Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (32 page)

4
. According to
Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
, by Cynthia M. Duncan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), dog mines are “small, often unsafe operations that pay low wages and have no benefits” (p. 31). Appalachian lore has it that the name comes from the fact that miners in such mines “worked like dogs.”

5
. Jay Gould was a leading railroad developer, financier, and speculator of the late 1800s who is often named as one of the nineteenth century's “robber barons.”

6
. Polyacrylamide, according to Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, is “a polyamide polymer…derived from acrylic acid.” According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), polyacrylamide has been proven to cause cancer in rats but has not as yet been proven to do so in humans. However, the NCI points out that “the relationship between acrylamide and cancer has not been studied extensively in humans.” A 1997 study found that polyacrylamide can degrade under normal environmental conditions, causing it to release acrylamide, which is a known nerve toxin.

7
.
Squidbillies
is a wildly popular series of cartoon shorts that currently runs on the Cartoon Network. The network's Web site describes the show this way: “A family of inbred squids tear the ass out of all creation in the North Georgia mountains. It's not all drinking, brawling, and reckless gunplay. Occasionally they use crossbows. There's also hate, love, sex, a multinational drywall
conglomerate, cockfighting, the penal system, and a deep-seated mistrust of authority and all things different.” “Appalachian ER” is a popular skit regularly performed on NBC's
Saturday Night Live
. It always includes an Appalachian who has been sodomized by some sort of item. “Hillbilly Moment” is a skit on the popular children's show
The Amanda Show
, which is no longer in production but still regularly airs on Nickelodeon. The skit features two Appalachian dullards hitting each other over the head and talking in thick accents. The skit has proven especially popular with teenagers, who make parodies on YouTube. A recent search of the phrase on YouTube's Web site garnered seventy hits.

8
. Neither the text nor the author of this speech could be confirmed despite hours of research.

9
. Common Appalachian colloquialism for
scrip
, tokens or paper vouchers with a monetary value given to miners by the coal companies as salary.

10
. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, McDowell County had a population of 27,329 people, with 38 percent falling below the poverty level (the national average was 12 percent) even though the county produced 6 million tons of coal in 2007 alone. The 1950 census listed the population as 98,887.

11
. Synthetic fuel.

12
. Department of Environmental Protection, a government agency.

13
. Appalachian Power, a division of American Electric Power, which serves about 1 million people in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Despite the coal industry's constant claims that mountaintop removal mining helps to keep electricity rates low in Appalachia, AEP recently filed a request with the Public Service Commission of West Virginia to raise electricity rates by a 17 percent increase in revenues in 2008.

14
. “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”

Pat Hudson

1
. II Corinthians 3:17.

2
.
Kilowatt Ours
is an award-winning 2006 film by Jeff Barrie that explores the way coal is causing widespread pollution in Appalachia and the rest of the nation. Produced by B. J. Gudmundsson,
Mountain Mourning
highlights personal stories of mountaintop removal through a faith-based perspective. Described as a “summons to moral courage” by the filmmaker, it was sponsored by Christians for the Mountains and released in 2008.
Serve God, Save the Planet
by J. Matthew Sleeth examines how Biblical models of personal responsibility and environmental stewardship can be applied to modern life. It was published in 2006.

3
. From the A Rocha Web site: “A Rocha is a Christian nature conservation
organisation, our name coming from the Portuguese for ‘the Rock,' as the first initiative was a field study centre in Portugal. A Rocha is now a family of projects working in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and South America, Asia and Australasia. A Rocha projects are frequently cross-cultural in character, and share a community emphasis, with a focus on science and research, practical conservation and environmental education.”

4
. Tuke, a fellow adoption attorney, is also the former chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party. He ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Lamar Alexander (R) in 2008 and was defeated.

5
. SB 3822 and HB 2248.

6
. Coppock is referring to Moses' fear that he was not worthy to be a prophet because, he says, he is “not eloquent…I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” He tells God to choose his brother Aaron instead (Exodus 4:10–16).

7
. Tom Humphrey, “Bill on Surface Mining Halted,”
Knoxville News Sentinel
, April 3, 2008.

8
. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a town established in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that were eventually dropped on Japan. The population of the town grew to nearly 73,000 over the course of World War II, during which the town did not appear on maps and was completely surrounded by a fence and guard towers. After the war, the population greatly decreased. At the time of the 2000 census, there were 27,387 people living there.

9
. According to the book
From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants
by Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), “the year 1980 also brought an increase in Central American asylum-seekers, namely Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans escaping the political turmoil.” This led to some churches stepping forward to house the refugees.

10
. HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins, released
The Green Bible
in the fall of 2008; the publisher's catalog copy describes it as “the first Bible to highlight how the scriptures teach the importance of caring for God's creation…and will specifically focus on creation care, with input from leading Christian conservationists, theologians, and practitioners, showing that creation care is not just a calling, but a lifestyle.”

11
. Meaning the Appalachian Writers Workship at the Hindman Settlement School. Appalachians refer to both the school and the workshop as “Hindman.”

12
. The Mountaintop Removal Tour for Interfaith Leaders.

13
. McKinley Sumner, resident of Montgomery Creek in Perry County, whose family land is being lost to mountaintop removal.

14
. The TVA is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government-run corporation
that serves as a flood control device, an electricity provider, and a regional economic development agency in Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The TVA has been a controversial entity, especially because of its legal employment of eminent domain.

