In spite of the persistence of corruption and the continued power of special interest groups such as coal and banking, a few of the new leaders were able to rise above the quagmire of mountain politics and, for a time, attempted to chart a different direction. One former coal miner in Letcher County, Kentucky, Carroll Smith, brought door-to-door recycling to county homes and union representation to county employees when he was elected county judge executive in the state’s fifth-largest coal-producing county. Soon after taking office, Smith, a Republican, proposed an ordinance to limit logging that was damaging county land and roads. He also proposed a bottle recycling bill, an ordinance to ban smoking in public buildings, and a bill to raise the minimum wage above the federal level. None of the latter proposals won the approval of the fiscal court, but Smith developed a strong regional reputation for independence and for his efforts to promote open government and economic diversification. Unlike other politicians in the area, Smith refused to take donations from the coal industry.40 He was narrowly defeated by a coal-supported candidate in 2006 after three terms in office.
Community leaders like Smith increasingly challenged the old political structures in Appalachia at the turn of the twenty-first century. They represented a rising number of residents who were frustrated with poor schools, insufficient job opportunities, inadequate health care, and deterioration of the environment. Many were professionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists. Some were new to the mountains, but others were native sons and daughters who had been educated outside the region and returned home to raise their own children. A few ran for office, but frequently they chose to avoid the sullied political process and to join citizen-based associations for change. For example, after the fifth congressional district in southeast Kentucky was identified as the least-educated congressional district in the country, more than 1,500 local people joined Forward in the Fifth, a grassroots organization established to work with teachers and children to improve educational outcomes in the schools.41 Others joined multi-issue groups like Western North Carolina Tomorrow, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Kentucky Appalachian Council. Many focused their efforts on protecting the region’s fragile and threatened environment, forming multistate networks such as the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and the Citizens Coal Council. More and more these organizations provided countervailing voices to the calls for growth at any cost, and they helped to draw public attention to the neglected problems of the region.
Nowhere was opposition to the old order greater than in the arena of the environment. Land, water, and forest resources had always shaped the quality of human life in the mountains, and this relationship was even more evident at the end of the twentieth century. Nothing brought out ideological conflicts over the future of the region more than disputes about land use, and nothing reflected old disparities of income, health, and political power quite as vividly as efforts to enforce environmental regulations. As America confronted the challenges of global warming, energy dependence, and urban sprawl, the mountains of Appalachia once again provided a stage for national debate.
The pursuit of quick and easy profit and the insatiable demand for cheap energy and developable land fueled the physical devastation of the mountains at an even more rapid pace than earlier in the twentieth century. The rising cost of foreign oil and the escalating demand for electricity increased the price of coal and expanded production from surface mining across central Appalachia. The growth of regional service centers and shopping facilities, the spread of suburban neighborhoods, and the explosion of recreational and second-home development intensified pressure on traditional land use practices and threatened sensitive ecosystems. Efforts to preserve the landscape and to protect the natural environment challenged head-on the modern values of growth, individualism, and consumption. Environmental battles often pitted giant corporations against private individuals and community groups, but more often than not the conflicts cut across class lines. In Appalachia, as much as in any other part of America, the false choice between jobs and the environment divided communities, pitting personal economic interests against the common good, short-term gain against long-term survival.
Some of the most dramatic examples of this conflict over land use occurred in the wake of the heavy rains that periodically drench the region. One of the oldest and most diverse forest ecosystems in the world, the Appalachian range contains the headwaters for most of the streams that drain the eastern United States. Blanketed by a forest that includes more species of deciduous trees, other plants, and wildlife than any other region of North America, the Appalachian woodlands functioned for thousands of years as a natural sponge that filtered and harnessed water resources and moderated runoff and soil erosion. The impact of industrial development in this temperate rain forest during the past century left increasingly large portions of the landscape cutover by logging, strip mined for coal and other minerals, and paved over for roads, housing, and suburban growth. Flooding became a major problem in mountain communities after the turn of the twentieth century and played a role in the establishment of the national forests in Appalachia during the 1920s, the TVA in the 1930s, and the special Appalachian development programs of the 1960s. The absence of logging regulations on private land, the lack of zoning ordinances, and the expansion of strip mining, however, led to persistent disasters from periodic flooding and revealed deep social and political anxieties about environmental protection in a growth-oriented economy.
