and-center for the Crescent Hill group was considering the role they play as consumers in contributing to environmental degradation.
“¢ Time is short. In some Kentucky counties, already 20 percent or more of the mountaintops have been sheared off, according to Chapman-Crane. With a heavy rain, there’s “no topsoil, no trees, no vegetation to hold the mountain back.” The coal industry offers other perspectives — viewing mountaintop removal more as an economic opportunity and less of a threat — and there’s no question this is a controversial issue. But the time for informed public policy debate is now.
“¢ Mission trips can be short-term and close to home, making them possible for people with limited budgets and limited time. This one involved four days, a rented van and nights spent in a renovated dormitory at the old Stuart Robinson School, which was founded in the early 1900s as a Presbyterian boarding school and now is being renovated as a retreat center called Calvary Campus.
The genesis of the trip also involved a sabbatical that Crescent Hill’s pastor, Jane Larsen-Wigger, took in the summer of 2006, assisted by funding from the Lilly Endowment’s clergy renewal program. Larsen-Wigger used Lilly funding to revisit two places that helped to shape her early sense of vocation and call — Guatemala, where she worked as a teacher in her early 20s, and eastern Kentucky, where she spent a semester in college studying the region.
The Lilly grant also provided funds for the congregation to be involved in the journey. Last summer, while Larsen-Wigger was away, Crescent Hill invited ministers from Appalachia to preach for six Sundays and a pastor from Guatemala for another six weeks. And this summer Larsen-Wigger has organized two mission trips: an intergenerational trip to Guatemala, and this environmental learning tour.
On the drive into the mountains, it didn’t take long to feel the touch of coal on this land.
The Crescent Hill group made a quick pit stop for gasoline and snacks on the side of a winding road. As they stood outside the van, coal truck after coal truck passed by — about one every minute, barreling down the hill. Outside the gates of the Stuart Robinson school runs a railroad track on which, at dusk, the trains passing by carry car after car after car of black coal.
“Think about how voracious we are,” said Marian McClure, one of the Crescent Hill group, reflecting on how Americans depend so deeply on the electricity this coal produces. “At a certain point,” McClure said, “I feel disgusted with ourselves and our culture.”
As the group moved along, the information piled up about energy use, job creation in an economically stressed area, lack of education, globalization, and interdependence.
“The more you know,” said Crescent Hill member Patti Marcum, “the more questions you have.”
Controversial questions
Chapman-Crane speaks with obvious pain of how the debate over mountaintop removal has strained relationships in her home community. In some cases, old friends are not speaking — at least not about this. She understands why. Some families rent homes on coal company land, some have relatives who work in the mines, some fear retaliation. Some see coal mining as essential to the economy here, in a place where good jobs are scarce.
“You defend what’s putting food on the table,” she said.
“We defend it with our own behavior,” Marcum said, when we expect to have energy inexpensively and to use it at will.
The poverty of this area is evident. Trailers and rusted cars line the back roads. People try to sell their piles of used clothing from the open trunks of their cars.
So was the faith of the people — the roads wind past many churches, cinder block and wood, Old Regular Baptist and Regular Baptist and Church of God and Pentecostal and Presbyterian.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth has a lot to say about the coal industry, like “King Coal is crippling Kentucky economically, culturally, politically and environmentally.”
But they also speak more broadly about organizing people around the idea of hope — hope in a better world and a future that is not dependent on coal. Spend time with them, and the conversation loops around to the ideas of building a more diverse and sustainable economy; requiring accountability for the coal industry; convincing consumers to use less energy and rely more on renewable sources of energy; building political power through alliances of people here and elsewhere who are willing to speak up, building strength one by one.
Some see coal mining as essential to the region’s economy.
But Kentuckians for the Commonwealth points out that the employment in the coal industry has dropped steadily over the last two decades. With the shift from underground mining to strip mining and now to mountaintop removal, coal employment in the region is less than half now of what it was in 1980, while coal production has not declined nearly as fast.
Much of the profit plumbed from these mountains — and much of the coal itself, some of which is shipped to China for $125 a ton — leaves this area entirely.
What’s left are scars on the land. Sludge ponds sometimes collapse, sending a wall of black goo down the hill. Some children struggle with chronic asthma. More than 1,000 miles of streambeds show signs of the mining debris dumped into them. Well water is often unsafe to drink. Flattened mountaintops supposedly “reclaimed” grow little except fescue and Russian olive trees.
The coal companies “take off the whole entire top of the mountain and push it over” into the valleys, Beachey said. What’s left, he said, is basically gravel, often inhospitable ground.
Sometimes, the mining companies take care to buffer the mines along main highways with trees, or post the land with “private property” signs, so people can’t come see what’s happening.
But when you can see mountaintop mining, there’s nothing subtle about it.
The whole top of the forest is gone.
Beachey speaks of the long history of powerlessness and corruption in eastern Kentucky. “If we discovered coal suddenly in another state,” he said, “they would never agree to this set-up.”
Longtime residents spoke plainly in a film about mountaintop removal the Crescent Hill group watched in Whitesburg.
“Coal’s not our savior,” says Teri Blanton, of Madison County, whose father was a coal miner.
Another woman said during that same film: “Everybody go home, get on your computers and see how much hell you can raise.”
Natural glory
Part of the environmental tour included hikes to places that had not been disturbed, to give a sense of the forests and the rivers in all their glory. At Bad Branch Falls, a clear stream drops over the cliff, its cool spray on the face a reward for hiking up in the heat over boulders and logs, through a forest filled with tulip poplar and rhododendron and much else.
In the evenings, the Crescent Hill group dipped their toes into music: dancing the two-step and flat-dance to a bluegrass band one night, and the Virginia reel at the Carcassonne Community Center the next.
The journey to Carcassonne, up a narrow mountain road to find the renowned square-dance caller Charlie Whitaker and a fiddle band waiting at the top, was more than worth it. The local people, well aware that city folk were joining their fun, could not have been more welcoming or gracious.
There’s a sense of place and of peace in these mountains that draws people in — Sam Gilbert spoke of many of his neighbors living on “heritage land.”
And some city people feel it too.
Mary Love of Crescent Hill grew up in east Tennessee, and her soul still longs for the mountains.
Nearly “every vacation I’ve taken since I was 11 was in the Appalachian range,” said Crescent Hill member Leslie Townsend. “I feel it’s my home away from home.”
Sharman’s husband, Jeff Chapman-Crane, is an artist — an exquisite painter who often chooses as his subject local people, grandparents, children, a boy holding his father’s hand. He also has created a sculpture called “The Agony of Gaia” — a woman on her side, her hands covering her face in embarrassment, her guts being carved out by bulldozers, the personification, he says, of Mother Earth being raped by the mining process.
“This is not a battle we can win by ourselves,” he told the group from Crescent Hill. “We’re in the middle of it — it’s part of our daily lives. But it’s going to take people from all over” to make things change.
