Hal Crowther Comes Home From the Hills

"The Effect of Light Reflected" by Lina Tharsing. Courtesy of Ann Tower Gallery, Lexington.

One decade into the twenty-first century, our latest boom-and-bust cycle of reckless greed and mendacity has left America on its hands and knees and bleeding freely—a reckoning not unfamiliar, though impressive in its scale. As more frauds and scandals unfolded, and wrists accustomed to Rolexes felt the bite of handcuffs, our vainglorious economy lay exposed as a colossal Ponzi scheme where incalculable wealth flowed to the players at the top of the pyramid while hapless legions of little believers at its base were left, as usual, with empty promises and emptier pockets. Economists and historians like to refer to these crashes as "adjustments," a dry euphemism that slights the agony of ordinary citizens who lose their jobs, their homes, and the kinds of lives they'd earned and counted on. The scenarios that follow the implosion are always the same: despair for the masses, a few careless arch-thieves in handcuffs, one or two Park Avenue suicides, and another generation of sated vultures flying off to their bonus-purchased island hideaways and mountain fortresses. At the bottom of the economy, unemployed people were abandoning dogs and cats because they were too expensive to feed; unemployed refugees from what was recently the top of the economy were free to sail and ski.

We never learn. Remember "a rising tide floats all boats," mantra of the supply-siders and their "trickle-down" theory? No doubt we'll hear it again, after a merciful moratorium. For the moment, it's been replaced by another tidal aphorism, "You don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out," an epitaph for the pyramid schemes and investment frauds that flourished before The Fall. No one disputes that it's low tide in America, with barren mud flats stretching as far as the eye can see. What will we gain from our pain? Not much wisdom, if history is our guide. But at least it's a rare opportunity for Americans who view capitalism not as a religion but as a tool—a limited and tricky tool at that—to rein in some of the lotus-eating parishioners of the Church of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. It wasn't just crooked businessmen and bankers who were caught swimming naked when the tide went out. A lot of prominent, arrogant economists showed their ugly butts as well, and a long-dominant school of economic theory went to Chapter 11 when the corporate economy went into toxic shock.

Laissez-faire capitalism failed us under perfect laboratory conditions. The economy tanked after eight years of passionate non-interference by an administration of not merely corporate lackeys but (in the cases of the president, vice president, and secretary of state) recent corporate employees who never wavered in their allegiance to Big Oil and Boss Energy. Nowhere, ever, has Milton Friedman's holy free market been offered a better chance to make good on its boasts—and instead of general prosperity, a deregulated, de-unionized America got Bernie Madoff, near double-digit unemployment, taxpayer purchases of dead banks and automobile companies, and a firebombed Wall Street where dehorned bulls and declawed bears rut fruitlessly among the smoking ruins.

The real problem with cult capitalism—like communism, anarchism, libertarianism, the more utopian strains of socialism, and most other -isms and undiluted ideologies—is that it relies on a more positive assessment of human nature than human behavior has ever yet justified. In this summer of sorrow that follows the autumn of reckoning, Friedmanites have little to offer us, though their avaricious sponsors will never allow them to fall silent. But the iron grip of the plutocracy has been loosened for an instant, as banks fail, CEOs' heads roll, and angry stockholders move to cancel bonuses and purge directors. It's one of those few historical moments when the dispossessed and downtrodden feel the scales of power tip ever so slightly in their favor. A good time to take inventory of the worst corporate malefactors, perhaps win a few skirmishes against them, settle some old scores. The soft underbelly of the dragon is partially exposed, for anyone brave and quick enough to slip his sword in.

