coal « Roan’s Mountain Reveries

Okay, I’m leaving my job. I’m leaving my family. I’m leaving HOME. I’m leaving this monstrosity of a life that I have here in Aville, and trading it in for some hopes and ideas and anticipation for life in the Kentucky coal fields.

And I think that I’m okay with this. In fact, I am pretty sure that I am purt-near excited.

PM is an amazing place. There are great people that work there, and great people that have worked there in the past. It’s in a totally different place than my blue ridge mountain home of generations (spanning centuries), but it’s in a place that warrants attention and energy.

I guess one of the harder things about all of this is that I am genuinely sad to leave my work at the Hill. There are so many projects that will be left unfinished, so many ideas and dreams that I had about things here left unfufilled. I never really thought that I would leave, I never thought that I would follow through with my desires for wandering or exploring other places, I was convinced that I wanted to be HOME, where I could have a family, be with my family, and raise our future kid in consistency and comfort in our ancestral homelands. I had not thought that I could be enticed enough to leave that for anything.

However, the PM is an amazing place. The opportunity to do meaningful work with my sweetheart cannot be undervalued. The opportunity to work under a capable and wise director cannot be underated. The gift of working in a place with wonderful forests to explore cannot be disregarded. H County is an amazing place chock full of real life examples of the complicated relationship between land and people, energy companies and local residents, and the many hardships for people and their environment because of the extraction of natural gas and coal mining, especially mountain top removal. I am excited about going to PM and meeting people in the community as well as the school— people who have interesting stories and struggles to share and people that I know we can really learn from.

I don’t want to go up there with some convoluted “do-gooder” attitude that several people have tried to pawn off on me when I’ve shared the news about our move. I know what roles (both the good and bad) that outsiders play in a community. I don’t have grandious plans of “fixing” H County. I don’t want people there to lump me in that category of furriner/do-gooder. I know that it’s probably inevitable that that will happen, but my intention is to go and participate. I am excited to share anything that I know that is of value to folks or that can create more efficiency, but I am also really excited to learn various things from the great people that live up there.

Outside of Caretta, WV, I met a wonderful woman at the Muncy Cabin who I plan to meet back up with this spring to learn more edible/medicinal plants that she knew. There are numerous musicians and ballad singers that I want to sit knee to knee with and talk/learn about their music. I am excited about the quilters that get together at PM. I am eager to meet the school children that come, and excited to learn from all the staff there.

Here’s an image for those of you curious about what exactly Mountain Top Removal is. This photograph was taken on a recent flyover of MTR sites with Southwings, at Mountain Justice Summer Camp. The photographer, Liz Veazey, has a whole slew of photos on her flickr site.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the definition of mountaintop removal is:
“Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys.”

From the EPA’s Website: Why Should We Be Concerned?
Mountaintop removal began on a small scale in West Virginia in the late 1960s. Beginning in the 1990s it became the dominant coal-mining technique for several reasons:
*Americans’ demand for electricity has jumped 70 percent in the past 20 years;
*The demand for clean-burning, low-sulfur coal by utilities shot up after Congress passed the 1990 Clean Air Act; and
*The development of massive “drag line” equipment has made it possible to shear off mountaintops to get at multiple seams of coal.

The impact of mountaintop removal on nearby communities is devastating. Dynamite blasts needed to splinter rock strata are so strong they crack the foundations and walls of houses. Mining dries up an average of 100 wells a year and contaminates water in others. In many coalfield communities, the purity and availability of drinking water are keen concerns. Blasting and shearing mountains have added to the damage done to underground aquifers by deep mines.

Appalachia’s waterways are among the regions’s most valuable tourist attractions. Canoeists and fishermen come for the pleasures of rivers meandering under umbrellas of green or dancing in sunlight. The valley fills bury streambeds and contaminate streams with sediment from the mines.The forests covering the Mid-Atlantic region are unique – the largest contiguous temperate forest in the world. The land is rich with wildlife and native plants. But in mountaintop removal areas, the native plants are being destroyed, and the wildlife chased away.

~From the EPA’s Website.