Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Judy Bonds, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch and inspiration to the movement to end mountaintop removal and for a clean energy future, succumbed to cancer last night.

Judy was a passionate women who sparked that passion in others to fight against injustice. She was loved by many, and will be sorely missed in the physical form, but her spirit will live within all of us who fight to protect these Appalachian communities and the ancient mountains that sustain them.

Biography:

Born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Julia Bonds, 51, is a coal miner’s daughter and the director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Over the past six years, Bonds has emerged as a formidable community leader against a highly destructive mining practice called mountaintop removal that is steadily ravaging the Appalachian mountain range and forcing neighboring communities, some of whom have lived in the region for generations, to abandon their homes.

In 2001, Bonds and her family became the last residents to evacuate from her own hometown of Marfork Hollow where six generations of her family had lived, due to mountaintop removal operations that had encroached into her community.

Bonds, who previously had worked as a waitress and manager at Pizza Hut and for convenience stores, now devotes 90 hours a week to protect Appalachia and the people who live there from the ravages of mountaintop removal mining. The catalyst for her activism, she says, was the day her grandson stood in a stream in Coal River Valley with his fists full of dead fish and asked, “What’s wrong with these fish?”

Since then, her dedication and success as an activist and organizer have made her one of the nation’s leading community activists confronting an industry practice that has been called “strip mining on steroids.”