Who's ready to fight? There's a grim consensus that this nation founded by rebels, split in two by rebels, and once dignified by the struggles of a rebellious working class has now fallen into apathy and obesity, and into techno-paralysis. Pockets of resistance and organized indignation are few and far between. Student activists at the University of North Carolina who routed a right-wing speaker, the noxious nativist Tom Tancredo, were flayed as enemies of free speech by both liberals and conservatives, and rightly so. But at least they cared enough to take a risk and make a public commitment to social justice. These young people have a pulse; they don't belong to the couch-potato nation that spent twenty-one billion dollars on video games in 2008. Better Tom Tancredo, as a trigger for their aggressions, than World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. All these student activists need is a better role model for citizen resistance, better than the Abbie Hoffman model that prevailed in Chapel Hill. They don't need to look far from home to find it.

Look to the hills. Of all the dirty tricks predatory corporations have played on this increasingly defenseless country to which they cling like bloated ticks, none is dirtier nor more apocalyptic in its consequences than mountaintop removal. The coal companies whose Final Solution turns Appalachian mountains into lifeless slag heaps set a standard for myopia and ruthless environmental destruction only the Russians and Chinese have ever challenged. Americans who've never seen a valley with a whole pulverized mountain pushed into it can't imagine the wasteland parts of Kentucky and West Virginia have become—sixteen hundred miles of streams buried under coal waste and rubble, more than four hundred mountains obliterated, some million-and-a-half acres of land rendered uninhabitable by the end of this decade. More than the degradation of a classic American landscape, it's the willful devastation of entire human and animal biosystems, of a native people and a way of life—an entire micro-civilization deemed expendable by businessmen with way too much money who wanted more.

"I've reported on devastation around the world—from natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina to wars in Central America and the Middle East, to coastlines in Asia degraded by fish farming," John McQuaid wrote in Smithsonian. "But in the sheer audacity of its destruction, mountaintop removal is the most shocking thing I've ever seen. Entering a mountaintop site is like crossing into a war zone."

The word to describe what the coal industry is doing to Appalachia is "Geocide." Even stronger words have been spoken. "I think it's the environmental counterpoint to the Holocaust," says novelist (and ordained Episcopal deacon) Denise Giardina. "To the landscape, to the earth, it's what the Holocaust was to destroying people." In 2000, Giardina ran for governor of West Virginia on an environmental reform ticket. Her Mountain Party received two percent of the vote in a state where coal companies own both Democrats and Republicans. Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia's Democratic senators, have won liberal praise for opposing the war in Iraq but contempt from Giardina for failing to defend their mountains. She calls Byrd "terrible on all coal issues" and Rockefeller "spineless on coal." Like nearly all mountain politicians, they justify bioregional catastrophe in the name of "jobs" and "the local economy"—though West Virginia, thanks to mountain-crushing mechanized mining, has actually lost fifty thousand miners' jobs in thirty years. "In Appalachia, I think ninety-eight percent of the politicians are corrupt," says Judy Bonds, a local activist who fights mountaintop removal in Whitesville, West Virginia. "They owe their soul to coal. We've been oppressed for a hundred and fifty years."

A government scientist told me that he discovered, to his surprise, that the lights of Las Vegas are powered by a coal-fired plant in the desert. Imagine the tonnage it requires. In its infinite wisdom, America drains the life from a vital ecosystem in the Appalachians to sustain the coarse, artificial life of a zombie city in a desert dead zone, where no city should ever have been built.

Opposing the coal companies in any way is both lonely and dangerous, because you do it without the support of elected officials, the media, the police, the courts, or even neighbors and family members whose livelihood depends on coal. Villages and individual families have been bitterly, even violently divided over mountaintop removal. Twenty years ago, Giardina stood almost alone as a public figure taking a public stand. But the ground—what ground the coal barons have left undisturbed—is beginning to shift in the mountain states. In Kentucky, three generations of writers, including Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Silas House, have joined ranks with local organizers and community leaders to form a network of true grassroots coalitions, operating without foundation money or outside expertise, that have stirred the wrath of the coal establishment and attracted the attention of the national media.

A writers' tour of mountaintop sites, led by Wendell Berry, resulted in a group manifesto titled Missing Mountains (Wind Publications, 2005), with an afterword by Berry that concluded: "We are not talking here about the preservation of 'the American way of life.' We are talking about the preservation of life itself." He compared the coal industry to a farmer who kills his only milk cow for a year's supply of beef, when the milk from that cow and her descendants might have sustained his family indefinitely.

