Our homes matter, our histories matter. They form the pathway we see when we turn our head around to see where we came from, and how we come to be where we now find ourselves. These are dear to us, they define us. Ashley Judd looks around her ancestral Appalachian homeland, and sees direct and powerful threats to the landscape and ways of life that have been foundational to her family for eight generations.
While Judd is perhaps best known for her film acting, she rightfully wears the mantles of activist and humanitarian as well through her attention to AIDS and domestic violence. With her recent completion of a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, she adds scholar to her impressive mix.
Today, Judd turns her eye toward the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining, and applies her energy toward putting an end to it. Taking on the industrialized, mechanized process of forever leveling mountain after mountain with explosives and heavy equipment may seem a formidable task, but in Judd, the coal mining industry is presented with a formidable foe.
She is fired up. She is speaking out. And she, along with our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), can use our help.
Judd was a recent featured speaker at a June 9 appearance before the National Press Club where she highlighted her partnership with NRDC on the issue, shared her deeply personal ties to the land and explained in detail how mountaintop removal mining practices pose direct and permanent threats to the land, water and local culture.
Following up last month’s speech with a blog post published this week, Judd eloquently touches upon facets of the issue that range from technical to legal, from philosophical to spiritual. It’s a stirring statement which we hope you’ll go read in full, but keep reading here for some of the most moving highlights.
Deep time
“There is a searing tear, a gaping wound in the fabric of my life and in the lives of all Appalachians. And it gets bigger every day with every Appalachian mountaintop that is blown up, every holler that is filled, every stream that is buried, every wild thing that is wantonly and recklessly killed, every ecosystem that is diminished, every job that is lost to mechanization, every family that is pitted one against the other by the state-sanctioned, federal government supported coal industry operated rape of Appalachia. I’m talking about mountaintop removal coal mining.
“The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest in North America; they may well be the oldest mountains in the entire world. Peaks and ridges so ancient that geologists call them — rather poetically, I think — “deep time.” Mountaintop removal only happens here; on no other mountain range in the United States would it be allowed to happen. Indeed, it is utterly inconceivable that the Smokies would be blasted, the Rockies razed, the Sierra Nevadas flattened — that bombs the equivalent to Hiroshima would be detonated every single week for the past three decades. The fact that the Appalachians are the Appalachians makes this environmental genocide possible and permissible.”
They don’t know that water is supposed to run clear.
“Every single day, around the clock, seven days a week, 2,500 tons of explosives are detonated — blasts 100 times greater than the bomb that brought down the Oklahoma City Federal Building. What once was an ecologically and potentially economically rich resource is reduced to piles of loose rubble, dirt and debris — “overburden” in mining industry parlance. Using shovels the size of buildings, the essential ingredients of deep time are pushed into the lauded and mythical hollers of Appalachia, indiscriminately burying perennial and permanent valley streams, along with all plants, wildlife and aquatic species, and poisoning the drinking water with a witch’s brew of toxic metals.
“This is the reason that children in eastern Kentucky draw creeks black. They don’t know that water is supposed to run clear.”
Mountaintop removal also removes the miners from mining
“And no one should be fooled into thinking that the price paid in leveled landscapes and polluted communities after mining is done is worth the cost because of jobs. All those giant machines and explosives used to literally remove the mountain from the coal don’t require nearly as many workers as traditional underground mining. There are only a few thousand surface miners working in Appalachia today — nowhere near the peak of 150,000 plus who pulled coal out of the ground several decades ago. But there’s more coal coming out of Appalachia than ever before. You see, mountaintop removal also removes the miners from mining.”
“We are making a difference. We must keep up the pressure.”
Don’t think that the mining companies aren’t taking note of Judd’s impassioned efforts? In fact, by way of a public relations campaign the coal companies have funded that can be best described as underhanded and sexist, it’s a good bet that they are feeling increasing amounts of heat and pressure.
Let’s show Ashley, the NRDC and the Appalachian Mountains that we have their collective backs on this ghastly practice that wrecks a stunning and ecologically important region forever for the sake of short-term private profit. Read Ashley’s statement in full, watch her June speech at the National Press Club, learn more about mountaintop removal at the NRDC website dedicated to the issue and step up and take action.
Together we can move mountains to keep the mountains from being removed.
Photo by GettyImages.
