See There Your Own Form

The struggle for social justice goes to the heart of faith. Indeed, I would argue that it provides the framework for the Gospels and the entire work of Christ himself:

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me" (Matthew 25:35-36).

This notion of service was rarely emphasized in the Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches I attended as a child and teenager. Instead, the focus was on individual salvation and a personal experience with God, too often at the expense of community outreach. And even when the notion of community service was raised, it was narrowly defined as going door-to-door to win souls or visiting with lapsed church members.

However, I have a vivid memory of an exception to this. A humid spring morning in 1989. The congregation of Bethlehem Baptist Church was sacrificing their Saturday to clean up litter along the roads and in the creeks of Dorton Branch in Bell County, Kentucky. I was eight years old and viewed this as a big event. I fidgeted in our yellow kitchen as my mother threaded three black garbage bags through the belt loops of my cut-off jean shorts. "Let's go!" I hollered to my dad, and bounded out the front door and down the steps, the plastic crackling against my scrawny legs.

Picking up trash didn't bother me in the least. After all, I'd had two years of experience in collecting discarded pop cans along the roadsides to sell to an aluminum recycling plant in nearby Pineville. But this was different, a group effort to improve our holler. I returned home late that afternoon, dirty and sweaty, but brimming with contentment.

That day has remained with me far longer than any sermon I ever heard as a child. It has become a metaphor for my personal journey of faith, a model of what we're called to do as believers--to pitch in and help. I find myself coming back to that basic compass each time I veer off course. In doing so, my focus is shifted from my frail, human self to something bigger, better. And I am restored.

Brian McLaren, a minister in the Emergent Church movement, writes in A New Kind of Christian: "We seem to think that the only thing that God really wants to save is 'souls.' But...the biblical vision is never a disembodied soul floating in or out of space. No, it's the redemption of the world, the stars, the animals, the plants, the whole show...The scope of salvation in the Bible is so much bigger than my little soul...When Jesus came, he was essentially saying to his people, 'Your view of salvation is entirely too narrow. It is nationalistic. God's vision is global.'"

This vision, then, calls us to be good neighbors, whether that neighbor lives next door to us or along the Coal River in West Virginia or in the Darfur region of Sudan. To stand with those suffering from all forms of injustice and oppression, whether at the hands of Massey Energy or warring militias. To pitch in and help.

I was asked recently at a Creation Care conference how the title of my latest book, We All Live Downstream, relates to faith. I paused a moment, contemplating. "It's just a paraphrase of the Golden Rule. What happens to our neighbor in West Virginia happens to us, not only spiritually, but physically, with the contamination of their water. It becomes our water. We all live downstream."

The Golden Rule, of course, is nondenominational; it shows up in all religions around the world. One of my favorite versions is from Shintoism: "The heart of the person before you is mirror. See there your own form."

These glimpses of recognition carried me away from the churches of my youth. Away from the women who could tithe but could not attend a business meeting. Away from the preachers who pounded the pulpit against gays and Democrats.

Since leaving the Pentecostal church, I have struggled as a Christian, trying to find a welcoming body of believers. I have since discovered the Episcopal Church, a denomination based on "scripture, tradition and reason." I feel at home there, a place where I can meld my faith and commitment to social justice, where I am free to explore and approach God intellectually as well as spiritually.

Throughout this process, I find myself returning to Mary, the Blessed Mother. Even as a child growing up in fundamentalist churches, I was drawn to and comforted by her story, consciously desiring a feminine presence in my faith. I remember begging my piano teacher to let me learn Bach/Gounod's "Ave Maria" after hearing it on a record I borrowed from the library.

My current devotional is titled 365 Mary: A Daily Guide To Mary's Wisdom and Comfort by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker, who writes eloquently of our need for justice:

"When we talk about justice, we tend to limit our thinking to legal action in a court of law. We believe that justice is done when criminals are convicted, murderers executed, and crimes punished.

When we talk about charity, on the other hand, we generally refer to acts of kindness to the less fortunate. We think of charity as giving a donation to a worthy cause or a handout to a street person.

The Hebrew Scriptures take a radically different view of these two words. What we call charity, it calls justice.

Mary stands as a living example of this scriptural interpretation of justice. The woman who announced to her son, "They have no wine," isn't afraid to go boldly before the throne of God to say, "They have no food, no home, no job." Completely absorbed by our human condition and human struggle, she prays now and always for our broken and confused world. But more than that, she devotes herself to praying for the forgiveness of sin. As an Orthodox Church prayer says, 'O Mary the Virgin Theotokos*, the holy and trusted intercessor of the human race, intercede for our sake before Christ, whom you bore, that He may grant us the forgiveness of our sins.'

