I have been to the mountaintop, but it wasn’t there: Christian Responses to Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in Appalachia Corinne Almquist ‘09 Middlebury College Environmental Studies with Religion and Philosophy Focus Senior Thesis 2008-2009 Adviser: Rebecca Gould Acknowledgments This paper is a result of the support and help of so many different people. Thank you first and foremost to Rebecca Gould for guiding my entire journey, for challenging me to ask new questions at every point, and for supporting me throughout my exploration of environmental studies and religion at Middlebury College. Thank you to everyone else at the college who has helped me along the way, including Jon Isham, whose energy and dedication I will always strive to emulate, and James Davis, who never doubted me and whose class first set me on this track. Thank you to Environmental Affairs, the Alliance for Civic Engagement, and the Senior Work Fund, for making my trips to conferences and to Appalachia possible. Thank you to family and friends who witnessed my journey, especially Sierra Murdoch, who went to Appalachia alone when I should have been beside her. Lastly, I will never be able to express my immense gratitude to all of the people in Appalachia who welcomed me with open arms. Thank you for sharing your homes, your stories, and your culture. You have touched me deeply and left an indelible impression on me. I think about you every single day, and I am inspired by your courage, your strength, and your wisdom. Thanks especially to Allen Johnson, Bob Marshall, Fred Krueger, and Will Samson for assisting me in my research, as well as to every single person I spoke with or interviewed. I will never forget the incredible work you are doing, and I hope to join you in your fight someday soon. This paper is dedicated to the residents of Appalachia who fight daily to save their homes from mountaintop removal coal mining. Blessings to all of you - may you all have cause for celebration in the near future. 1 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction...................................................................................................3 Chapter Two: Grassroots Christian Opposition to Mountaintop Removal........................14 Chapter Three: Official Statements of the Christian Church.............................................82 Chapter Four: The Theology Behind the Activism..........................................................104 Chapter Five: On the Ground in Appalachia...................................................................150 Chapter Six: Lasting Impressions....................................................................................207 Appendices.......................................................................................................................217 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................227 2 Chapter One: Introduction “Unions, communities, people, everybody's going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society, and that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.” --Don Blankenship, C.E.O. of Massey Energy1 Carmelita and Ernie Brown live in Rawl, West Virginia, downstream from a mountaintop removal site operated by Massey Energy, the biggest coal company in the state. Ernie Brown is a former coal miner, following in the footsteps of his ancestors. Carmelita and Ernie have been drinking, cooking with, and bathing in their well water for as long as they can remember. Over the past decade, however, Carmelita and Ernie have noticed a drastic change. They and their neighbors began contracting mysterious illnesses, rashes, and cancers. Carmelita started to suffer from kidney stones and other ailments. The community’s health as a whole rapidly deteriorated. No one could account for why the people of Rawl, WV had such an abnormally high rate of sickness; that is, until they began testing the water. Independent scientists who conducted tests on Rawl residents’ water were horrified at what they found: arsenic, manganese, lead, barium, selenium, aluminum, and trace amounts of many other toxins.2 This testing occurred several years ago; since then, the water has gotten even worse. Until Carmelita and Ernie won a recent legal battle to receive water from the city line, their tap water would emerge from the faucet a deep, murky brown, with a sickening sulfurous stench. Put a tablet of Pepto-Bismol in the water, and it turned solid black.3 The Browns realized that they were being poisoned 1 Bill Moyers, “Is God Green?” PBS Video, 2006, Chapter 2. 2 Alliance for Appalachia, “Mountaintop Removal Facts” Booklet, End Mountaintop Removal Lobby Week, March 2009; Bill Moyers, “Is God Green?” 3 In the case of Pepto-Bismol, black discoloration is typically a response to high levels of bacteria in water. 3 from the toxins in their water, and they could easily trace the pollutants uphill to the massive mountaintop removal site above their house. Mountaintop removal is an extremely destructive form of surface mining that involves blasting the tops off of mountains to extract the coal seams beneath. Coal companies began experimenting with mountaintop removal mining in the 1970’s in their search for the cheapest, easiest way of extracting coal. A highly mechanized activity, mountaintop removal eliminates the need for the hundreds of workers that deep mines typically employ, leading coal companies to embrace the practice as economical and practical. Ironically, most proponents of mountaintop removal cite the need for employment in Appalachia and criticize mountaintop removal opponents for prioritizing the environment over people’s jobs. Yet the advent of mountaintop removal has precipitated a sharp decrease in the number of coal mining jobs available throughout Appalachia, demonstrating that the practice is beneficial only to the industry, not to the local people. Demand for fossil fuels has driven the expansion of mountaintop removal mining across Appalachia. The Appalachian Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, are being systematically eliminated by the coal industry in favor of cheap extraction of dirty coal. Mountaintop removal has completely decimated southern West Virginia, as well as parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwest Virginia. [See Appendix A for a map of the region where mountaintop removal is taking place]. Currently, almost five hundred mountains (more than one million acres) in Appalachia have been destroyed in this process, and many more are endangered.4 4 Alliance for Appalachia, “Mountaintop Removal Facts” Booklet. 4 Mountaintop removal mining represents an environmental, social, spiritual, and public health disaster in every step of the process. First, thousands of acres of native hardwood forests that cover the tops of the mountains are stripped away in giant clear- cutting operations. These trees are often burned or dumped illegally into the valleys, rather than being used for viable lumber, since coal companies want to access the coal as quickly as possible.5 Next comes the blasting: mountains can be flattened by up to one thousand feet, eliminating entire ridgelines. Three million pounds of explosives are used every day in West Virginia alone; this is the explosive equivalent of a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb being detonated every single week in Appalachia.6 Blasting is allowed to occur within three hundred feet of people’s homes, and many Appalachian residents have suffered cracked foundations, broken windows, horrific noise pollution, and plummeting property values. They breathe air thick with dust and particulate matter and live in constant fear of fly-rock and dislodged boulders raining down from the mountaintop removal site. The waste from the top of the mountain, which exposes heavy metals once hidden underground, is pushed off the edge of the mountain and dumped into the adjacent valley. These “valley fills” have completely buried thousands of miles of streams across Appalachia and have severely harmed wildlife species across the region.7 Once the coal is exposed, the companies scrape out the seam across the ridgeline, then blast more to get at the next layer of coal. They treat and purify the coal in 5 Appalachian Voices, “End Mountaintop Removal Action and Resource Center.” http://www.ilovemountains.org/resources/ (accessed April 28, 2009). 6 Bill Moyers, “Is God Green?” 7 The Appalachian Mountains are considered one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Home to dozens of rare bird and invertebrate species, the region is defined by the rich presence of wildlife. Mountaintop removal mining has completely eliminated the habitat for many fragile species throughout the region, leading to forest fragmentation, water pollution, and a sharp decline in populations of aquatic insects, birds, and mammals. [Shirley Stewart Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007), 128-135.] 5 processing facilities before shipping it out of Appalachia. The water left behind from this treatment is called coal slurry or coal sludge, and it contains toxins like arsenic, mercury, lead, and selenium.8 The sludge is stored in enormous, open pools known as impoundments atop the flattened mountains. These pools of liquid coal waste are held up by unstable earthen dams constructed with the rubble from the mountaintop. Impoundments have been known to collapse, leading to catastrophic floods of millions