Mountaintop Removal

Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land

John Denver

I was a child when John Denver was at the height of his popularity, and whenever I heard this song, I could not understand this lyric. I remember thinking, "You can't tear down a mountain! That doesn't make any sense!"

Twenty-five years later, I was horrified to realize just how wrong I was. When I was in graduate school, I attended a conference at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, about energy conservation. I decided to attend a session about mountaintop removal, a practice I had never heard about before. "How in the world," I wondered, "does one remove the top from a mountain?" The answer is simple of course - with lots and lots and lots of explosives. Apparently, digging into the mountains to extract the underlying coal became too cumbersome and expensive, so coal companies decided it was just easier to remove the mountains altogether by exploding the tops off of them.

As you may well imagine, this takes some doing, and the unfortunate people who live in these mountains can attest to the fact that the shelling goes on all day, every day, for months on end. One resident of West Virginia, named Maria, described the scene of her family's Christmas dinner as something akin to trying to celebrate in a war zone. The dishes were literally coming up off of the table. (Yes, they were shelling on Christmas day.) As you can also imagine, the constant shelling results in debris flying everywhere and destroys the natural beauty and wonder for which most people move to, visit, and write songs about mountains. For the residents of Appalachia, the very reason their ancestors moved to the mountains generations ago is being demolished before their very eyes. When Maria expressed her concerns to the coal company that was causing this damage, she was told that if she didn't like it she should just move away, as if she could sell her property to anyone after it had been filled up with the mud and debris from the havoc being wreaked all around her.

The domino effect that mountaintop removal has on ecosystems most certainly cannot be measured, but there is one immediate repercussion that claims lives and leaves many homeless - flooding. An important factor not considered by the coal companies and their government supporters is that the mountains, and the trees and shrubs calling them home, are holding water - lots and lots and lots of water. They are not just rearranging dirt out there; when they remove the tops from mountains, they are erasing hundreds of millions of years of quiet, constant, and patient development. This reality becomes painfully apparent with the first heavy rains that fall on a mountain that has been violently transformed into a plateau. The waters run right off of the top and proceed to flood the valleys and the homes of the people living in them, claiming history, property, and innocent lives.

As people witness their friends and neighbors dying or being driven out of their homes, fear becomes palpable. Maria's children sleep with their clothes on and their shoes right next to the bed every night so that they may run at a moment's notice, and are taking anti-anxiety medications just to sleep at all. Similar stories were shared by others who live in the mountains of West Virginia, and those people clearly perceive what so many of us do not want to recognize: "They can get away with doing this to us because we're poor." In other words, their opinions are considered invalid. I have repeatedly heard the argument that poor people should not enjoy the benefits of a government run on tax dollars because "they haven't paid." It appears to me that too many of them certainly do pay. They pay with their homes, their livelihoods, their communities, and their lives. They pay more dearly than most of the rest of us could ever imagine.

From a poignant short documentary film that was shown at the conference, one scene really stood out to me and has stuck with me for several years. A gentleman in his 60's, who had lived in Appalachia his entire life, stands on a lookout that once featured a spectacular view of mountains and foothills that boast the most biologically diverse temperate forests on the planet, and looks out over a plain of ruins, a desert of brown streaks where there once was a sea of green leaves and quiet mist. He explained that when he, too, protested the wholesale destruction of the mountain behind his home, he was asked the following impertinent, if not downright perverse, question, "Why don't you just take a picture of it?" With tears filling his eyes, he recounted his reply, "You don't take a picture of a mountain. It's always going to be there."

It is heartbreaking to witness how greed has so thoroughly wrenched the truth from this statement. It is maddening to listen to our own collective consciousness rationalize that such destruction is necessary while, as individuals, we would never allow this to go on in our own backyards.

Maria ended the session with this statement: "This is eco-terrorism, and it's making our lives a living hell, and we are asking for your help."

There are so many ways that we can help that cost us very little.

1. The first way is obvious: turn off the lights. Get into the habit of turning off electronics when you are not using them, and don't use them at all when they are unnecessary (pass on the electric hand-lotion warmer, please).

2. Call the EPA and tell them to support Clean Water legislation, which can prevent the dumping of debris and sludge into mountain streams, and as such effectively halt or dramatically slow mountaintop removal.

3. Support the development of alternative energies.

4. Visit www.appvoices.org to find out more about mountaintop removal.

5. Lastly, search yourself to find out what you truly value. I believe that the reason so many of us allow things like this to go on is that we too readily accept values that are imposed upon us, rather than reflecting on what we really want. In spite of our grandest platitudes, we are still taught that material wealth and the health of the economy are more important than the health of everything else. I think if we really search within ourselves, we will find that what we really value is the health of living things, and will plainly see that causing this much pain isn't worth a little more convenience for some and lots of money for others. I think we will see that we do feel a connection with other people and with other living things, and from that connection recognize the egregiousness of blowing them apart for the sake of cheaper energy.

We have the power to find another way. There are countless moments in our history when we have changed and overcome practices and institutions that we knew were hurting people, and we can change this practice as well. Please take the Mountain Pledge and do just one thing. Just one.

Sharyn Beach

I know I am only one little person and I can only do little things. But there are so many little things that need to be done.

Peace Pilgrim