As you go about your daily life, do you see people in need of food, clothing, shelter, and forgiveness? If so, don't give them a token in the name of charity; give them all you can in the name of justice."

* Godbearer

The True Costs of Coal

Below is a speech that I gave to the Lexington Forum on 5 November, 2009. I followed Nick Carter, President and Chief Operating Officer of Natural Resources Partners L.P. and its subsidiaries (NRP), as well as Western Pocahontas Properties Limited Partnership and New Gauley Coal Corporation.

***

Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today, and I am grateful for the intelligent debates and dialogue that have been fostered over the years by the Lexington Forum.

As the invitation to this morning’s meeting announced, I am speaking as a representative of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a grassroots organization whose thousands of members work on behalf of environmental and economic justice issues across the state. I am proud to be associated with KFTC.

However, I am first and foremost an Eastern Kentuckian, born and raised in Dorton Branch, a former coal camp, in Bell County. Some of my earliest memories are of trains rumbling past, rattling our windows, the massive cars loaded down with coal. I spent hours walking those oily tracks with my father and grandmother, collecting pieces of coal dropped by the trains, hemmed in by the surrounding mountains. In the summertime, I placed pennies on the tracks with my friends, eagerly awaiting the distant sound of the train whistle.

I also listened to my family’s stories about the rough side of the coal industry. My great-grandfather, McClellan “Clell” Howard, is the first name listed on the Kentucky Coal Miners’ Memorial at Benham in Harlan County. He was murdered while in the mines because of a union dispute. His death is a testimony to what fighting back could get a miner in the early union wars.

My maternal great-grandfather, Garrett Garrison, went into the mines when he was only nine years old, driving a mule team, and worked there most of his life. As an adult, he worked in the Harlan County mines during the bloody strikes of the 1930s, and instilled in our family the belief that unionizing was the saving grace for a miner. He died an excruciating death by way of black lung. In their conversations, my family bore witness to the way coal mining can destroy a body. These stories marked my childhood as much as the coal miners I grew up around, as well as the boisterous stories they told of their workdays.

Now, years later, I am a writer. And I am still listening to stories about coal.

Tales of damaged homes, of contaminated water supplies, of divided families and communities.

Accounts of severe flooding, of sludge and coal ash spills, of alarming asthma and cancer rates.

These stories represent the true costs of coal being paid by the citizens of Kentucky—indeed, by all of us gathered here, regardless of region—a price due in large part to mountaintop removal mining.

The term is concise and straightforward: an entire mountain is blown up for a relatively thin seam of coal, often only eighteen inches. This destructive method of mining requires large areas for disposal of the resulting overburden, or “waste”—topsoil, dirt, rocks, trees (almost never harvested so the coal can be extracted as quickly as possible)—which is then pushed into the valleys below, burying the streams, trees, and animals. This activity is neatly described as “valley fills.”

The coal industry tells us that mountaintop removal is necessary for “post-mining development.” And indeed, Mr. Carter stated earlier that his company intended that the land be used for such. But intentions too often do not translate into realities. It’s something we’ve seen time and time again in Eastern Kentucky, most recently with the promise of booming industrial parks that instead remain deserted atop barren plateaus created by mountaintop removal and strip mining.

To date, more than 700,000 acres in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia have been destroyed as a result of mountaintop removal. Over 1,200 miles of streams have been buried or polluted since 1985. Each year, the explosive equivalent of 58 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs is detonated by the coal industry in the region.

These are sobering, hard statistics of environmental devastation. But it’s impossible to quantify the culture that is disappearing along with the mountains. The laughs of children playing in a clear creek, the memories of walking and knowing every tree and rock on a ridgeline, the sweat that went in to planting and tending a patch of white-half runners. And even more importantly, the resolve of people who are still holding on, determined to keep their land till the bitter end.

People like Rully and Erica Urias of Island Creek in Pike County, whose well has been contaminated by the effects of mountaintop removal. Their experience is especially troubling because they have a young daughter. “Our water is unsuitable to bathe in, but we have no choice,” they say. “Makayla loves to take baths and like most children will try to drink the water. We can’t let her play with any toys that she can put water into and drink from because of the contamination.”