Last Christmas, the ghastly but timely spill of a billion gallons of toxic coal ash in East Tennessee provided the resistance movement with images television could not ignore: a monstrous three-hundred-acre lava flow of poisonous gray sludge that crept across the landscape, eating fields and trees, at least three houses, and a wide section of the Emory River. Though the spill came from a TVA retention pond and not a mountaintop site, it bore a gruesome family resemblance to another horror in Kentucky in 2000, when an artificial lake created by a mountaintop mine in Martin County released three hundred million gallons of coal slurry, burying houses and streams and contaminating drinking water—a break the EPA called one of the Southeast's worst environmental disasters.

The Emory River spill brought the cameras from New York and Washington to a region they habitually neglect. It gave the rest of America a rare close-up and a bitter taste of what the Appalachians have been suffering for decades. And it coincided fortuitously with the coal industry's latest piece of environmental mischief, inducing the departing Bush administration and its emasculated EPA to gut the "stream buffer zone rule," which for twenty-five years had been one of the few regulatory restraints on mountaintop removal mining. Coal bosses are not easily embarrassed; but a recent national poll showed two-thirds of the American public in favor of Appalachian stream protection and eighty-five percent disturbed by mountaintop removal. There's a sense in the mountains, where optimism is scarce and hard-won, that a stubborn tide might be turning. This spring, the University Press of Kentucky published Something's Rising by Silas House and Jason Howard, a book of profiles and oral histories intended to serve as a rallying cry for the various outposts of resistance to mountaintop mining. House and Howard, writers from coal-mining families in Eastern Kentucky, assemble a formidable lineup of witnesses—writers and journalists, musicians like Jean Ritchie and Kathy Mattea, community organizers, backroads sages with long memories—to testify to the great crimes committed against the mountain people and the courage and wisdom that survives. The first official breakthrough in their favor came in late March, when the EPA issued an advisory that as many as two hundred mountaintop mining permits awaiting approval by the Army Corps of Engineers may be put on hold. And on April 27, the new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, moved to restore the original language of the "stream buffer zone rule" that Republicans vandalized.

People, too, can move mountains—not as rapidly or dramatically as Big Coal's earthmovers, but just as surely. But first they have to dare to push. Mountain people have a long history of fighting back. Coal mining in Appalachia has been a bloody epic full of strikes and rebellions and working-class heroes like Mother Jones, along with company goons and strikebreakers and all the beatings, killings, and intimidation necessary to keep miners and their communities subservient to the corporations. Denise Giardina's marvelous novel Storming Heaven (1988) is about the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, an uprising of ten thousand West Virginia miners that required U.S. Army infantry and Air Force bombers to put down.

They build tough hillbillies, as these activists delight in calling themselves, up where mountains crumble and rivers run gray. But "Where's the outrage?" is still the big question troubled observers, native and foreign, are asking about the United States of America. Its recent resistance to corporate predators, including the overreaching ones who destroyed our housing and financial markets, has been little better than anemic. During the Depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, whole neighborhoods rose up violently to oppose bank agents and policemen who were enforcing foreclosures. The only reaction to the foreclosures of 2008-2009 was a rash of suicides among the newly homeless. If something's truly rising in the Appalachians, it has implications that reach beyond the region and the critical struggle against mountaintop removal. If these underdogs win a few battles and save a few mountains, maybe more Americans will recover their faith in the power of citizens' outrage and grassroots resistance. I always thought the best people were the ones who got lumps in their throats, as I did, when Joan Baez sang "The Ballad of Joe Hill": "The copper bosses killed you, Joe, they shot you, Joe, says I..../ Says Joe, what they can never kill, went on to organize." Joe Hill's ghost hasn't had much to smile about lately. I hope he has his eye on these hills, and these hillbillies.