Movements of the Mountains
It was quiet sitting atop “Big-Ass Rock”, as I learned this place was called. The wind blew through the trees, rustling the turning leaves of early fall. The birds sang in chorus with each other with their own distinct sounds: chirp, caw, tweet. The forest glistened with life from the fresh rain fallen during the night before. Trees of every kind filled the cracks and crevices of this rock formation: chestnut oak, black oak, scarlet oak, beach, red maple. If you peered through the canopy, you could catch a glimpse of mountains only a few miles away. Leaves of every color scattered the forest floor, bright from the changing seasons. I thought to myself, “this is how it’s supposed to be, and yet, somehow, someway, it’s not.” I would later be able to visualize the reason behind this.
On my whirl-wind tour of Eastern Kentucky and Robinson Forest, I finally grasped how little industries contemplate and consider the ramifications their exploitation causes to occur. I realized just how palpable this negligence was a few hours later after driving up a mining site to reach a cemetery just outside Robinson Forest. This small cemetery was surrounded three-hundred and sixty degrees by mountain top removal strip mining, a deadly practice that shatters mountains in order to collect the thin layers of coal beneath them. A thought occurred to me that the people who come into this cemetery in order to pay their respects to the deceased not only have to face their loss of a loved one, but also the destruction of the home they once shared with that person. Beautiful gravestones commemorating the deceased contrasted the barren landscape behind them. On one side, a flat field of black coal laid open like roadkill waiting for the vultures; on the other, a pond damned up with coal sludge swelled with the continued strip mining. The pond gurgled with toxins of every kind, slowly intoxicating the life it touched. Miles and miles of thickly forested mountains were intermittently disrupted by seemingly random patches of prairie due to the “reforestation” efforts of the coal industries.
The corruption of Eastern Kentucky is mostly due to the “shoot and shove” method of mining coal in the mountains. Mountain top removal has been chosen more and more in Eastern Kentucky due to the economic and safety advantages relative to underground mining (Moyers 2007). The process involves blasting the tops of mountains, or overburden, loose. Then, using bulldozers, the miners push the loose overburden into nearby valleys. According to a 2009 report, a little over 500 mountains in just the Appalachian region have been completely flattened by mountain top removal (Geredien 2009). Six years later, hundreds more have undoubtedly been destroyed. This flattening includes valley fills that occur due to mountain top removal. This often blocks off streams and kills habitats along with their residents. This is detrimental to the populations of wildlife that reside in the Appalachia region. For those few animals who survive, they must find refuge in different areas that are untouched by strip mining.
Focusing in on the sight of the coal sludge pond, it became an unfortunate reminder of the tragedy that unfurled in Martin County Kentucky just fifteen years before. This spill oozed three-hundred and six million gallons of coal sludge into the surrounding town, contaminating the land and water with dangerous heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, and mercury (Sourcewatch 2012). According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the spill was thirty times worse than the infamous Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in 1989 (Sourcewatch 2012). Massey Energy, the company who owned the mine, foresaw this tragedy and continued to operate the collapsing mine. Jack Spadaro, a former employee of Massey, communicated to the public that the company “willfully ignored the Mining Safety and Health Association’s guidelines” and “they knew [the mine] was an accident waiting to happen” (House 2009). As a consequence to Massey’s actions and other companies’ continued actions, the sludge and mining practices in these communities continue to cripple the water supply and taint the environment where Appalachians reside. I suddenly remembered Judy Bonds, a woman who lived in the Appalachian region her entire life, and how she described how the coal company admitted to a chemical leakage at the preparation plant that seeped into the nearby streams, but claimed the toxins were not harmful to human beings. She later recounted how a stream was “filled with dead fish on the surface” (House 2009). The companies lied to the people of Appalachia, causing destruction within the communities. This destruction manifested in many forms such as water contamination, destruction of property, and death. Families that reside within these communities are unavoidably affected by these spills and continuous contaminations. As the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth’s (KFTC) mantra reads “When the land is sick, the people are sick.” Appalachians traditionally use the land in their everyday lives, and when the land they need is poisoned, their lifestyle is crippled. Massey Energy and other companies like it have not and are not held accountable by either the law or by the Appalachian communities for the destructive practices they employ.
