Impeded streams, baffled minds, & Appalachia
“If you live in a wooded suburb of Boston and treasure the preserved lands next door, if you live in the dense neighborhoods of Boulder, Colorado, and like to go to Rocky Mountain National Park for your summer hikes, your relation to the land is secure, a privilege enshrined in law. But if you love the hills of southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, if they form your idea of beauty and rest, your native or chosen image of home, then your love has prepared your heart for breaking.” — Jedediah Purdy, After Nature
One afternoon three years ago, I was weaving up Black Mountain in a car with a man named Carl Shoupe. He had driven the roads for decades — illegally, legally, at night, at dawn; over sheets of ice and flattened maple leaves and summer rain. A native of Benham, Kentucky, a community of 500 people nestled deep in Harlan County, Carl knew the woods well. But each time we turned and there was a clearing in the trees, he slowed to almost a stop. We both stared, awestruck, at the rounded green mountains, their peaks reaching above the wispy gray clouds, the blue echoes of more ranges fading into the distance.
Seven miles up, feet across the Virginia state line, we pulled off to a gravel shoulder. Carl stepped out of the car and motioned for me to come over to the edge of the hill. He wanted to show me something. More than that, he wanted to watch my face, which fell as I anxiously looked out over the horizon, expecting to see another beautiful mountain view.
But there was nothing. And beneath that nothingness, black and brown shavings, piles of rubble, dust, soot: lingering ghosts of mountaintops.
In February, Duke University researchers published a study that said something those of us familiar with Appalachia have known for years — coal companies are obliterating our mountains through mountaintop removal mining. Parts of the region are 40 percent flatter than before, they reported. The average slope of land dropped 10 degrees. In southern West Virginia, there’s enough rubble to bury Manhattan.
The study was enough of a shock to get The New York Times to pen an editorial on it. Environmental publications throughout the country wrote about it as well. I suppose, it seemed to warrant something bigger than the sporadic article or random documentary from big media about life in Appalachia and the havoc coal companies wreak on it.
There was a certain air to this dispatch, much like when we reported 2015’s record high temperature, or the lead in Flint’s water — oh, yeah, we let this go way too far. Sorry.
When a mountain is blown up, the leftover earth and accompanying waste, known as overburden or spoil, is dumped into nearby valleys or sludge ponds, which bury or pollute streams. The sites leak arsenic, cadmium and selenium into the streams, soil, and groundwater.
Coal companies are supposed to reclaim the mountaintops and plant grasses, but they often file for deferrals and never finish the job. Even when they do, there’s “no way to put lipstick on that pig,” someone once told me. This form of mining is less popular now, as natural gas competes with coal, but all of the rubble, sludge, and poison has been dripping down the mountains, into the lives of these communities, for decades.
Study after study has shown that people living near mountaintop removal sites have higher rates of physical and mental illness. Grist recently reported
“people living in mountaintop removal counties are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to exhibit at least moderate depressive symptoms.” According to another study, people living near mountaintop mining have cancer rates of 14.4 percent, compared to 9.4 percent for people in other parts of Appalachia. The rate of birth defects are 42 percent higher. The list of risks and consequences go on.
In 2013, I met a man named Elmer Lloyd, who was tall and easygoing, with a thick Kentucky drawl muddied even more by the packed dip behind his lip. As we stood in his yard and picked blackberries, he showed me his prized possession — a fish pond he built in 1993. But in 2006, Nally & Hamilton Enterprises began a mountaintop removal mining job on the mountain behind his home and dumped the toxic sludge and mud into the stream that fed the pond. It rushed with such force that it knocked the garden wall out and flooded his yard. His years of work were destroyed. Almost all the fish died. His tap water was contaminated. Elmer said the company pumped more chemicals in to fix it, which made it worse. They denied any wrongdoing. After five years of written violations and meetings with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Division of Water, they removed the mud and finally reached a small settlement.
So when I read these articles, I know they are decades too late. I think of Elmer. I think of Carl and his grandchildren. I think of my grandmother, who was born in eastern Kentucky and didn’t live to see her mountains decimated.
I think of Flint. I think of South Chicago. I think of the San Juan River Basin, the oil fields in Los Angeles, of Richmond, California. I think of race, and of class, and of the environment, and of complete, unjust, infuriating, maddening inequality.
An Appalachian saying, adapted from a Chief Seattle speech on the environment in 1854, rings loudly in my ears: “What we do to the land, we do to the people.”
The mountains out West are incredibly dramatic, and I fell for them immediately. They’re so jagged, sharp, and jarring against the blue sky. Last year, I drove across the country, and with each new state, I shrieked louder, “How did I not know this existed?”
Perhaps, in the West, it’s easier to take that drama for granted— there’s always a scene to dwarf us humans, and usually, those scenes are protected. And it’s not just mountains. In Utah, it was the canyons. In New Mexico, it was the towering pines on the mesas. In Southern California, it was the San Gabriels and Santa Monicas, both so vastly different from each other, yet always competing for my heart. There’s high desert and low desert and ocean and prairie and arches and cliffs and mountain after mountain after mountain.
I now live in Paonia, a beautiful, tiny town on the Western Slope of Colorado. I’ve never traveled in this state, never climbed a 14,000-footer or even seen the Rockies except through an airplane window. I plan on it.
But for now, every time I step out the door, I can see two mountaintops —and the peace it brings is enough. They feel quite familiar. Paonia is part of coal country. The cities around here are breathing their last bit of black rock before they must reinvent. Every time I hear people talk of progress, of solar, of quiet Main Streets and boarded windows, of the future and what it may hold, my mind drifts east, toward Appalachia.
As a writer, there’s always been a certain sense of guilt that fills me knowing I came to write about the West. It’s like I ditched my first love because it wasn’t good enough, stopped trying to conquer an outdoors that wasn’t challenging enough. I began writing about mountaintop removal mining in graduate school, and failed to get a story published that I wanted, so I moved on. I needed to at the time. Years later, that guilt mixed with knowledge is starting to feel more like fuel. After all, being a writer is being okay with breaking your own heart over and over. And over.
So when my bones ache for Appalachia, as they do many days; when I use my best words to describe the majesty that is those lush, green hills, and I get a blank stare from someone trying to imagine anything other than sheer rock faces and snow-capped peaks; when I wonder why it has taken so incredibly long for that study to come out or why my mountains never got the same protection as these Western ones — well, to be honest, I have no idea what to do. So I write.
Journalism is wanting to provide information to move the world along, whatever that may entail: always the truth, always the facts, sometimes an idea, a consideration, a question, to lead someone else to figure out a solution. I write about the ecological issues that affect us and our understanding of the world every day, trying to better provide that information for the public.
And yet, with the subject of mountaintop removal, I feel as though I’m suffocating beneath what I want to scream and what I want to write, all my frustrations, fears, perceptions, and emotional ties, knowing that the rest of the world is catching up, finally, with what people in the hollers have been saying for years, though they continually dig themselves deeper into political traps: that it has to stop, now, forever, but that it won’t. Unless we write. And talk, and sing, and picket, and elect, and change, and fight. Unless we get creative.
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.” — Wendell Berry