People like Rick Handshoe in Floyd County. “We’ve gotten extreme dust, fast moving coal trucks, blasting damaging to our property, dust damaging our property. The coal trucks are extremely hazardous. We’ve called vehicle enforcement about fast driving trucks, coal falling off, breaking people’s windows. The dust is extremely bad, you can’t use your porch. You cannot raise a garden the way it is. We’re hoping it is going to get better, but we’re yet to see that.

These are the true costs of coal.

Kentucky has yet to see the benefits of mountaintop removal as well. Although the coal industry’s loudest defense of this practice is that mountain people need the jobs mining supplies, the truth is that Appalachia’s mining jobs are being buried along with the region’s streams. Mountaintop removal is done by giant machines: draglines, bulldozers, and dynamite don’t require as large a number of employees as deep mining. According to USA Today, this mechanization has resulted in a net loss of over 48,000 jobs in West Virginia alone during the period from 1978 to 2003.

In his Second Inaugural Address, President Franklin Roosevelt stated, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Sadly, we continue to see similar statistics in many mountain counties today. What I find particularly interesting is that those very counties are the major coal-producing areas of the Commonwealth.

According to the U.S. Census, 24.7 percent of Pike Countians live in poverty. Bell County—my home county—numbers 35.4 percent. In neighboring Harlan County, 31.6 percent live below the poverty line.

These are the true costs of coal.

Despite these appalling figures, Kentucky continues to look at coal as the state’s economic savior. A recent study published by the Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development (MACED) compared the tax revenues generated by the coal industry in Kentucky with the state expenditures supporting it. It found that the Commonwealth provided a net subsidy of nearly $115 million to the industry in 2006.

This is in addition to a recently released report from the independent National Academy of Sciences that discovered coal-burning plants in the United States produce over $62 billion a year in environmental damages and “hidden costs”—damage done to crops and timber yields, to buildings and materials, and most notably, to human health, including illnesses and premature deaths.

These are true costs of coal.

Now, you might assume from my rhetoric that I am anti-coal. That is a mischaracterization and, quite frankly, too simplistic a label. I am against irresponsible mining practices, and I believe that mountaintop removal falls into that category.

I am not here to demonize the coal industry, to simply raise my voice and point my finger. That will have solved nothing. And I don’t think that would be in keeping with the spirit and tradition of the Lexington Forum.

So let me say this in closing—I recognize the complexities of living in a coal economy. After all, I’m a child of it. Kentucky enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in the country, due in large part to the coal mined in Appalachia. And many miners working on mountaintop removal sites are doing so in the absence of competitive jobs in other industries; they simply want to put food on the table. No one wants them to go hungry.

But with the Commonwealth’s historic role as one of the primary energy producers in the country comes a great responsibility. We must also be energy leaders, thinkers, innovators.

Coming from a state with some of the oldest mountains in the world, surely we can all agree on the beauty found on a ridgeline. So as consumers, can’t we commit to using less energy—to turn off the lights in rooms not being used, at least—and thereby save some acreage?

The United States Geological Survey has projected that Appalachia will “peak coal” by 2020. Can’t we therefore acknowledge the need to begin an honest, open dialogue about beginning the transition to a truly sustainable economy?

I believe it is our duty, our moral imperative, to begin that discussion.

Let it begin today.

The Scriptures tell us “where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Let us, then, pray to be visionaries.

Thank you.

Freedom's Heroes

While standing in line at the grocery store the other day, I noticed a little blonde girl begging her mother for a plastic silver crown, bejeweled with pink rhinestones.

“It’s so pretty,” she smiled at her mom. “Can I get it?”

Her mother, obviously exhausted from a hard day’s work, sighed. “I guess so.”

“Now I can be like Paris Hilton!” the daughter responded with a shriek of delight.

I nearly dropped my package of yogurt in horror. With scenes like these transpiring in supermarkets across the country, it’s no wonder so many Americans lament our supposed lack of heroes.

As I continued watching the mother and daughter proceed through the checkout line, I daydreamed of sitting the girl down on a bench and reciting to her a list of names: Mother Jones. The Widow Combs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Bobby Kennedy. Neda Agha-Soltan.

These are some of my heroes.

Today, my list got a little longer as I read about the civil disobedience action that took place in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, where dozens of activists and coalfield residents were arrested while protesting at a mountaintop removal mining site operated by Massey Energy.

This operation is particularly notorious within the anti-mountaintop removal movement—a 2.8 billion gallon sludge impoundment sits just four hundred yards above the Marsh Fork Elementary School. Should the dam break, students would have only three minutes to evacuate. Needless to say, escape attempts would be futile.

