Uneven Ground (44 page)

Environmental disasters like those at Buffalo Creek and Martin County dramatized the growing tragedy of surface mining in the mountains and the unwillingness of most politicians to challenge the power of the coal industry or to confront the real costs of energy consumption in the United States. The lack of oversight by regulators, the collusion between the industry and political leaders, and the growing demand for coal as a replacement for foreign oil exposed the mountains and mountain people to some of the worst environmental devastation in the history of the region. Even the massive deforestation of Appalachia by the American logging industry at the turn of the twentieth century had not altered the landscape in the permanent manner that mountaintop removal did. By the turn of the twenty-first century, hundreds of miles of ridgeline in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee had been leveled, the tops of the mountains dumped into adjacent valleys, creating vast, desert-like plateaus. Nearly one thousand miles of streams had been buried, and entire ecosystems had been dismantled, the forests and wildlife permanently replaced by lespedeza and sandstone rubble. Almost five hundred mountains in the heart of Appalachia had been decapitated, and more were being lost every day.

Fearing that Appalachia was fast becoming a national sacrifice area in the quest for energy independence, mountain residents increasingly challenged mountaintop removal in the courts. In 1998 regional environmentalists, led by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the practice of filling mountain valleys with the overburden
from mountaintop removal operations violated the Clean Water Act. A federal judge in southern West Virginia agreed and prohibited mining within one hundred feet of a flowing stream. When the decision was overturned upon appeal, KFTC filed its own lawsuit seeking to prohibit the Army Corps of Engineers from granting permits to deposit mine waste into valley streams. The same federal judge ruled against the coal industry again, but in 2003 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned this decision as well, declaring that the Clean Air Act's prohibition of waste in streambeds referred only to “garbage and sewage” and not to mine waste.
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Opponents of mountaintop removal received little help from state and federal authorities, who were generally more concerned with protecting coal production even if they hoped to mitigate the harshest effects of mining on the land and the people. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration cut the Office of Surface Mining's budget for enforcement and directed a smaller staff to provide “regulatory relief” to the coal industry. President Clinton slashed the office's budget again, limiting inspection and enforcement staff by one-third and eliminating six field offices. Under George W. Bush, the agency became even less vigilant, replacing recalcitrant staff members such as Spadaro and focusing more on speeding up mining permits than on regulating the industry.
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The struggle to protect the mountains was left to a few environmental organizations and to individuals like Larry Gibson. The self-proclaimed “keeper of the mountains,” Gibson became a popular symbol of resistance to mountaintop removal in Appalachia after he organized neighbors in his southern West Virginia community to fight the destruction of Kayford Mountain by Massey Energy bulldozers. Gibson's 50-acre farm, which had been in his family for almost two hundred years, stood like a defiant oasis in a dead sea, surrounded by 180,000 acres of one of the largest mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia.
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The man and his land became a focal point for environmental activists in the region; he seemed a fitting heir to Dan Gibson, Jink Ray, and Ollie Combs.

