Amber & Larry Speak Out in Nebraska

Larry Gibson and Amber Whittington came to Creighton University to share a part of their lives with us. It is one thing to learn about mountaintop removal in a classroom from a professor but Larry and Amber are experts on what it is like to live in West Virginia. They came to share a part of their human experience with us. Some people were familiar with the issue and learned the personal
stories to put a face to statistics. Others who heard Larry and Amber speak had no idea this was an issue and were not aware of where their energy comes from.

Monday they met with students, faculty and staff. Events included a green bag lunch,a lecture to environmental science students, and a talk in a 500 seat auditorium that was open to the public. The director of facilities at Creighton enjoyed Amber & Larry’s “outstanding passion for the environment.”

A Powerful Weapon

Post Written by Volunteer Event Planner Lou Martin

On Tuesday, February 21, Larry Gibson and Amber Whittington spoke in Margaret Sanger Hall at Chatham University, a small school in Pittsburgh with an enrollment of about 2,500 students including 700 who attend the all-women undergraduate college. The event began with a brief video taken on Kayford Mountain, just beyond Hell’s Gate, overlooking the destruction of the mountain. Then Larry and Amber shared their stories with us. Amber explained the problems with water quality that she and her family now face in Raleigh County and asked the audience if we thought it was right for them to drink discolored water that smelled. Larry shared stories from his decades of fighting strip mining.




Back in November 2011, two other professors and I held a panel discussion at Chatham University about the March on Blair Mountain that had occurred in June and about the problem of mountaintop removal. We felt connected to this issue because we grew up in West Virginia and Kentucky, but some in the audience had a common reaction. They asked, “How do the people from that area feel about this?” “Do you think the miners who need those jobs will ever oppose mountaintop removal?” We tried to explain that the March had been organized by people who live closest to mountaintop removal sites. We tried to explain in words the impact of mountaintop removal on the people, their communities, and the land. We had planned to show videos, but our equipment failed; so too did our words fail to capture the magnitude of this problem.



It is one thing to hear your professor tell you that there is a crisis unfolding just a few hours’ drive away. It is another for two people to speak from the heart about an issue affecting their daily lives and to ask you for help. And that is exactly what Larry and Amber did. They spoke to an environmental class in the morning, a social issues class in the afternoon, had lunch with creative writers, and spoke to a crowd of about 60—a big crowd for a very small school—in the evening.

Larry told me that public speaking is not about facts and figures. While he has the facts and figures available, it is far more important to tell audiences how you feel and to have them recognize you as a fellow human being. We might detail the role of coal in the national and state economy. We might detail how stream buffer zone rules are worded. We might detail the biodiversity of the Appalachian Mountains. We might detail the problems of soil erosion. But those issues seem abstract to people who have never witnessed mountaintop removal, who have never met the coalfield residents who face the destruction of their land.



And Larry was right. Students later told me that what made the experience so powerful was hearing from fellow human beings who are faced with a terrible loss. The rest of the week I had people asking me about details of Larry’s talk. What agency oversees mountaintop removal? Why is this not illegal? Did the coal operators really drop bombs on the miners at Blair Mountain? And a number of students signed up for volunteer work. A stark contrast to the panel discussion I participated in back in November.



There simply is no substitute for hearing about mountaintop removal from coalfield residents who must live with the trucks, the processing plants, the dust, the explosions, the flooding, and the contaminated water. That is why a presentation by a Keeper of the Mountains is one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against mountaintop removal.



Lou Martin, Assistant Professor of History, Chatham University

Larry Gibson to Speak at Hawks Nest Premiere

This Post is a reprint of a press release for this event 

Presenting: Hawks Nest: Blood Beneath Our Feet

A Black History Month Program sponsored by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History

Where: Cultural Culture Center

Capitol Complex, Charleston, West Virginia

When: Sunday, February 19, 2012, 3pm

Contact: Kate McComas (304-521-7444 )

For immediate release:

Award winning film makers Mari-Lynn Evans and Phylis Geller will premiere the trailer for Hawks Nest: Blood Beneath Our Feet as part of the Black History Month Celebration at the Culture Center on February 19, 2012 from 3pm to 5pm.

The keynote speaker will Dr. Wilburn Hayden, a leading expert on the history of blacks in Appalachia with long and distinguished as a university scholar and social activist.  He was featured in the PBS documentary film "The Appalachians," which has been shown regularly on local PBS stations since April 2005. Dr. Hayden who grew up in Forsyth County, North Carolina, has taught in three Appalachian institutions of higher learning and has been involved in Appalachian studies for a lifetime.

Rev. Ron English, Rev. Mathew Watts and Pastor Paul Dunn will speak about the tragedy and triumph of the Hawk Nest Tunnel Disaster as an untold story hidden in the hollows of Appalachian hills and its relevance to critical issues shaping the current narrative of socio-economic injustice in our state and nation. Moreover, the Hawks Nest story amplifies the insult of marginal visibility of African Americans in Appalachia whose history has been largely ignored primarily due to the paucity and decline of the black presence in the area.

Industrialization stimulated the migration. The Hawks Nest documentary uncovers details of events that betrayed the hopes of African American ex-slaves who migrated into Appalachia to work in the mining and railroad industries at the turn of the century but were left vulnerable to massive exploitation and victimization by corporate giants in the 1930s. Yet the story also reveals the peculiar paradox of triumph emerging out of tragedy and the genesis of the black middle class in West Virginia.

To honor the victims of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, Dave Saville, of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, will announce the donation of 2,500 trees for a memorial forest .