The great Appalachian flood of 1977, for example, contributed to the passage of the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, but the compromise legislation did little to slow the destruction of mountain hillsides, and the act contained within it the seeds of an even more devastating mining practice, mountaintop removal. Coming just five years after the Buffalo Creek disaster in Logan County, West Virginia, that killed 125 people, the April 1977 flood ravaged four Appalachian states, destroying more than 1,700 homes and displacing almost 25,000 residents. Striking fourteen counties in the middle of the coalfields, the record flooding was most severe along smaller tributary streams at the heads of hollows where strip mining was most intense, but state and federal officials were reluctant to attribute the loss of life and property to mining practices for fear of alienating the coal industry. Governor Julian Carroll of Kentucky acknowledged that silt and debris from mining might have clogged up the streams and reservoirs but claimed that “farming, housing development, and the wind, which scatters soil” had contributed equally to the flooding.42 An intensive investigation by the group Appalachia—Science in the Public Interest later found that strip mining had played “a significant role” in the latest disaster, especially on tributary streams where heavy sediment and the absence of vegetation had caused floodwaters to rise faster and without warning.43
Twenty-five years later, residents of the coalfields still complained about the ineffectiveness of the 1977 legislation, and the region continued to suffer from the destructive effects of mining on mountain water resources. After another massive flood ripped through the central Appalachian coalfields in the spring of 2001, killing six and wrecking 4,600 homes in West Virginia alone, that state’s governor, Bob Wise, ordered state authorities once again to investigate how much of the devastation was attributable to rapid runoff from mining and timbering sites. Ten months later, after flood waters had ravaged poor communities in McDowell County, West Virginia, for a second time in a year, reporters found that legislators had refused to attend the committee hearings that Wise had established and that state regulators had resisted federal requirements mandating flood runoff protection on mining sites for the past twelve years.44
The failure of regulators to enforce existing mining laws was tragically illustrated again in October 2000, when a 2.2-billion-gallon coal slurry pond in Martin County, Kentucky, collapsed, spilling 300 million gallons of sludge into two neighboring creeks and creating what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) call
ed one of the worst environmental disasters ever in the southeastern United States. One of hundreds of coal slurry ponds constructed in the mountains to hold residue from washing coal before shipment, the Martin County impoundment was similar to the earthen dam that collapsed at Buffalo Creek in 1972. After the Buffalo Creek disaster, the Mine Safety and Health Administration had begun regulating the design and maintenance of these coal waste dams, which contained toxic heavy metals and which frequently leaked or overflowed. The Martin County impoundment, owned by a subsidiary of Massey Energy, broke through the abandoned mine over which it had been constructed and spewed toxic, black sludge up to eight feet deep along tributaries to the Tug Fork and the Big Sandy River, contaminating drinking water for eighty miles downstream. The spill was twenty times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Investigators later determined that Massey Energy had failed to follow up on recommendations to repair the slurry pond after a smaller leak in 1994, and regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration had failed to enforce their own recommendations. Although the coal company claimed that the accident was an unfortunate “act of God” and denied legal responsibility for the disaster, a team of engineers appointed by the Mine Safety and Health Administration afterward to investigate the spill found sufficient evidence to issue citations against the Massey subsidiary for willful and criminal negligence. Before the investigation could be completed, however, the new George W. Bush administration replaced the team leadership and narrowed the scope of the investigation. A final report eventually cited the company for two minor violations and issued a fine of $100,000. A judge later reduced that fine to $55,000, but not before a member of the original investigating team, Jack Spadaro, revealed the government negligence and the cover-up of the violations to the national media. Spadaro, who had served as an investigator following the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972, was demoted from his position as head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy and forced out of government for his criticism of the administration and the coal industry.45
Environmental disasters like those at Buffalo Creek and Martin County dramatized the growing tragedy of surface mining in the mountains and the unwillingness of most politicians to challenge the power of the coal industry or to confront the real costs of energy consumption in the United States. The lack of oversight by regulators, the collusion between the industry and political leaders, and the growing demand for coal as a replacement for foreign oil exposed the mountains and mountain people to some of the worst environmental devastation in the history of the region. Even the massive deforestation of Appalachia by the American logging industry at the turn of the twentieth century had not altered the landscape in the permanent manner that mountaintop removal did. By the turn of the twenty-first century, hundreds of miles of ridgeline in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee had been leveled, the tops of the mountains dumped into adjacent valleys, creating vast, desert-like plateaus. Nearly one thousand miles of streams had been buried, and entire ecosystems had been dismantled, the forests and wildlife permanently replaced by lespedeza and sandstone rubble. Almost five hundred mountains in the heart of Appalachia had been decapitated, and more were being lost every day.
