Uneven Ground (28 page)

Support for a national ban on surface mining reached its height in 1972 following the collapse of a coal waste dam at the head of Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. A series of dams had been constructed on the creek by the Buffalo Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Pittston Coal Company, the largest independent coal producer in the United States, but both state and federal mining authorities had ignored the loose “gob pile” dams, which by 1972 had turned the Middle Fork of Buffalo Creek into a series of black pools. On the morning of February 26, 1972, heavy rains caused one of the dams to collapse, sending a thirty-foot wave of water and rocks down the seventeen-mile length of the creek, killing 125 people in a matter of minutes and leaving over 4,000 homeless. Despite its history of poor
safety practices and the fact that the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 had outlawed coal impoundments like the ones on Buffalo Creek, Pittston assumed no responsibility for the tragedy. A spokesperson for the company claimed that the flood was simply “an act of God.”
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The Buffalo Creek disaster briefly focused national attention on the consequences of uncontrolled strip mining, but the loss of life and the destruction of fifteen communities in southern West Virginia had little impact on the congressional debate. Four months after the Buffalo Creek massacre, as it would become known in the mountains, nine hundred activists gathered at the National Conference on Strip Mining in Middlesboro, Kentucky, called to draft a statement on surface mining to be presented to the Democratic and Republican conventions that year. The conference, which brought together grassroots activists and environmental leaders from across the nation, adopted a resolution demanding the prohibition of strip mining in the United States. Although the Democratic National Committee later endorsed a general statement opposing strip mining, neither party was willing to accept abolition, and by the end of the summer even the National Coalition Against Strip Mining moved to a position accepting regulation instead of prohibition.
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Congress deliberated for more than six years before finally passing the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. As was the case at the state level, industry and union opposition, combined with the energy crisis of the early 1970s, doomed efforts to abolish surface mining at the national level. Even after national conservation groups abandoned prohibition in favor of federal supervision of mining and reclamation practices, President Gerald Ford vetoed two regulatory measures before President Jimmy Carter signed a weaker bill in the summer of 1977. While Carter favored stronger legislation, he acknowledged that the “watered down bill” would enhance “much needed production of coal” while protecting the “beautiful areas” where coal was produced.
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Appalachian groups, led by the Appalachian Coalition, expressed their opposition to the bill on the grounds that it set up federal guidelines but left enforcement to the states, failed to protect private property and compensate landowners, and allowed mountaintop removal as an approved mining procedure. The legislation did
outlaw highwalls, require slopes to be restored to their approximate original contours, and establish the federal Office of Surface Mining to regulate the industry, but it failed to end surface mining itself. The struggle over the environmental and human costs of surface mining would continue in Appalachia for years to come.

The fight for a national abolition bill dramatized the gap between middle-class conservationists who saw surface mining essentially as an aesthetic and moral assault against the environment and Appalachian activists who perceived the practice as part of a larger system of regional exploitation. Conservationists were more willing to compromise in favor of government regulation, but the former poverty warriors and poor people who led the mountain resistance organizations distrusted the ability of institutions to protect their lives and homesteads. At a people's hearing on strip mining held in Wise, Virginia, on December 4, 1971, more than two hundred activists gathered to hear mountain residents deplore the courts, legislatures, and other “institutionalized channels” that refused to respond to the plight of local people. Joe Begley from Letcher County, Kentucky; Rufus Brooks from Logan County, West Virginia; John Tiller from Brammel, Virginia; Bessie Smith from Knott County, Kentucky; and dozens of other speakers echoed the words of the Reverend Warren Wright, a Letcher County, Kentucky, farmer and anti–strip mining activist, who urged the crowd to rise up in democratic protest against the “industrial and political conspiracy” that was ruining the mountains and mountain life. The “question of strip mining,” chided Begley, was “more than a question of beauty and trees.” It was also a matter of “the destruction of farms and homes.”
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Regional activists used the struggle against strip mining to expand their networks, to organize new citizen-based organizations, and to foster what they believed was a “regional democratic movement.”
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Regional strategy meetings like those held in Middlesboro, Huntington, and Wise brought together local opponents of surface mining, but they also provided venues for sharing information and ideas on a variety of other issues. New organizations such as Save Our Cumberland Mountains in east Tennessee sprang up to oppose strip mining and to work for landowner rights in their areas. Led by young radicals like
Michael Clark of the Church of the Brethren Appalachian Caucus and the Reverend B. Lloyd of the Anglican Appalachian People's Service Organization, a number of religious organizations, including the Knoxville-based Commission on Religion in Appalachia, joined the crusade. Leaders of SOK, especially its director, James Branscome, and writers Harry Caudill and Jack Weller, spoke widely at college and university rallies throughout the mountains, spreading the idea that Appalachia was an exploited colony within modern America and that surface mining was only one manifestation of a corrupt political and economic system.

