Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Taken from the Courier-Journal 6/18/06 in Louisville Kentucky

By Dianne Aprile
Special to The Courier-Journal

Two weeks after coming home from a tour of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Eastern Kentucky, one particular image lingers in my mind. More than all the other sights and experiences of the trip – and they were plentiful – I remember the figure of Daymon Morgan, an 80-year-old World War II veteran, wearing bib overalls and a wide-brimmed hat, standing in the lush green woods of his Leslie County farm, holding a broken wildflower in his hand.

Beneath a canopy of trees, he described in plain but stirring terms his love and concern for the mountainous land above Lower Bad Creek, land he has nurtured and defended for half a century. It was here, among his family and friends, that he returned to build a home after serving his country.

The wildflower he held in his hand was bloodroot, one of the first signs of spring in Kentucky. It was broken because Morgan wanted to demonstrate how the flower got its name. He showed us that when you snap the root, it bleeds a sticky, red-orange sap. Long before Kentuckians inhabited the commonwealth, Indians used the plant for medicinal purposes as well as a dye to paint themselves for battle.

Morgan’s woods are teeming with bloodroot, as well as golden seal, ginseng and wild ginger. Not too long ago, these native plants grew wild and plentiful not just in Morgan’s woods but in the neighboring mountaintops adjoining his property, on the tree-laden slopes that have been part of the majesty of the Appalachian landscape – and integral to the lives of his community – for generations.

But now, the mountaintops surrounding Morgan’s land are bleeding. More precisely, they are being blown apart with explosives. Mining companies are blasting the tops off the mountains, pursuing a technique that makes it easier and faster and cheaper to remove coal from the earth that holds it. It’s an efficient technique: Explode the mountain; remove the coal; shove the waste over the nearest hillside; “reclaim” the site; move on to the next site.

But Morgan is a hold-out, a resister to this process. He’s told the mining companies they’ll never take his mountaintop. Therefore, his land – untouched by their equipment – is a good starting point for understanding exactly what this brutal mining technique is removing from Kentucky’s land, people, communities and natural ecology.

One has only to drive a short distance from Morgan’s home, down dusty, eroded, pot-holed roads, to get a glimpse of what he fears and wants to stop: barren plateaus of land, flat as airstrips and far more desolate, that once, before the bulldozers and explosives had their way with it, looked just like Morgan’s lush woods. Today, many of the neighborhood’s streams – once home to fish and wildlife – are dried up, vanished, filled with sediment or, worse, with the demolition debris that is allowed to tumble down newly decapitated mountains into once-running, now unrecognizable creeks and brooks.

Fears for many

Morgan’s fear isn’t just for the streams, or the trees, the deer or the wild turkeys, the ginseng or the bloodroot. It’s for his family and friends; their health and safety. And he fears for the welfare of all the rest of us who, let’s face it, live downstream.

“We are going to be the endangered species,” Morgan said, his eyes stubbornly fixed on his visitors, making it clear whom he meant when he said “we.”

I met Morgan two weeks ago on an authors’ tour of mountaintop-removal mining sites. The trip, inspired by Wendell Berry and organized by the non-profit organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, was the third such excursion in a year’s time. On our tour, there were roughly two dozen writers, mostly Kentuckians, travelling together from Lexington to Morgan’s farm, then on to Hazard, Hindman and back, stopping often to view evidence of the collateral damage of this mining technique.

Our first night, we stayed at the Hindman Settlement School, a treasured institution established in 1902 at the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County. There, we listened to the stories of men and women who live among the mountaintops, people who oppose the violence imposed on their land and culture, families on the front line of the devastation that this brand of coal mining wreaks. If the devil is in the details, their stories spoke of the diabolic: foundation-splitting blasts; undrinkable, slimy, sulfurous water; dust so thick children can’t play outdoors; coal trucks, overweight and speeding, tearing up already dangerous roads; streams once filled with minnows and frogs, now dead; mountaintops resembling battlefields where, in the words of one resident, it looks like “a ton of bombs gone off.”

Fighting for their land

Despite their belief that coal companies routinely get away with breaking the law, these people told us they were determined to fight for their rights and for the future of the land they love. They called for enforcement of current laws and enactment of more stringent legislation to protect Kentucky’s environment.

John Roark, 61, a resident of Montgomery Creek in Perry County, spoke in vivid biological terms of the threat to the Appalachian mountain range posed by coal companies: “They want every ounce of blood they can squeeze out of it.”

Back in Lexington at the end of our trip, we were greeted by authors from previous tours, including Wendell Berry, who recalled the poet Shelley’s definition of writers as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It’s a designation with responsibilities that ought to be taken seriously, especially in light of how cavalierly some of our acknowledged legislators take them.

A case in point is the so-called “stream saver bill,” which has failed to pass either of the past two sessions of the Kentucky General Assembly. The legislation, if passed, would not ban mountaintop removal, per se, but would prohibit coal companies from dumping mining wastes into streams. This would do away with one of the most damaging effects on the environment – the burying of streams. According to KFTC, more than 400 miles of streams in Kentucky have already been eliminated as a result of mining waste.

What’s shameful is that the House Natural Resources and Environment committee has yet to allow a hearing on the bill. What could possibly be keeping Rep. Jim Gooch, the committee chair, from permitting an honest airing of the issue?

Rep. Don Pasley of Winchester is the chief sponsor of the “stream saver” legislation. His co-sponsors in the most recent legislative session included Charlie Hoffman (Georgetown); Lonnie Napier and Harry Moberly (Madison County); Rick Rand (Shelbyville); Jim Wayne, Mary Lou Marzian, Tom Riner, Reginald Meeks, Tom Burch (all of Louisville), and Gerry Lynn (Brandenburg). These legislators deserve our thanks.

And what of those who have failed to rally ’round the legislation? All I can hope is that someday they find themselves listening to the same appalling stories we heard at Hindman, having their eyes opened to what the Kentucky author Harry Caudill called the “exhaustion of soil, exhaustion of men, exhaustion of hopes” in his 1963 classic on Appalachian coal mining, Night Comes to the Cumberlands.

`We are not throw-away people’

Someday I hope these lawmakers will hear, as I did, the testimony of Sam Gilbert, a resident of Eiola in Letcher County, who stated: “We are not throw-away people.”

Unfortunately, our most powerful legislators act as if that is exactly what Gilbert and his neighbors are. They need to go back to Caudill’s prophetic book and heed his warning about our attitudes toward Appalachia and its people: “We will continue to ignore them at peril to ourselves and our posterity.”

Sadly, Caudill’s words are as relevant as ever.

And yet, I find hope in the image of the bloodroot. Harbinger of spring, its white flower is a sign that change is coming and can’t be stopped; its green leaves – the color of hope – persist throughout summer, a symbol of unrelenting resolve.

With such hope and persistence, Kentuckians can bring about change. Change of heart among our legislators. Change of removal procedures among mining companies. Change of course for our disappearing streams. And change of direction for a policy that spells disaster not just for Kentucky’s mountains but for the commonwealth as a whole – and for the world beyond its borders.

What can an individual do? Write your legislators – especially, Gooch and Rep. Jody Richards, speaker of the House. (You can find their home addresses at www.vote-smart.org/index.htm.) Urge them to support the “stream saver” bill when it comes up next time. At the every least, insist that it be heard in committee.

Remind them, as John Roark of Montgomery Creek reminded us, “Our very lives are being put on the line.”

Dianne Aprile is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. Her work will appear in the anthology “Now Write!: Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers” (Penguin).

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