December 10 – December 18, 2007
Appalachia, Virginia, located in the heart of Wise County, was covered by a cold, dark mist throughout our stay. The mountains surrounding the hillside town seemed to smoke day and night as a constant drizzle made sure the ground (and one’s shoes, and one’s vehicle) was covered in the black spray from the road. Every few seconds, whether you’re in the center of town or in a house on the hillside, you can hear a large black truck drive by, rattling all windows and doors, beating its path through a once lively and booming town. The population is diminished now; coal companies spent much of the nineties replacing their workers with machines and explosives, so many people have left for lack of jobs. Some stay, for a mining position that hasn’t yet been cut, for family, or because they’ve nowhere else to go. Others stay to fight the wanton destruction of the once lush Appalachian mountains and the culture that grew up around them. In West Virginia, coal companies have considered lobbying for forced depopulation to quiet their concerns.
Every so often, less frequently than the coal trucks but more powerfully than their enormous loads, a ray of sunshine would break through: one’s name was Matthew, one’s Mike, another’s Hannah, most of them tied together by a woman named Cathy and the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards.
Back Porch traveled to Wise in order to aid in the preliminary permit hearings regarding a new coal-fired power plant to be placed in Virginia City. This site would be 5 miles from the existing Carbo plant, one of the most environmentally threatening plants in the area, and less than 1 mile from the St. Paul Elementary and High Schools. The Department of Environmental Quality came to present on the initial air-quality permit, showing standards meeting the national requirements of the EPA, but failing to recognize the health and social justice concerns of the immediate regional community. We thought we’d come help Cathy and the community members involved in this process to really debunk the information and organize the community’s response to Dominion’s plans. Instead, we learned that energy conservation, just turning off your lights when you’re not using them, is deeply connected to the lives of our neighbors and the justice of our energy economy.
As we move into the 21st Century, as we work with eachother to create a sustainable life for ourselves and our children, and as we deal with various brilliant, moving, global concepts, we are also charged to remember that injustice still prevails in our own backyards. But there are rainbows. Cathy Selvage has put the entirety of herself into saving her life, her land, her history and OUR Appalachians. So have Hannah Morgan, and Bill McCabe, and countless others working with Cathy and SAMS, and the folks at Appalachian Voices, and the I Love Mountains campaign, not to mention the Sierra Club, CCAN, and the Southern Environmental Law Center.
There are many groups working for social and environmental justice in our Appalachian Mountains. So much information out there, such a call for help and awareness, so much work to be done. But we can do this. That’s what Cathy taught us as she cooked us breakfast our final morning in the area. From Cathy’s porch one can see the cold, dark mist rising off what used to be the Appalachian hillside and is now a bald, terraced moonscape. But what one hears is not the rattling of the trucks or the dynamite on the mountain, but rather Cathy’s soft, subtle voice calling for the power of equality, justice, and activism toward what is right and good in the world.
For more information and to sign the urgent petition, please see the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards website. In addition, ILoveMountains.org and the Appalachian Voices website, including their Front Porch blog, have a good deal of information regarding the issues and ways to get involved. Depopulation plan speech provided by Mountain Justice Summer.
