Saturday 2 May 2015
wild wonderful coal
Larry Gibson isn’t impressive in stature. He’s not much more than 5 feet tall, has a bit of a belly, and was wearing Velcro shoes and a bright yellow T-shirt when we met him Thursday – so he wouldn’t get shot, he half-joked.But he is an impressive speaker. Gibson is an advocate against mountaintop coal mining, and he apparently gets quite a bit of press. His T-shirt read, “WE ARE THE KEEPERS OF THE MOUNTAINS. LOVE THEM OR LEAVE THEM, JUST DON’T DESTROY THEM.” Then it listed a few phone numbers.
“I don’t want to just be seen,” Gibson told me and a big group of reporters on a coal-focused field trip, "I want to be heard." (I’m at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference.) We had driven about three hours from Roanoke, Virginia to eastern West Virginia and climbed a long dirt drive to a small collection of homes. Now we were standing under a tin-roofed shed and listening closely.
Gibson wanted us – and the people who read what we write – to hear how coal was fouling the air and making people sick, how it wasn’t sustainable or necessary (he’s pushing for wind turbines on mountain tops instead), and how mining jobs weren’t that great anyway.
We took notes and snapped pictures as he talked.
When Gibson finished, he introduced his friend, Chuck Nelson, a retired underground miner. Nelson had wrinkled, dark skin and big bags under his eyes, and before he spoke, I wondered if he’d been crippled in some way by his profession. (It turned out he wasn’t.)
Nelson’s case was also multi-faceted. With mountaintop mining, the jobs have shrunk dramatically; people are getting sick in awful ways (brain cancer, gall bladder problems); and mining is destroying the land. Nelson said he used to pick wild ginseng, gather nuts, and hunt – “Everything we needed, the land provided for us,” he said. Now it’s useless.
Nelson held a half-pint mason jar as he talked. He argued that coal was neither “cheap” – at least for people living here – nor clean, and said mining coal was even dirtier than burning it. He talked about sludge ponds and a particular disaster where one fell apart and spilled.
“is some of the sludge that come outta that pond,” he said, holding up the Mason jar.
The jar got most of the way around the group before one woman unscrewed the cap and popped the lid off like it was a jar of jelly. The sludge was thick and dark and had globs of stuff in it. One reporter snapped a picture with his iPhone; another touched the substance – as if in solidarity – then wiped his finger on his sock. Nelson charged that big papers and politicians had failed to act because they were bought out by the coal industry.
It started to drizzle, so we set off to see the mine before the rain came. We hiked down a rocky road past big walnut trees and trailer homes with furniture outside, then up a slight hill till we reached a metal gate. Gibson called it the “Gate of Life." Before it was natural and alive, he said. Beyond it was dead.
Gibson explained that we’d actually be on mine property once we crossed it, adding that he personally didn’t mind getting arrested. He’d been arrested before, he said.
A man with a video camera filmed as Gibson spoke.
We climbed through the gate and followed Gibson up a grassy trail and out onto a small plateau. A little further, the land dropped off beneath us and the mine appeared below. Haul trucks rumbled along wide dirt roads with loads of rock, dumping the waste over dirt banks. The mine itself was a combination of flat spots and uniform slopes. One knob in the distance was still covered in trees.
The mine has already taken down the mountain about 900 feet in four years, Gibson told us, and has another four years of mining to go. “mountain’s got 39 seems of coal,” he said.
Off to the right, a slope was covered with a man-made product aimed at restarting plant growth. To the left, charges were already set in the rock. In the distance, the leaves on the trees were starting to turn gold.
Our next stop was another mine a 45-minute drive away. time we had permission, and guides from the mine and a West Virginia mining association.
The mine’s general manager, Rocky Hatworth (I think), got on the bus and joked about bringing a bunch of reporters to a coal mine. (The suggestion was that environmental reporters are environmental advocates, a label I try hard to avoid myself, but that’s another story.)
We drove up another dirt road to the mine site and parked on a wide, flat spot above the operations. A miner followed us there in a big haul truck, and when he parked it next to the bus, reporters went over to have their pictures taken by the giant tires. Down the hill, the ground was shaped in rigid contours, some of it with grass starting to grow back. Haul trucks carried loads of dirt and dumped them over a bank. Reforestation techniques are getting much better, the mining association guy told us.
We gathered by a small cabin parked on the dirt and met the mine’s owner, Andrew Jordon. Jordon is huge, but has a boyish and gentle look. Despite the cool air and drizzle, he wore only a T-shirt.
Jordon talked about growing up in the area and hunting in the hills around the mine. He explained how he got his degree in mining engineering, started his company, and developed the mine.
“To me, it’s very important to do this right,” he said.
Jordon said the hunting was still good around the mine and explained that the cabin was actually a hunting cabin for his employees. The cabin was built entirely of oak – from floorboards to bunk beds – that workers had rough cut from local trees. (They don’t just mine the mountain; they cut the forests on top.)
Jordon and Hatworth talked about replacing topsoil, bringing back local trees, and working with local university researchers to find the best ways to reclaim the land. In short, they argued that the impact on the land didn’t have to be that bad, or even negative at all – the woods would come back, and the valleys they filled in didn’t have real streams anyway. It seemed like they believed it.
The mine was fading into fog and drizzle, but we could still see the new shape of the land and the old shape of the hills around it.
Some, I thought, would see little more than destruction and waste in the vista. I figured Jordon saw something more like temporary disturbance.
Reporters huddled around and interviewed the coal guys, who were friendly and funny and not like the big, bad “coal industry” one hears.
I asked Jordon an admittedly vague question: If everyone agreed on the facts – the impacts on streams and forests, for instance – would there still be a battle over the more subjective things, like the importance of local jobs and the value of leaving a mountain a mountain?
Yeah, probably, he told me. People who don’t support the surface mining just don’t want things to change, he said.
A few minutes later, we boarded the bus and started back to Roanoke, surrounded, it seemed, by coal. Coal filled trucks on the road and barges in the river and thin seems in the rock cuts of the interstate.
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