Throughout Appalachia, citizens like Gibson continued to challenge the destruction of their communities by corporate greed and governmental neglect. In the 1980s residents of Bell County, Kentucky,
fought a decade-long battle to clean up the sewage and industrial waste being dumped into Yellow Creek by the Middlesboro Tanning Company and by a substandard municipal water treatment facility. Before winning a settlement among the City of Middlesboro, the tannery, and the EPA, the Yellow Creek Concerned Citizens confronted local and state officials, held rallies and demonstrations, and inundated federal agencies with letters of support from government officials in developing countries around the world who were concerned with the industrial pollution of streams in poor communities. Nearby, the Harlan County Concerned Citizens against Toxic Waste forced a Texas company to clean up a former industrial site polluted with cancer-causing PCBs that was then being used as a mobile home park. After toxic solvents and waste oils were found to have fouled at least fourteen drinking wells in the community of Dayhoit and to have leaked into groundwater a mile away, the company agreed to remove contaminated soil and to pay for the construction of a new water line.
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One struggle raised tensions between two states when economic activities in North Carolina destroyed a river flowing into Tennessee and may have contributed to high rates of cancer in a community lying along the border. Since 1906, the Champion Paper Company had provided more than two thousand jobs in Haywood County, North Carolina, at its Canton paper mill, but the company dumped tons of carcinogenic pollutants into the Pigeon River, effectively killing the once clean-flowing mountain stream and turning it dark brown below the mill. By the mid-1980s, residents of the small Cocke County, Tennessee, town of Hartford, downstream from the paper mill, had started to notice a disproportionately high rate of deaths from cancer, especially among men who swam or lived near the river. The town had long been nicknamed Widowville, and an informal survey of the town's 500 residents revealed an alarming 167 cancer cases. In 1985 local residents formed the Dead Pigeon River Council to pressure Tennessee and North Carolina to enforce water quality standards and to clean up and restore the Pigeon River. In federal court, the EPA became involved and refused to renew operating permits for the Champion plant unless the problem was fixed. Relationships between the two states became contentious. North Carolina and Haywood County feared the loss of jobs; Tennessee, Cocke County, and the EPA demanded that the
river be brought up to Tennessee water quality standards. Champion finally agreed to modernize its Canton plant, and in 1990 the EPA issued a new permit. The company later consented to pay Cocke County property owners $6.5 million in compensation and to endow environmental education projects in the area. Following the agreement, however, the Connecticut-based company sold the North Carolina plant and moved its production facilities abroad. A much-reduced labor force continued to operate the Canton mill as a partially worker-owned company, Blue Ridge Paper Products. After the installation of new equipment and bleaching processes, water quality improved, and fish and other wildlife returned to the river. Within a decade a thriving river-based recreational industry had developed in Hartford, and the community was on the road to recovery.
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Struggles for environmental justice were common across Appalachia at the end of the twentieth century. The region's poverty, politics, and long history of industrial exploitation subjected mountain communities to disproportionate threats from health hazards and environmental damage. Local citizens' groups organized to fight acid mine drainage, pesticide contamination, toxic landfills, timber clear-cutting, nuclear dump sites, waste incinerators, hydroelectric dams, and other threats. As urban Americans gained a greater awareness of the dangers of waste disposal in their own environments, low-income rural areas in Appalachia became prime targets for commercial landfills, waste incinerators, and toxic storage facilities. The availability of comparatively cheap land, abandoned deep mines, lax environmental regulations, and receptive local politicians made it cost effective for large companies to haul solid waste from cities in the Northeast to dump sites in rural communities in Appalachia, especially in Virginia and West Virginia. Citizens' organizations such as the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League challenged the landfill developers in court and often succeeded in limiting the volume of the landfill, if not defeating the project itself.

Less confrontational organizations, often supported by government and business leaders, emerged as well to improve environmental quality, reduce unsightly trash, and educate children about local ecosystems. Groups such as Eastern Kentucky PRIDE, created in 1997 by U.S. Representative Hal Rogers and Kentucky Department of Natural
Resources secretary James Bickford to promote “personal responsibility in a desirable environment,” energized schools, parents, civic organizations, and businesses to clean up creeks, rivers, and highways and to protect the natural beauty of their neighborhoods. Eastern Kentucky PRIDE mobilized thousands of volunteers to clean up streams and illegal trash dumps, and it encouraged the building of outdoor classrooms, greenhouses, and nature trails in almost every county in southeastern Kentucky. With the assistance of federal grants to improve water quality, the organization helped to install over seven thousand septic systems and to modernize sewage treatment facilities serving over twenty thousand homes. Most of the streams of eastern Kentucky had long since ceased to be healthy and viable as a result of mine drainage, straight pipe sewage disposal, and other nonpoint pollution. Eastern Kentucky PRIDE hoped to restore water quality and to create a more attractive environment for economic development by advocating personal responsibility for waste and educating children to prevent pollution in the future.

