Shirley Stewart Burns Addresses Annual Meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists, October 2008

	Marley Shebala with the Navajo Times (left), and Shirley Stewart Burns at the 2008 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. Shebala noted that both uranium and coal mining have ravaged the lands where indigenous people have been relegated.

In October, the Society of Environmental Journalists held its annual meeting in Roanoke, Va. Hundreds of journalists gathered to learn more about assorted issues, including mountaintop removal. OVEC arranged for journalists to fly over W. Va. mountaintop removal sites and helped plan a bus trip to Kayford Mountain. The Alliance for Appalachia and Earthjustice and its partners at stopmountaintopremoval.org  hosted receptions. Below are excerpts from an address given by historian Shirley Stewart Burns, author of the excellent non-fiction book, Bringing Down the Mountains.

When thinking about this plenary session, I could not say environmental justice and the poor. I kept referring to it as Environmental Injustice and the Poor because I could not think of one example of environmental justice in my home in the southern West Virginia coalfields. Mother Jones once said that there could be no peace in West Virginia because there is no justice in West Virginia. This is as true today as when she said it nearly 100 years ago.

The people in central Appalachia, including my home in the southern West Virginia coalfields, are among the poorest people in the country. Poverty rates in these areas are 2x or more of the rest of America. This is true in spite of the fact that they live among the richest coal reserves and one of the most ecologically biodiverse places in the world. They are mainly a rural, white population whose families have lived in Appalachia for generations, dating back before the exploitation of the coal seams. People often ask, how could this happen? How could one of the most minerally rich places in the world be populated by some of the poorest people in America? It happens because the economies in these areas have revolved around one resource coal for more than 100 years. There is no economic diversification. Study after study has shown the futility of such short-sighted economies. The wretched economy and lack of true leadership has been aided and abetted for more than 100 years by local color writers and journalists who have come into these areas and written riveting stories of the beauty of the region and how strange, different, and unlike the rest of America the inhabitants of the region are. This stereotyping of the area has effectively othered the peopleand made us not as good as and different from the rest of the country. Because, of course, it is only okay to exploit and mistreat those who are less than and different from the majority. The neglect of politicians along with the mainstream cultures mischaracterization of the region has left the people in a very precarious position. Presently that precarious position has seen the very defining feature of the area itself, the mountains, destroyed one by one to obtain the coal that runs underneath. The people are left at the mercy of the coal industry and short-sighted politicians who do little to nothing to aide these areas in developing alternative economic opportunities. These are areas that the Appalachian Regional Commission has determined are persistently poor and distressed. Tucked away in little hollers throughout central Appalachia, the United States has kept its dirty little secret of Mountaintop Removal and while throughout the last decade and a half occasional stories outside the region would be written, it is only recently that it has received any amount of steady press coverage. To understand what the poor are up against in Appalachia, you must first understand the process of mountaintop removal.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is an extreme version of strip mining. In this type of mining the tops of the mountains are literally blown away to gain easy access to the coal. This became a predominant form of mining in the mid-1990s once the Clean Air Act emission standards were strengthened. While this may have been a good thing for the rest of the country, it was devastating for the coalfields of central Appalachia. In the southern West Virginia coalfields where my study is based, mountaintop removal became the predominant method of strip mining. This allowed the coal companies to gain quicker and cheaper access to millions of tons of coal while effectively eradicating the most expensive cost of doing business labor. The average MTR mine employs 89 people for an average of 10 years. The average underground mine can employ upwards of 300 people for decades. So far, this type of mining has destroyed 450 mountains and according to a federal environmental impact statement by 2013 will have damaged or destroyed 2400 miles of streams.

The people have not sat idly by while their homes and environment have been destroyed.  They have banned together to form community and environmental activists groups. Most of these folks have never been involved in such endeavors before MTR came into their area and would not have identified themselves as environmentalists. These are people like Mary Miller and Pauline Canterberry, women in their late 70s who headed up efforts to take dust samples from throughout their small community for a lawsuit against a coal company whose preparation plant rained coal dust all over their town. And people like Judy Bonds, an ex-pizza hut waitress who now travels all over the country telling people about the ecological and community travesty that is permeating Appalachia. And Ed Wiley, an ex-miner who walked more than 400 miles to Washington, DC, to meet with Senator Robert Byrd and to bring attention to the massive coal slurry impoundment and coal silo resting directly behind his granddaughters elementary school. And Larry Gibson who refused to sell his 50 acres of property smack dab in the middle of a mountaintop removal coal mine. It is the one site you can go to and see an active mountaintop removal site. And most recently there is Loralei Scarbro who is fighting tooth and nail to save the last mountain in Coal River to use for a wind farm instead of a mountaintop removal site. These people, and many more like them, took a stand for their communities and their environment when those in power largely ignored their plight. But environmental justice is far from a reality for these people and the communities of Appalachia being devastated by mountaintop removal. Lawsuits are frequently won in federal court only to be overturned on appeal to the fourth circuit court. Still, the people keep pursuing lawsuits against coal companies that they believe are destroying their homes, their environment, and their culture.

It is easy for the rest of the country to flip on t heir light switch and never think for a moment where that energy is coming from. More than half of all American electricity comes from coal. Its the nations dirty little secret. Even filthier is what they do to the land in order to obtain the coal. I often hear people talk passionately about clean coal technology. This is only cleaning up the burning of the coal. It ignores all others aspects of using coal. Coal, in its extractive phase through mountaintop removal, is filthy. Along with the incessant dust that permeates these areas from the blasting is the processing of the coal, which results in huge coal slurry impoundments. These impoundments consist of a toxic sludge that can include such concentrated toxic substances as selenium, cadmium, boron, arsenic and nickel. In addition to the fear that these dams could break, like the dam did in Buffalo Creek, WV, in 1972, killing 125 people, is the fear that these dams could be contaminating groundwater.  Additionally, the valley fills created to hold the mountains that are blasted to access the coal, bury hundreds of miles of streams.streams that feed the waters of the eastern United States. Bury the water here; suffer the consequences all over the east coast.

Earlier I mentioned the role that writers and the media have played in the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes and myths associated with Appalachia. As much as you have been part of the problem in the past, you can now be part of the solution. While some of you have met these challenges, there is much more work to be done and many more stories to be told. Come to central Appalachia, to southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky where this mining practice is rampant. Talk to the local citizens. Hear their ideas for green energy in the middle of the coalfields. Read some updated histories that depict the people in an accurate way and not the stereotyped characters that have been relied upon and perpetuated for so long. Take a look, firsthand, at what greed and over consumption has done to one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world and to the people whose resources fueled the industrial revolution and allowed your current standard of living. Write about us as if we were interconnected as if our people were more than fodder for hillbilly jokesWrite about us as if what happens here impacts  you... as if we mattered. Because it does, and we do.