15
. According to the Kentucky Coal Association's “Coal Facts” Web site, which includes an extensive glossary of coal-mining terms, scrubbers are “any of several forms of chemical/physical devices that remove sulfur compounds formed during coal combustion. These devices, technically know[n] as flue gas desulfurization systems, combine the sulfur in gaseous emissions with another chemical medium to form inert ‘sludge,' which must then be removed for disposal.”
http://www.coaleducation.org/glossary.htm#S
.

16
. See
www.ilovemountains.org
, a Web site dedicated to providing information about mountaintop removal, made up of a coalition of seven grassroots organizations from five Appalachian states. Those organizations are Appalachian Voices, Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, and the Ohio River Environmental Coalition.

17
. The Montgomery Creek mine was the culminating site for the Mountaintop Removal Tour for Interfaith Leaders and the place where Hudson saw a mountain blown up.

Jack Spadaro

Epigraph: Barbara Ehrenreich, “Family Values,” in
The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed
(New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

1
. Erik Reece,
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 133.

2
. Erik Reece names Andrew Rajec as McConnell's former aide who was appointed to the investigative team. Ibid., 131.

3
. On September 23, 2001, thirteen miners were killed by a methane gas blast in the Jim Walters mine no. 5 in Brookwood, Alabama. Chao personally promised the victims' families that MSHA would investigate the explosion in order to help prevent future mining accidents. The miners' widows have since been active in protesting for safer deep mining and for faster payment of benefits.

4
. Nine miners were trapped underground for over seventy-eight hours, July 24–28, 2002, in the Quecreek mines in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The disaster galvanized the nation as everyone watched the rescue with hope that all nine miners would be saved. They were, in the process becoming national heroes. The event led to the creation of many books, a high-rated TV movie
(
The Pennsylvania Miners' Story
), and several songs (perhaps the best known is “Quecreek,” written by Julie Miller, performed by Buddy Miller). The Quecreek disaster cast new light on the issue of safety in the mining industry.

5
. The Sago disaster occurred on January 2, 2006, when thirteen miners were trapped for nearly two days. Only one survived. The accident led to widespread outcry for better safety regulations and a Senate investigation. Perhaps expecting another hopeful story like that of Quecreek, top journalists converged on the scene.

6
. The Aracoma Alma mine accident occurred on January 19, 2006, when a conveyer belt in the Aracoma Alma mine no. 1 in Logan County, West Virginia, caught fire and killed two miners.

7
. Five miners were killed in the Darby mine disaster, which happened on May 20, 2006, in Harlan County, Kentucky. According to
The Nation
(Erik Reece, “Harlan County Blues,” June 28, 2006), “the majority of miners at both Sago and the Darby Number One Mine in Harlan survived the initial blast. They died because their self rescuers held only an hour's worth of oxygen. In the late 1990s…MSHA proposed installing more caches of oxygen inside the mines. But the Bush administration, under former mining executive David Lauriski, withdrew that idea in September 2001, calling it cost prohibitive.” A lawsuit filed by the sole survivor and relatives of four of the five miners killed charges the coal company with putting production over safety. News of the disaster was carried on page 28 of the
New York Times
and did not become a national story.

8
. Six miners and three rescuers were killed at the Crandall Canyon mine in August 2007. The mine owner, Bill Murray, became the subject of ridicule after he blamed the accident on the land itself. “Had I known this evil mountain, this alive mountain, would do what it did, I would never have sent the miners in here,” Murray said, according to an Associated Press report filed on August 23, 2007.

9
. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

10
. According to the Web site of the Appalachian Studies Association, the Jack Spadaro Documentary Award “honors the activist and whistleblower…who has spent his entire professional career working within the coalmining industry for the betterment of the Appalachian community…the award is given to recognize the best film, video, radio, television, or other media presentation on Appalachia and its people.”
www.appalachianstudies.org
.

11
. The Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969.

12
. In 1994, the same impoundment released 100 million gallons of coal slurry. Larry Wilson, an MSHA engineer, made nine recommendations to Martin County Coal before the pond could be used again. They were never implemented.

13
. David Lauriski was the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health from January 2001 to November 2004.

14
. Tim Thompson.

15
. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA).

16
. Another Massey Energy mine, located in Logan County, West Virginia.

17
. West Virginia.

18
. A fire boss is someone employed by the mine or a state official responsible for examining a mine for potential dangers.

19
. President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

20
. U.S. Representative from the Sixth Congressional District of Kentucky.

21
. U.S. Representative from the Third Congressional District of West Virginia.

Nathan Hall

1
. Allen is the county seat of Floyd County, Kentucky.

2
. Kentucky.

3
. Kentucky.

Anne Shelby and Jessie Lynne Keltner

1
. “Teges” is thought to be a colloquial distortion of the word “tedious,” according to Shelby.

2
. Marianne Worthington, “Anne Shelby's
Appalachian Studies: Poems
and
Can a Democrat Get into Heaven?” Appalachian Heritage
, Fall 2006.

3
. Shelby is referring to Reece's book
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

4
. Middlesboro, Kentucky, is located where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee meet.

5
. The Clear Fork Valley in Clairborne County, Tennessee, is an area often cited in arguments for new legislation in that state, due largely to the vast size of the MTR sites there and the depopulation being caused by the practice.