by Vivian Stockman
Outreach Coordinator
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

Photo: ©2002 Vivian Stockman

This hollow is like so many others-a twisted, narrow ribbon of fertile bottomland separating the steep, convoluted mountains of Southern West Virginia. Here, as in all these valleys, it's easy to see that this sheltering, isolating landscape molded the culture of the Appalachian folk as they made a living off what they could harvest both from above and below the ground.

A rock-strewn stream meanders through the hollow. Minnows dart in and out of the shade cast by elderberry bushes, scrubby willows and a trio of sycamores, their upper trunks nearly all white. Come autumn, a woman will pick the elderberries for a cobbler made from a recipe given to her mother by her grandmother. Each of them grew up in this hollow, sharing with the birds the berries from these same bushes.

A pickerel frog, perhaps startled by a muskrat, springs in a graceful arc from the bank into the cold water with barely a splash. The flute-like trill of a wood thrush floats out from the branches of a stream-bank dogwood that, in response to its prime edge habitat, spreads wider and taller than its counterparts in the woods.

A tidy farmhouse sits alongside a little brook that flows into the bigger stream. Here, it's just a few yards before the gardens and clipped lawn surrounding the house give way to the dense thickets of hazelnut, blackberry and blooming multiflora rose, marking the dark edge of the woods. A deer bounds into this maze, and disappears within seconds. Now, in late May, the landscape is utterly dominated by a breeze-tossed wall of many shades of green-the leaves of scores of different kinds of trees, each rooted in the unfathomably ancient soil of the Appalachian Mountains. The tree-covered slopes rise hundreds of feet above the hollow, so that only a sliver of perfect azure sky, complete with cotton candy clouds, is visible from the old homeplace.

Inside the woods, life expresses itself in myriad ways- this is the mixed mesophytic forest, home to one of the most richly diverse plant communities of all temperate climates on earth. A recent shower has tumbled the last tulip tree flowers to the forest floor. Earthy soil scents mingle with the light, fruity aroma of the blossoms. The heart-shaped leaves of the wood violet tell of wildflowers missed, while a late bluet sways in the slightest breeze. Sunlight dapples the yellow-green fronds of maidenhair ferns, as they bob on delicate black stalks below a towering white oak. Velvety, emerald green moss and scaly gray-green lichen carpet a sandstone boulder that serves as a resting perch for anyone making her way through the forest.

Photo: © Vivian Stockman

The diversity of the woods shapes the activities of local people's lives. In early spring, folks gather ramps and greens for tonics-an internal spring-cleaning. Molly moochers, or morels, reward the sharp-eyed person who knows the exact moment in spring when rainfall will sprout these delicacies from the damp soil. The seasons, too, dictate when one should scramble about the steep woods, hunting herbs like black cohosh and ginseng, both for personal medicines and for some cash income. Locals pluck wintergreen from its creepings along the forest floor and dig the roots of sassafras saplings to flavor mugs of aromatic tea. They harvest fallen trees and fell hardwoods for firewood and lumber. In fall, black walnut and hickories feed animals of the two- and four-legged variety. Some of those four-leggeds fall to the hunter's gun, providing protein for families throughout the winter. After the first freeze, people shake the persimmon tree for its custard-like fruits that dangle with an offer of sweet sustenance. So the woods cycle through the seasons, from stark winter to lush summer jungle.

Back down in the hollow, people resting on the front porch mark the onset of a spring evening by the increased nattering of a catbird mimicking its cousins. As twilight fades into night, the whippoorwill, named for its song, begins its repetitive call.

This was the beauty, serenity and bounty of this hollow up until a few years ago. Now, the whippoorwill's cry no longer heralds dusk and few people remain to live within this landscape's seasonal rhythms. Some days, the last few folks can still hear the melodious songs of the ever-dwindling number of birds, the bubbling of the brooks and the whisperings of the leaves. Other days, when the wind blows differently, the blasts and mechanical rumblings and beeps of nearby destruction shatter the soundscape. The din draws ever closer-a noisy foreboding of the annihilation heading this way.

Photo: © Vivian Stockman

Profit-crazed coal companies that practice mountaintop removal / valley fill coal mining are coming to claim this hollow, despite the objections of the people who want to stay on the land they love…people who, so far, have resisted the buyout offers. Long ago, their ancestors, deceived by the slick talk and of company reps, signed away their rights to the coal deposits beneath their land. Of course, those ancestors could never have conceived of mountaintop removal.

For over a century, the coal has been mined from the ground beneath these hills and hollows. For many families living here, the mining jobs provided cash that helped buy what the land could not offer. That cash came with a toll, as tens of thousands of miners died from accidents, or from black lung disease, or from battling the companies in order to establish unions. The coal industry promised prosperity, but the wealth was mostly whisked out of state. To this day, the majority of West Virginians have very little monetary wealth compared to folks in other states.