Ultimately, rising concern about the environment, especially among middle-class groups like Eastern Kentucky PRIDE, reflected a growing cultural crisis in Appalachia over land use and its relationship to traditional values and identities. As a result of the expansion of highways, retail centers, industrial parks, and other indicators of modern sprawl, many mountain communities now faced the same dilemmas of economic growth that challenged other areas of the United States, such as how to protect open space, how to preserve communities, and how to provide meaning to life in a changing world. In Appalachia, however, the land had always shaped human relationships and personal identity. It had always defined cultural meaning. The loss of farms and of farm life, the enclosure of the forests for private use, the pollution of streams, the uprooting of families, and the congestion of people in once quiet places were for many Appalachians high costs to pay for material convenience and comfort.

The environmental and cultural consequences of uncontrolled growth were evident in both urban and rural Appalachia. Mountain families who lived near metropolitan centers on the perimeter of the region and those who resided in the larger towns and growth centers
witnessed with mixed feelings the spread of housing developments, shopping malls, restaurants, motels, and chain stores. Modern services provided access to consumer products and amenities, but the service economy created few well-paying jobs, and the distance between home, shopping, school, and work left little time for community and family life. Suburban sprawl converted limited agricultural bottomland into housing and retail developments, and extensive paving and floodplain construction increased flood levels and groundwater contamination. The expansion of metropolitan centers such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Knoxville into adjoining rural counties and the spread of tourism and second-home development deeper into coves and hollows increased traffic congestion, property values, and taxes in once remote communities. Rural residents, who had benefited least from the new economy, now faced displacement, the loss of their land, and the disappearance of their way of life.

For some Appalachian communities, the growth of tourism during the last decades of the twentieth century provided a hopeful alternative to environmentally destructive industries such as mining and timbering, but recreational development brought its own problems. Traffic congestion, visual pollution, low-wage jobs, and increased demand on local public services tempered the economic benefits of tourism. Megadevelopments associated with theme parks, outlet malls, and internationally based hotels at places like Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, not only transformed these communities entirely but leaked many of the dollars spent by tourists back to absentee corporate owners. Outdoor recreational activities associated with the free-range riding of motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles rutted trails, polluted streams, and disturbed wildlife. The unregulated spread of rental cabins and second-home communities along ridgetops and hillsides altered mountain ecosystems and views, threatening the landscape that had sustained local culture and attracted tourists to the region in the first place.

The growing popularity of ecotourism and heritage tourism, on the other hand, contained the potential for building an alternative economy, one that promised greater monetary returns for local residents, the preservation of rural traditions, and the protection of sensitive natural resources. At least 115 million Americans lived within a
day's driving distance of Appalachia, and the region's water, forests, and cultural resources increasingly appealed to urban hikers, campers, kayakers, fishermen, and families seeking relaxation and cultural enrichment. In parts of the region less scarred by environmental destruction, outfitters, bed and breakfast accommodations, restaurants, and other small businesses multiplied to serve urban tourists seeking outdoor adventure. Festivals celebrating mountain music and crafts and fairs promoting local farm products, homecomings, historical reenactments, and community gatherings of all kinds brought dollars into local economies, supported local shop owners, and sustained a sense of local pride.

In some communities struck hard by the decline of manufacturing and mining jobs, ecotourism and other community-based forms of small business development became important strategies for renewal. Community leaders in western North Carolina, for example, built on that area's long history of handcraft production to organize independent artists into a marketing network that was environmentally sustainable and took advantage of the international economy. Handmade in America, as the effort was called, not only provided guidebooks and other marketing tools for mountain artists, galleries, inns, farmers' markets, and historical sites in the Carolina Blue Ridge but developed technical assistance programs that helped small towns identify local assets, share community building strategies, and promote entrepreneurship. Such programs sought to capture the growing suburban interest in handmade products and alternative services and to channel wealth back to local communities and producers, reversing the historical pattern in which assets flowed out of the mountains. These efforts attempted to build distinctive and sustainable communities that enhanced the human and natural resources of the region. They sought to turn the commodification of the land into something that could preserve the land and the cultural meanings that derived from close relationships to that land.