This news story originally provided by Blue Ridge Outdoors

November 16, 2005

BEST ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Mountain Justice Summer

In 1964 a coalition of the civil rights movement in the Deep South organized Freedom Summera season-long campaign of marches, boycotts, student sit-ins and the infamous Freedom Rideswhich glows in the history books as one of the greatest steps towards desegregation. In the same spirit a group of concerned citizens declared 2005 Mountain Justice Summer to combat the growing epidemic of mountaintop removal in the Southern Appalachians. 

The Mountain Justice Summer movement ran from May through August. Coupling activist groups like Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and concerned residents, organizers in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky staged protests and city rallies, went door to door to educate affected residents, wrote letters to government officials, and called for permit hearings throughout the summer against coal mining companies that use mountaintop removal and resultant valley fill mining as a technique. Over the summer hundreds were arrestedfrom young idealists to an 82-year-old grandmother concerned for a West Virginia elementary schools close proximity to a coal prep plantfor a cause they believe is becoming more urgent. While coal industry giants will be hard to topple, Mountain Justice Summer succeeded in getting the issue some necessary awareness, as dozens of papers around the region couldnt ignore the posters and protests.

Theres a real urgency to this issue, says Mountain Justice Summer organizer Sadie Heck. Its taking place at an increasing rate and therefore safety is on the down slope. We wanted to use every different method of attacking this issue, so people will hopefully come together and try to stop it.

Mountaintop removal, which has been called strip mining on steroids, involves using machinery and explosives to literally shear off the top of a mountain to gain access to interior seams of coal beneath. Forests are clear-cut; then explosives are employed to blast off mountain domes, before enormous shovels plunge into soil and a dragline digs into the rock to expose the coal.

In the last decade mountaintop removal in West Virginia alone has buried 1,000 acres of streams and cut down 300,000 acres of hardwood forests. In 2000 a coal slurry spill in Martin County, Ky., dumped more 250 million gallons of toxic materials into local streams that eventually flowed into the Big Sandy River. This was just one of the incidents that prompted Hecka member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth to join the efforts of Mountain Justice Summer. As a student at the University of Kentucky, one of her professors showed her the effects of the spill that found locals communities staring down dangerous runoff at their doorsteps. She was angered when the disaster received little media attention.

It hardly got any coverage, she says. Thats typical of the way this region is treated. Mountaintop removal wouldnt even be allowed to happen up in New York or other places that arent so marginalized. This issue is not known about by a huge percentage of our population. The effects of this are outrageous enough that if people knew about them, they wouldnt allow them to happen.

Many coal companies claim mountaintop removal creates jobs, but in reality jobs decrease as more machinery comes into play and less people are necessary. According to the Citizens Coal Council between 1987 and 1997 coal mining production increased by 32 percent while jobs decreased by 29 percent.