Sadly, now the area's most important natural wealth-the forests, the streams and the culture-is being devastated so that companies can get more coal, more quickly and more cheaply, with far fewer miners. The moonscapes-the biological deserts-that are the aftermath of mountaintop removal have come to Southern West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and, to a limited degree, portions of Virginia and Tennessee.

To get to the multiple, thin layers of low-sulfur coal that underlie these mountains, coal companies first raze the verdant forests, scraping away the topsoil and its priceless bank of seeds. In a mad dash to get to the coal, the trees are usually shoved out of the way, not even harvested as lumber. The understory herbs like ginseng and goldenseal are trashed with an arrogant disregard for their current worth, let alone their value to future generations.

Photo: ©2002 Vivian Stockman

Up to 800 feet of denuded mountaintops and the underlying rock is then systematically blown up. The explosives used can register anywhere from 10 to 100 times the strength of the explosion that tore open the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The blasts send health-endangering, silica-laden dust into the air. The shock waves can travel miles from the site, sometimes ferociously rattling the foundations of homes, as well as people's nerves. The blasting has affected groundwater, drying up wells or ruining the taste and color of the water. "Fly rock," more aptly named fly boulder, can occasionally rain off the blasting sites, endangering residents' homes and lives.

The layers of coal are then scooped out by giant draglines, up to 20 stories tall. Behemoth dump trucks cart hundreds of millions of tons of "overburden"-the former mountaintops-to the narrow, adjacent valleys. The trucks dump the rubble over the sides, filling the valleys and burying the headwaters streams, which scientists say provide habitat for an unusually high diversity of aquatic organisms. These critters act as the biological engines that drive the life downstream. Across Appalachia, according to a draft environmental impact statement on mountaintop removal, valley fills already have buried forever 724 miles of streams and have negatively impacted a total of 1,200 stream miles. Some aquatic biologists argue that the figure is much greater, and that the destruction more harmful than most people realize. Selenium is just one toxic metal that has been found in high concentrations in the water seeping from valley fills.

Already, mountaintop removal has claimed nearly 400,000 acres of forested mountains. Entire communities, built long ago in hollows the companies now desire for valley fills, have been bought out. For other communities, mountaintop removal grinds ever closer, and worries about the blasting damages become almost routine, as even bigger problems claim attention. Every time it rains, folks who live close to this greed-crazed form of mining get scared. Really scared.

Government studies have shown that valley fills can dramatically worsen floods associated with heavy summer thunderstorms. Residents really didn't need these studies to back up their experience-thousands of acres of bulldozed-away forests, blown-up mountains and rubble-filled valleys just don't handle rain like intact ecosystems do. In Southern West Virginia, flooding in 2001 and 2002 killed 15 people, destroyed thousands of homes and damaged thousands more. Recovery efforts so far have topped $150 million. Residents blame mountaintop removal and virtually unregulated logging for making the floods far worse than they would have been without these disturbances.

Photo: ©2002 Vivian Stockman

Floods don't just come off valleys fills. Mountaintop removal generates huge amounts of waste. While the solid waste becomes the fills, the liquid waste, created when coal is washed and processed for market, is stored in massive slurry impoundments that loom above communities. These lakes of slurry contain water contaminated with a black, toxic brew of carcinogenic chemicals-used to wash the coal-as well as particles laden with all the heavy metals found in coal, including arsenic and mercury. Several times a year, water plant operators are forced to shut down drinking water intake valves as upstream waters are blackened by spills from coal processing plants and sludge impoundments.

In 2000, the floor of one coal sludge impoundment near Inez, Ky., partially broke through into an abandoned underground mine. Over 300 million gallons of sludge spewed into people's yards, in some places up to fifteen feet deep, and fouled 75 miles of waterways. Several similar impoundments still sit above schools and towns. People believe it's a matter of "when" not "if" for the next disaster. They fearfully wonder if, this time, someone will be killed.

For years, while coal companies have had their way with the coalfields, both state and federal regulators have failed to enforce mining laws that would rein in some of the worst abuses. Many politicians, secure in the coal industry's pocket, have ignored requests for help. Feeling under siege, people mourn the loss of their homeplaces. They question the wisdom of those who can rationalize such devastation as necessary for meeting the nation's "cheap" energy needs. And, they turn to each other for answers. With the help of West Virginia environmental groups like Coal River Mountain Watch, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, as well as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, people are rising up to demand an end to this ecocidal form of coal mining. They organize, educate, litigate, and strategize to save what is left of the central Appalachian forest-and they are making strides to save this land and its people. Please join them.

Learn more at http://www.sierraclub.org/appalachia/.

Read Eric Reese's Orion article, "Moving Mountains".