The degradation of the mountains started with the infamous John C. C. Mayo. This man wrote up a manipulative and vague contract called the Broad Form Deed which he convinced many Appalachians to sign. This deed transferred the rights of the subsurface minerals over to John Mayo; this right, he abused. He started extracting coal by any and all means necessary, for he was now protected by the law. The Appalachian people were tricked into signing over their property rights to a man with no understanding of their true value, their non-monetary value. Later, a bill called the Surface Mining and Coal Reclamation Act (SMCRA) was instated along with the Approximate Original Contour (AOC) stipulation. SMCRA stated that a mountain was to be restored to its approximate size and shape after mining was completed. However, the AOC stipulation let variance occur in the way it was interpreted, which was abused by the companies. The AOC stated that the area must be put back to equal or higher use. Instead of returning the land to some semblance of the previous ecosystem, the companies chose the cheapest path and usually turned the areas into pastures or wildlife habitat after utilizing shoddy reforestation techniques. With no definite understanding or stipulations of what to do in order to return the land properly, companies seem to choose the cheapest and least effective route to do so.
Much of this was explained to me the day before I visited the graveyard, in a recently completed reclamation site, by Michael French, a Forester who works with the organization Green Forests Work. He illustrated the process of extracting coal and the measures the organization usually took to restore the land to what it once was. I looked around and saw many species already starting to thrive in the lines of free soil. The land was breathtaking; to see a clearing in the beginning process of reforming itself was incredible. Tiny plants stretched to the sky in order to bathe in more sunlight, large boulders of leftover coal were scattered intermittently across the ground, and many flowers including Kentucky’s state flower, the goldenrod, streaked the landscape with their brilliance. There were a vast array of species planted in the reclamation area as well as some blown in from the surrounding forest. Black oaks, red maple, sweet birch, poke berry, and many more species were taking over the cleared land. To make this area what it has started to become took many hours of labored work, for this area was previously disrupted by the poor reforestation efforts taken by the coal industry.
Such poor examples of reforestation were compacting the soil with bulldozers, planting invasive species, and replacing the lush mountain landscape with unused prairie. These techniques create landscapes that are foreign to the area. The only species that grow in these conditions are those that are unrecognizable by the communities nearby. Luckily, there are ways to repair this damage. Michael French explained the process of tilling up the compacted soil was utilized in order to allow trees to live longer. Gas exchange more easily occurs in loose soil, allowing trees to better absorb nutrients. The native species that lived in the forest before the land was mined needed loose, rich soil to live. Loosening the soil is not as cost effective as the alternative, so the coal companies usually compact the soil when they restructure the land after mining. On the reclamation site, I could see there were long gashes in the land, revealing where the soil was stirred up by Green Forests Work to allow plant life to flourish. Native species have difficulty receiving needed nutrients in compacted soil and most of the trees and other plant life die due to this. However, plants such as Autumn Olive grow easily in compacted soil, which is one reason many companies choose to use this plant in the reforestation process. The drawbacks to these plants are that they are invasive and rapidly grow to outcompete the other surviving species. This leaves little diversity in species within the new landscape. Michael pointed and cursed at a few Autumn Olive plants near the reclamation site that still managed to weasel their way in, showing me how invasive and overwhelming they can be in a reclamation site. He explained Green Forests Work compiled a new forestry reclamation approach to tackle the problems that surfaced from the coal companies. The approach includes leaving four feet of growth medium on the surface, avoiding compaction of the soil, planting a variety of species in the area, using proper planting techniques, and lightly seeding tree compactable groundcovers. As I witnessed by the thriving reclamation area, these techniques work quite well. Companies are not required to abide by Green Forests Work’s new approach, however. They are still able to compact and “restore” the land however they see fit under the current regulations. Native species and a variety of planted species are not requirements within the government’s stipulations on how to reforest a mining site. The future of positive reclamation relies upon people like Michael and his organization to come back over the land and return it to its proper topography.