Many of the new organizations published newsletters that reached thousands of readers inside and outside Appalachia, but no organization played a larger role in providing a network for regional activism than the CSM. Traditionally a rather moderate voice for reform, the council was taken over in 1969 by young activists who redirected the old organization's mission toward more radical causes and restructured its many commissions to reflect the interests of youth, community organizers, and the poor. The council no longer represented “professional persons, settlement school, religious, health, and education workers, and businessmen and philanthropists” interested in Appalachia but instead became a communication vehicle for the bottom-up democratic movement that activists hoped would sweep the region.
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Under the leadership of Warren Wright, the council established a number of new commissions to reflect a wide range of constituents and issues: aging, black Appalachians, community action, education, natural resources, poor people's self-help, regional development, youth, urban affairs, and welfare reform. Throughout the 1970s, the council's annual meetings and periodic commission forums brought together a mixture of community activists from across Appalachia. More important, the council magazine,
Mountain Life and Work
, was a widely distributed source of information and opinions about movement struggles and regional events. As executive director for 1970–1971, Wright reoriented the council toward “a different kind of war on poverty,” one that would increase the “political awareness” of mountain people. “They have to learn,” he told a reporter soon after taking office, “that
the people own the system and that the system doesn't own them. I want them to know the extent to which they've been defrauded.”
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The new CSM reflected the revolutionary change of thought and strategies that had swept Appalachia since the announcement of the War on Poverty. Mountain advocates no longer saw the culture or geography of the region as a primary barrier to development; instead they challenged the very assumptions and institutions on which the rhetoric of growth and opportunity was built. As council member Sally Maggard told the readers of
Mountain Life and Work
in 1972, the essence of the controversy over strip mining in Appalachia was “not wildflowers” but the definition of “progress” itself.

In Appalachia, exploitation goes hidden under the rhetoric of economic development. People are forced out of their homes and from their farms because it is more profitable to let mud slide into living rooms and across cornfields than it is to mine coal with care. Little thought is given to farmlands which would have fed families for generations to come. People find that there are not jobs in the mountains because a cheap and ruthless method of mining requires few laborers. People are forced to take mining jobs which destroy their homes and the entire economic base of the region, or else move away to migrant cities like Dayton, Cincinnati, Baltimore, or Chicago. Miners are injured and die because it is more profitable to mine coal in unsafe conditions than it is to run safe mines.
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The challenge facing the mountains, Maggard and other activists concluded, was to confront those “powerful individuals” who controlled the region's resources (including human resources). Abolition of strip mining alone was not the answer. To carry the struggle to the political and economic power brokers outside the region, in 1972 the new council opened an office in Washington DC, staffed by Alan McSurely, to assist the lobbying efforts of Appalachian groups.
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The growing network of regional activists and organizations that confronted issues such as strip mining and black lung disease created a fertile environment for the growth of citizens' groups that confronted a variety of other concerns throughout the mountains. Residents of
rural North Carolina communities fought the expansion of a national park visitors' center near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Others in Kentucky and West Virginia organized to resist the construction of dams that would flood family farms. Citizens in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and West Virginia established local chapters of the regional group Citizens for Social and Economic Justice that helped parents negotiate with school boards for better lunch programs and free textbooks and provided paralegal services for low-income people.

Some of the organizations that sprang up in the 1970s were designed to coordinate the efforts of diverse local groups on a larger regional basis. In eastern Kentucky, community-based groups formed the Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation to better assist craft and agricultural cooperatives, low-income housing programs, and other alternative economic development efforts. At a meeting in May 1977 in Williamson, West Virginia, 150 representatives of fifty mountain organizations created the Appalachian Alliance to synchronize region-wide “direct action” in support of individuals and communities that were “working to gain democratic control over their lives, workplaces, and natural resources.” The alliance hoped to provide “a unified voice for Appalachian people,” serve as a forum for communication among regional organizations, and change public policy through research on issues ranging from landownership to strip mining and health delivery.
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The most notable product of the Appalachian Alliance was the publication of a study of landownership patterns in eighty Appalachian counties, financed by the ARC in 1978 and undertaken by the alliance's Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force. Staffed primarily by young activists and college students, the task force identified the large corporations and land companies that controlled up to 90 percent of the surface land and 100 percent of the mineral resources in some Appalachian counties. These wealthy landowners paid only a small fraction of the taxes for schools, roads, and other public facilities in impoverished communities. Absentee ownership, the report concluded, limited job opportunities and economic development alternatives, restricted the local tax base, and shifted the burden for public services to local residents.
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Disparity in taxation had long been an issue for Appalachian activists,
and in the 1970s pressure mounted to institute a severance tax on coal and other minerals and to equalize assessments on surface and subsurface property. Throughout most of the industrial history of Appalachia, the natural wealth of the region had been mined by large corporations and shipped out of the mountains untaxed, leaving local schools and other community services starved for public support. The coal industry's powerful grip on state and local governments kept property taxes low and taxes on unmined minerals even lower. Most Appalachian states depended on regressive sales taxes to support state government expenditures, and even after the passage of meager severance taxes on coal in the early 1970s, the revenue from extractive taxes flowed to the state general fund for distribution statewide (in Kentucky) or into the repair of coal haul roads (in West Virginia and Virginia). In 1976 a “mountain caucus” of eastern Kentucky legislators succeeded in returning 4 percent of severance tax funds in the commonwealth to coal-producing counties for capital projects that promoted economic development, but most coal communities and nearby rural counties where coal production had diminished received few benefits from the funds.
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Nor did the mining industry contribute its fair share to county property taxes. Studies of landownership and taxation in Appalachia found a direct correlation between the poverty of a county and the percentage of property owned by mineral companies. In Claiborne County, Tennessee, for example, one British company owned 17 percent of the county's land but paid only 3 percent of the county's property taxes (an average of twenty-five dollars per assessed acre for forty-four thousand acres). Seventy-five percent of the county's revenue came from state and federal sources. In fourteen West Virginia counties, twenty-five companies owned 44 percent of the surface land, yet they were assessed for only 20 percent of the area taxes. On the whole, in central Appalachian counties, only 48 percent of total revenue came from local sources, compared with 65 percent nationally.
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The disparity in taxation of unmined mineral assets beneath the surface was even greater. In eastern Kentucky counties, the tax on unmined coal was set at such a low rate that it was considered uncollectable, despite the coal's potential value to its corporate owners.
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