Fearing that Appalachia was fast becoming a national sacrifice area in the quest for energy independence, mountain residents increasingly challenged mountaintop removal in the courts. In 1998 regional environmentalists, led by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the practice of filling mountain valleys with the overburden from mountaintop removal operations violated the Clean Water Act. A federal judge in southern West Virginia agreed and prohibited mining within one hundred feet of a flowing stream. When the decision was overturned upon appeal, KFTC filed its own lawsuit seeking to prohibit the Army Corps of Engineers from granting permits to deposit mine waste into valley streams. The same federal judge ruled against the coal industry again, but in 2003 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned this decision as well, declaring that the Clean Air Act’s prohibition of waste in streambeds referred only to “garbage and sewage” and not to mine waste.46
Opponents of mountaintop removal received little help from state and federal authorities, who were generally more concerned with protecting coal production even if they hoped to mitigate the harshest effects of mining on the land and the people. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration cut the Office of Surface Mining’s budget for enforcement and directed a smaller staff to provide “regulatory relief” to the coal industry. President Clinton slashed the office’s budget again, limiting inspection and enforcement staff by one-third and eliminating six field offices. Under George W. Bush, the agency became even less vigilant, replacing recalcitrant staff members such as Spadaro and focusing more on speeding up mining permits than on regulating the industry.47
The struggle to protect the mountains was left to a few environmental organizations and to individuals like Larry Gibson. The self-proclaimed “keeper of the mountains,” Gibson became a popular symbol of resistance to mountaintop removal in Appalachia after he organized neighbors in his southern West Virginia community to fight the destruction of Kayford Mountain by Massey Energy bulldozers. Gibson’s 50-acre farm, which had been in his family for almost two hundred years, stood like a defiant oasis in a dead sea, surrounded by 180,000 acres of one of the largest mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia.48 The man and his land became a focal point for environmental activists in the region; he seemed a fitting heir to Dan Gibson, Jink Ray, and Ollie Combs.
Throughout Appalachia, citizens like Gibson continued to challenge the destruction of their communities by corporate greed and governmental neglect. In the 1980s residents of Bell County, Kentucky, fought a decade-long battle to clean up the sewage and industrial waste being dumped into Yellow Creek by the Middlesboro Tanning Company and by a substandard municipal water treatment facility. Before winning a settlement among the City of Middlesboro, the tannery, and the EPA, the Yellow Creek Concerned Citizens confronted local and state officials, held rallies and demonstrations, and inundated federal agencies with letters of support from government officials in developing countries around the world who were concerned with the industrial pollution of streams in poor communities. Nearby, the Harlan County Concerned Citizens against Toxic Waste forced a Texas company to clean up a former industrial site polluted with cancer-causing PCBs that was then being used as a mobile home park. After toxic solvents and waste oils were found to have fouled at least fourteen drinking wells in the community of Dayhoit and to have leaked into groundwater a mile away, the company agreed to remove contaminated soil and to pay for the construction of a new water line.49
One struggle raised tensions between two states when economic activities in North Carolina destroyed a river flowing into Tennessee and may have contributed to high rates of cancer in a community lying along the border. Since 1906, the Champion Paper Company had provided more than two thousand jobs in Haywood County, North Carolina, at its Canton paper mill, but the company dumped tons of carcinogenic pollutants into the Pigeon River, effectively killing the once clean-flowing mountain stream and turning it dark brown below the mill. By the mid-1980s, residents of the small Cocke County, Tennessee, town of Hartford, downstream from the paper mill, had started to notice a disproportionately high rate of deaths from cancer, especially among men who swam or lived near the river. The town had long been nicknamed Widowville, and an informal survey of the town’s 500 residents revealed an alarming 167 cancer cases. In 1985 local residents formed the Dead Pigeon River Council to pressure Tennessee and North Carolina to enforce water quality standards and to clean up and restore the Pigeon River. In federal court, the EPA became involved and refused to renew operating permits for the Champion plant unless the problem was fixed. Relationships between the two states became contentious. North Carolina and Haywood County feared the loss of jobs; Tennessee, Cocke C
ounty, and the EPA demanded that the river be brought up to Tennessee water quality standards. Champion finally agreed to modernize its Canton plant, and in 1990 the EPA issued a new permit. The company later consented to pay Cocke County property owners $6.5 million in compensation and to endow environmental education projects in the area. Following the agreement, however, the Connecticut-based company sold the North Carolina plant and moved its production facilities abroad. A much-reduced labor force continued to operate the Canton mill as a partially worker-owned company, Blue Ridge Paper Products. After the installation of new equipment and bleaching processes, water quality improved, and fish and other wildlife returned to the river. Within a decade a thriving river-based recreational industry had developed in Hartford, and the community was on the road to recovery.50
Struggles for environmental justice were common across Appalachia at the end of the twentieth century. The region’s poverty, politics, and long history of industrial exploitation subjected mountain communities to disproportionate threats from health hazards and environmental damage. Local citizens’ groups organized to fight acid mine drainage, pesticide contamination, toxic landfills, timber clear-cutting, nuclear dump sites, waste incinerators, hydroelectric dams, and other threats. As urban Americans gained a greater awareness of the dangers of waste disposal in their own environments, low-income rural areas in Appalachia became prime targets for commercial landfills, waste incinerators, and toxic storage facilities. The availability of comparatively cheap land, abandoned deep mines, lax environmental regulations, and receptive local politicians made it cost effective for large companies to haul solid waste from cities in the Northeast to dump sites in rural communities in Appalachia, especially in Virginia and West Virginia. Citizens’ organizations such as the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League challenged the landfill developers in court and often succeeded in limiting the volume of the landfill, if not defeating the project itself.
Uneven Ground Page 32