Kenny Perdue, President of the West Virginia AFL-CIO, will speak about the significance of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster on the formation of Worker’s Compensation legislation.

Larry Gibson, the founder of the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation and longtime community activist whose father worked at Hawks Nest, will also be a featured speaker.

Music for the program will reflect the shared cross cultural “roots” of soul music. Gospel and praise music will be performed by the Shabbat Choir from First Baptist, Charleston and blues and country sounds will be provided by well-known local artists John Lily, Lady D and other special musical guests.

A reception will follow the program. This event is free and open to the public.

###

Gainesville Loves Mountains is Moving Forward!

Post Written by Gainesville, FL resident Jason Fults

Since Larry Gibson's successful visit to Gainesville, FL last March, we have been hard at work pursuing an official policy to end the purchase of Mountaintop Removal coal by our municipally-owned utility.

We started a Facebook page for our group, “Gainesville Loves Mountains,” and asked citizens to contact their Commissioners and the utility to speak out against Mountaintop Removal. We received lots of positive media attention and it was clear that the Commission was hearing from people. I've seen firsthand that the more people learn about Mountaintop Removal, the less they want to be connected to it.

While we are having an impact on our Commissioners, the technocrats at our utility's fuels division have been steadfast in their opposition to any sort of restrictions on where they purchase their coal. As recently as last week, the Assistant General Manager of the utility was stating publicly that they remain “...reasonably agnostic on where the coal comes from, other than we prefer deep-mine coal for performance reasons.” Yet as we continued our campaign, other forces were at work.

As it turns out, the growing availability of natural gas, resulting partly from the controversial gas drilling practice known as “fracking,” has driven fuel prices so low that in recent months the bottom appears to have come out from under the coal markets. Whereas our utility had previously considered deep-mined coal a luxury it could only sometimes afford, and had been using approximately 60% Mountaintop Removal coal, we were able this year to sign 1-year contracts for nearly 100% deep-mined coal and still come in under budget.

It is an awkward position to be in, to have “won” our local campaign against purchasing Mountaintop Removal coal, thanks in large part to another highly destructive mining practice. This “victory” is obviously inadequate, and our campaign will continue. Our goals for 2012 include:

• Continuing to discuss Mountaintop Removal at every opportunity. We'll host more film screenings and Appalachian activists this year, and continue to build public support in advance of the next round of coal contract negotiations later this year.

• Building a bridge between Gainesville and the Appalachian communities that provide our coal. One definitive victory that our campaign has had is a line item in all new coal contracts that requires the companies to disclose any major environmental violations. We'll be watching.

• Educating ourselves, our community, and our Congressional representatives on any federal efforts to ban Mountaintop Removal mining.

• Supporting a local effort for a more aggressive energy conservation ordinance that will move our community closer to a future free of electricity generated from fossil-fuels.

We want to hear what folks up in Appalachia have to say about our efforts, and want to encourage other communities that consume Mountaintop Removal coal to duplicate our campaign. Please contact us with any feedback, questions, or resources you have to offer.



Thanks,

Jason Fults, on behalf of Gainesville Loves Mountains

sisyphus@riseup.net

352-318-0060

The Mountain Top

The Mountain Top

                                             Kayford, West Virginia

The mountain man points across a half-mile gap

to a hill where silver leaves shiver in strong gusts,

to family graves, centuries old, unreachable

without permission from the coal company.

Coal keeps the lights on, the company brags.

On in the funeral parlor, the mountain man says,

inviting Jim and me to visit what’s left of his hill

since the dragline shovel devoured Appalachia.

Face smudged, boots soaked in sludge,

the old coal miner still hoists hammer

and pick to a rocky ledge, sets charges,

chokes on dust, coughs blood, dies hard.

And now comes the behemoth, ten stories high

with a button’s push swallows the mountain,

each bite 50,000 tons of sandstone and root,

heaves its maw into the hollows below. 

Soil, forest, whatever’s above the black seams,

the company calls waste or overburden.

Inside the shovel the word is spoil, and once

the river’s sunk, fish killed, they speak of fill.

Taking the miner out of mining means 8 billion

pounds of explosives; 800 million acres

of forest; 500 mountains collapsed—leaves

the fresh yellow-painted signs saying HAZARD

               DO NOT EAT BASS

               BEYOND THIS POINT

                                             *

We take the risky ride over washed-out gravel.

Dark leaf canopy, walls of sheer rock shadow

the way. Mud ditches raise the peril, coal

trucks racing down, hogging the road.

At the sunny crest, the mountain man guides us

past a yellow crack the size of a barbeque pit.

He calls it land rupture; I lean over to see where

it leads—straight down, a ragged black shaft.

Dynamite’s ripped open the belly, gutted the hill

from below. He says, please be careful, you don’t

want to fall in. We walk on toes by spindly trees

until the light opens to face the stark precipice.

The mountain next door has vanished, dropped

into the planet’s bowel, an entire forest gone.

A few hawks fly around aimlessly; the wind

carries the insistent whine of motors nearby.

At the brink stands one ghost tree, black roots

sinewy, naked in mid-air, branches stiff as bone.

The mountain man studies the bark. Don’t fall, 

he advises. No one will come to save you either.

                                             --Peter Neil Carroll

First published in Written Rivers: A Journal of Eco-Poetics (Winter 2011)

This poem first appeared in "Written Rivers": http://issuu.com/hiraethpress/docs/writtenriverwinter2011?utm_source=Hiraeth+Press+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4390d5fa65

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