Laura Not Afraid to Speak the Obvious, and to Help Others Find Their Voice

by Frank Young
President, WV Highlands Conservancy

I first met Laura around 1992, when the Apple Grove pulp mill campaign was getting organized.

By the mid-1990s, some folks, even some environmental leaders, were saying that the pulp mill was a “done deal,” that it would happen, no matter what.

But Laura reminded us that the issue was not yet settled.

And Laura and OVEC continued to hold informational meetings and plan and sponsor public rallies about the project.

They helped organize in Point Pleasant where the public crowd on the outside was essentially shut out from the elitist movers and shakers meeting on the inside, and at the governor’s mansion in Charleston where we repeatedly brought our pleas for justice and dignity, only to find that suddenly the governor had more important business elsewhere.

Laura was helping the people of southern West Virginia wage battle in the hills and hollows of communities that up until then had been told to know their place and to take whatever coal and its political army threw at them.

And just this year, when coal executives and their official government apologists were blaming God for the summer floods that wiped out entire communities, and were ridiculously suggesting that mountaintop removal mining actually helped prevent flooding, Laura showed that it was not a sin, and was not unpatriotic, to speak the obvious - that flooding was the worst where mountains had been leveled and where the streams nearby were completely filled with mountaintops, and the streams further below choked with sediment from above so that the storm water had nowhere to flow except through people’s yards, through people’s homes, through their workplaces, and through their very lives.

Laura Forman, dressed in a black mourning outfit, speaks passionately at the Funeral for the Mountains event in Charleston, W.Va., on Oct. 28, 2000. photo by Chuck Wyrostok