Sites like the one I stood upon and the organizations that produce these second-growth landscapes give hope to the Appalachian people. In Something’s Rising, Bev May recounted how the coal companies “left [the mountains] a mess” (House 2009). She watched the coal companies like Massey Energy try to take the land from the people around her over the years. Restructuring these mining sites and forming some semblance of what they once were eases the pain of seeing large gouges of absent forest within the mountains that residents were so accustomed to seeing. When I drove to eastern Kentucky, I witnessed firsthand just how bad the conditions were. Houses were broken, yards were trashed, and stretches of road commemorated lives taken by rampant coal trucks. The crosses I passed in town reminded me of a woman named Renee Pierdominici who lost her life due to a careless coal truck driver. After dropping her daughter off at the bus, Renee was headed to work. Then, “while she sat [at a stoplight], a loaded coal truck some witnesses said [had] been speeding swerved alongside her Oldsmobile Bravada, then toppled over onto its side. The truck crushed Pierdominici’s vehicle, killing her” (Hoffman 1998). The coal companies are not only causing people’s lives to be in poor conditions-- they are also taking them. I could not help but think about what kind of corrupt society allows such blatantly inhumane conditions continue to exist, just to benefit industry.
I can only imagine the agony Appalachians must experience to witness the destruction of one’s own home and feel as though there is no way to stop the process. On my last day in Robinson Forest, I could just barely get a glimpse at the destruction mining has caused. To view its entirety, I set out for the fire watch tower on the last day. This wooden and rustic tower stood about eighty feet tall, reaching far above the swaying tree line. As I took the stairs one by one, each squeaking step allowed me to peer further and further across the unfurling landscape. As I sat atop the fire tower, I started to capture a sense of how far this destruction extended both physically and communally. On my right there was a picture-esque landscape of rolling hills that faded into the distance, seeming to mesh into the iridescent blue sky. To my left, the forest rolled up to a pit of brown and black dirt that revealed the site where a mountain once stood, with the hills continuing on behind them. For just my few minutes atop the tower, a fraction of the time compared to what other have experienced living here, I witnessed the beauty of the forest. Gazing out, time stood still as the wind whispered of the memories buried beneath the flattened landscape. The pain one might feel to look out and see a scar of land such as this, knowing a friend, brother, or sister once played freely on that mountain must be incredibly immense, for these mountains are not merely a breathtaking landscape-- these mountains are the memories and lifestyles of the people that reside within them. To take away just one of these is to deem their existence trivial or unnecessary, a right no man should possess, yet companies such as Massey Energy think they do. They use the law to protect and trick the people of Appalachia into abandoning their rights of these lands. As Bev May and Judy Bonds described, the companies bribe, lie, threaten, and blackmail communities into signing over their rights to the minerals within their land (House 2009). After people sign over their land, the companies are protected by the law in most circumstances in order to take the coal beneath the land people reside on by any means necessary. Families have little legal right to fight these companies, and, therefore, cannot do much to prevent the destruction. With the government backing mining companies, with the communities dealing with traumatic situations, with no accountability for the company’s management practices, with the general population’s ignorance, it is difficult to rise up against injustice.
When companies force themselves upon trembling communities, destruction and antagonistic effects coalesce very quickly. As I walked about the peaceful cemetery before I was to return to the bustling city of Lexington, I stumbled upon a beautiful headstone that seemed to embody precisely what these companies were doing to these families and the mountains they could not protect.
References:
Geredien, Ross, and GIS Consultant. Assessing the Extent of Mountaintop Removal in Appalachia:
An Analysis Using Vector Data. Rep. Boone: Appalachian Voices, 2009. Print.
Hoffman, Ernie, and Cindi Lash. "Woman Crushed, Killed by Coal Truck." Pittsburg Post
Gazette 27 Jan. 1998: 3. Print.
House, Silas, and Jason Howard. Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop
Removal. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky, 2009. Print.
"Martin County Sludge Spill." - SourceWatch. N.p., May 2012. Web. 04 Oct. 2015.
Moyers, Bill. "Mountaintop Mining." PBS. PBS, 7 Sept. 2007. Web. 08 Oct. 2015.