After countless efforts—petitions, phone calls, letters, meetings, rallies—to get the attention of their elected officials and regulatory agencies, some brave souls took matters into their own hands.

One of them was Ken Hechler, a 94-year-old former congressman who has been a tireless advocate of working people throughout his political career and who held the first congressional hearing on mountaintop removal nearly thirty-five years ago.

My good friend Judy Bonds was also there. One of Appalachia’s greatest ambassadors, Judy has traveled throughout the country, raising awareness about mountaintop removal. According to news reports, she was assaulted by a Massey Energy supporter, suffering blows to her head, ear and jaw.

Other protesters included actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah, NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and community activist and Coal River Mountain Watch volunteer Bo Webb.

It’s ironic that West Virginia’s state motto is “Mountaineers are always free,” because nothing could be further from the truth.

Freedom is a scarce commodity in the hollers of the Mountain State and, indeed, throughout Central Appalachia. Our jobs, health, economy and energy are all shackled to Big Coal.

In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt famously named “four essential human freedoms” that should be enjoyed by people throughout the world:

1. Freedom of speech

Many Appalachians are afraid to speak out against the coal industry, fearful of retribution from their employers and neighbors. “My daughter bought me a stun gun for Christmas because I’ve been threatened a couple of times,” recalls Judy Bonds in Something’s Rising, the book I recently co-wrote with Silas House.

2. Freedom of religion

While the region boasts an abundance of churches, it too often seems like Coal is the true religion, requiring total devotion and subservience. The concept of environmental stewardship is rarely taught, as most churches rely on tithes from members affiliated with the coal industry. “It’s just as simple as Psalm 24,” says Pat Hudson, a writer and co-director of the Lindquist Environmental Appalachian Fellowship (LEAF). “‘The earth is the Lord’s.’”

3. Freedom from want

The poverty rate in the coal producing counties of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia often exceeds 30 percent. And according to statistics from the West Virginia Coal Association, the number of mining jobs in the state declined from 125,000 to 16,000 between 1950 and 2004, while coal production increased during the same period. 

4. Freedom from fear

Noted columnist, poet and playwright Anne Shelby says, “The coal companies do a real good job of making people be afraid of losing their job. The companies use that fear that people have of not being able to put food on the table for their families. They’ve always done that.”

Tyranny is deplorable everywhere, whether it be in the Coal River Valley or halfway around the world in Iran. Today, though, the residents of the Coal River Valley are one step closer to freedom due to the efforts of these activists, these heroes.

Judicial Empathy

Big Coal has finally been augered by the Supreme Court. On Monday, June 8^th, the nation’s highest court ruled by a 5-4 vote that West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice Brent Benjamin should have removed himself from a decision to strike down a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy Company, citing a potential risk of bias. Don Blankenship, chief executive of Massey Energy, had contributed more than $3 million to Benjamin’s judicial election campaign in 2005.

“This is an exceptional case,” admitted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority. “In all the circumstances of this case, due process requires recusal.”

Not surprisingly, Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, dissented.

Roberts, you may remember, is no friend of the mountains. In a 2003 ruling that was handed down when he was on the U.S. 4^th Circuit Court, Roberts upheld a change to the Clean Water Act that reclassified all mining waste as benign “fill material.”

Such decisions have been common during his tenure as Chief Justice as well. His is a conservative court, usually taking the side of big business and government interests over individual rights and liberties. The Roberts Court has gutted a key provision of McCain-Feingold, found school integration plans to be unconstitutional and, most recently, rejected a challenge to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

“The court has to stand up if nobody else will,” President Obama has said. In other words, it should empathize with those on the margins of society—people in poverty, minorities and communities in distress. Especially if the exploitation is occurring at the hands of a dirty, runaway industry.

This doctrine of judicial fairness did not begin with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. It was the basis for Kentucky native John Marshall Harlan’s fabled lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Southern segregation. It corrected that atrocity nearly sixty years later with Brown v. Board of Education.

Judicial empathy went on to guarantee the right to an attorney for those accused who couldn’t afford one (Gideon v. Wainwright), hold that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia), rule that women could make their own medical decisions under the right to privacy (Roe v. Wade) and extend those same privacy rights to include what happens in one’s bedroom between consensual adults (Lawrence v. Texas). 

These were all common sense rulings, as was the Massey Energy case. We need more of them.

Welcome

Welcome to On The Margins, my new blog. Check back for posts. In the meantime, please visit me at www.jason-howard.com.