The rally is directed at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Permits Protection. DEP has become a rubber-stamp for the practice of mountaintop removal. The HORN’s Bob Kincaid was worried about teabaggers showing up; he’s emceeing the event. He’s introducing Maria Gunnoe:
“We are home,” she declares in response to the opposition calls to ‘go home.’ “Anyone that’s here to destroy the mountains is an outsider…the people who think their jobs are more important than our water haven’t tried to live without water.”
The protest today is about Coal River Mountain, where Massey Energy is busy setting off explosives about 200 feet from an earthen dam holding back eight billions of gallons of toxic coal slurry from a populated valley at the Brushy Fork Impoundment. It is a disaster literally waiting to happen.
Bob introduces a musical act and reminds the crowd that science and activism are the backbone of American democratic traditions. “Everything that is good and decent about the United States stands right here, right now…it is unacceptable that people of West Virginia are treated like second-class citizens.”
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The music is over, and now an elderly retired miner is telling the crowd that mountains can die. He recognizes the problem of monoeconomy. Emphasizing the need for a diversity of jobs to come in and replace coal, he says he has been against coal for 20 years and isn’t ashamed of his stand. (Appalachia passed peak coal at about that time.) “I’m tired of being called a third-world country in West Virginia,” he says.
Joe Stanley is next. Another retired union coal miner, he isn’t against coal but against mountaintop removal. He describes the process by which toxic materials get dumped into streams and rivers, poisoning them and ruining the ecology of West Virginia. The silica-filled explosive dust causes serious health problems on its own. The true cost of the practice isn’t reflected in the price of the coal. Coal River Mountain, he says, could support an enormous wind farm — but not if it’s blown up first.
Nancy (Starbuck?) is next. A Welsh activist, she draws the connection to Copenhagen and tells the crowd about what the British coal industry did to her community, leaving it poisoned and jobless after breaking the unions. She wants a revolution for a clean energy future.
Mike Rozell: “civil disobedience is only justified under certain conditions,” he says, insisting that mountaintop removal represents such a threat to communities that disobedience is necessary. “The laws protect every state in the union except West Virginia,” he says, invoking the 14th Amendment. With the courts, state house, and state agencies in the pocket of Massey Energy, such action is necessary.
Julia Bonds begins with Mother Jones: there is no justice in West Virginia. “The pro-coal thugs talk about patriotism,” she says, but say nothing about the human rights of poisoned West Virginians. She is passionate: “The whole world is listening,” she says, marking West Virginia as the center of gravity for climate change. “Honk if you love mountains!”
Next is Stephanie Pistello. She praises Sen. Robert Byrd for calling for peaceful resolution of the coal debate. “Honk if you love mountains!” She yells. “Let them hear you!” This, apparently to the teabaggers present. She calls for a common solution that works for all West Virginians.
Rev. Jim Lewis reminds the crowd of the time that Mother Jones walked into the state capital and was arrested on a nearby street. Drawing on scripture, he exhorts the crowd to take action for social justice.
Bob Kincaid introduces Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the day’s keynote speaker. Kennedy begins with a trembling voice, talking over the blasting horns of coal miners. He reminds the crowd of his family’s ties to West Virginia and the outsize number of military volunteers and heroes from the state. Invoking the Greatest Generation, he refuses to think that what they fought for was intimidation and fear at home.
Why are the most coal-rich counties in the state the poorest, he asks? The coal companies are literally liquidating the state. Virtually the entire state of New York, he says, has elevated mercury levels in fish because of coal-powered electricity emissions. He recently learned that his own mercury levels are ten times higher than normal because he eats so much freshwater fish. One out of five lakes in the Adirondacks is sterile because of acid rain. These are the hidden costs of coal: “they don’t tell you about this when they say costs are nine cents a kilowatt hour,” he says. There is a net cost, not a net profit, to coal.
The counter-protest leans on its horns. “Honk if you love mountains!” Kennedy says, pausing to wait.
“We are cutting down these historic landscapes,” he says, describing the Pleistocene ice age and the way that all North American forests were re-seeded from the Appalachian region. The biodiversity of West Virginia is responsible for the entire ecology of our nation.
He describes the economics of strip-mining and the long history of illegal activity by coal companies, culminating in the Bush-era Interior Department where regulations were altered to undo the actions of the courts.
The trucks start up again. Kennedy reminds the crowd of a time in his youth when his uncle was after Jimmy Hoffa; trucks would pass by his house then, blasting their horns. He wasn’t intimidated then, and he won’t be now. “Honk if you love mountaintop removal,” he says. “Honk if you love America!”
The horns finally fade. He picks the thread back up. “They changed the definition of the word ‘fill,’” he says, “and made it legal for anyone to dump rock and debris in any river they want.” He rejects the characterization of MTR opponents as extremists; there is nothing extreme about clean water and air. “Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy,” he says. Massey wants to treat the state of West Virginia as a business in liquidation. Kennedy describes it as a kind of deficit spending, leaving the costs for future generations to pay in diminished wealth and ecology.
Kennedy says there have been more than 10,000 violations of the Clean Water Act in the last decade. “This is real crime, with real victims,” he says. Children poisoned by toxins in the mining waste suffer reduced IQs and education levels. If a foreign power did this to America’s children, what would we call them? He asks.
“Murderers!” the crowd responds.
Kennedy calls MTR a crime. Agencies meant to protect us have been captured by lobbyists. Referring to the Reverend’s speech, he reminds the crowd of how central the natural world is to spirituality. “We have an obligation to our creator, to our children, to each other,” he says, closing.
