Arrested: Sanity
By Eastan McNeal on May 29, 2009 at 8:30 AM in Current Affairs, Environment
A special note from actor and activist Robert Redford is a must see and listen later in this article.
I am working on a story tentatively titled Ecocide – Is Obama the Worst Environmental President in Recent History? On May 15th the Obama EPA cleared 42 MTR permits, saying that blowing up tops of mountains and dumping the debris into nearby rivers and streams would not have an adverse environmental impact. While working on that piece from the relative comfort of my home some of my friends were out this past weekend getting arrested at a protest against Mountaintop Removal (MTR).
One of the protesters was 94 year old former congressman Ken Hechler, life-long advocate for Earth Justice and author of the original legislation that became the Clean Water Act. For some reason the police refused to arrest him, though he continued to lead the troops on with his bull horn during the arrests. This, just a week after coal country flooding left countless homes and lives in muck. The protesters were in the area because they were volunteering their time helping the flood victims. This is only going to get worse over the next four years.
Here is a note from one of the brave souls reporting on Saturday’s actions:
Seventeen courageous Mountain Justice volunteers were arrested Saturday, May 23 in a three-part civil disobedience action in our continuing movement to end mountaintop removal. Six are still in jail with bogus, unprecedented, $2,000 cash-only bail amounts, slowing their release. Many of them were arrested for the first time with clean records, and all they did was cross a line onto coal company property. We are raising $18,000 to get them out of jail as we move closer to defeating King Coal. Fundraising has bailed out three others since this morning. Thank you all!
The Kayford Eight were charged with trespass and conspiracy for walking onto the 12,000-acre-plus Kayford Mountain mine and locking themselves to a giant dump truck. Placing U-locks around their necks, they attached themselves to guardrails and the driveshaft of the truck after hanging a banner on the truck’s grill that read “Never Again!” Here is a statement from the Kayford Eight:
We locked down at the Kayford mountaintop removal site with mud from the Mingo County flood on our boots and now, with the dusty remains of Kayford Mountain on our boots, we stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers jailed for their actions to oppose mountaintop removal coal mining.
This may seem like the extreme activism some remember from the 60′s. But it is the only way we can draw attention to this crime against humanity. Robert Redford asks you to spend just five minutes to learn about MTR. It is only five minutes. Please watch.
If you don’t understand our passion for fighting Mountaintop Removal just visit Patchwork Films or OHVEC. Coal companies are literally setting off each day more explosives than we used in the entirety of WWII. RFK, Jr. recently said:
“If a foreign enemy had done to this country what this industry has done to West Virginia, it would be regarded as an act of war.”
The coal companies blow off up to 1,000 feet from the tops of our mountains and dump the rock and dirt into the rivers and streams in the valleys. They call that dumping “Valley Fills.” It is literally killing our people.. your people.. young children. The hell with being upset with insults cast at Princess Pelosi and apologizing for how we treated 9/11 killers – This is RAPE! This is TORTURE! This is Baghdad in the Boonies. The suicide bombers here are the poor local folks who work as miners, killing their own for a sliver of a greenback nirvana handed out by the ass hole coal company executives who have been funded by the Washington War Lords’ billion-dollar subsidies for over eight presidential administrations.
If I sound pissed to you then you heard me right. I am downright fed up with this clean coal bullshit talk. If you don’t live here, you don’t see it. We care about TARP, Korea and H1N1 but we have a more pressing problem going down right now. We are being annihilated here. Back to the kids who came here and stood up for us.
Also before dawn, two brave women, donning hazmat suits and respirators, boated onto the eight-billion-gallon Brushy Fork toxic coal slurry lake and launched a 60-foot floating banner that read “No more toxic sludge!” They were charged with trespass and littering. How can you litter on a giant toxic waste dump? Massey Energy has a permit to blast within 100 feet of this impoundment, which sits atop a honeycomb of abandoned deep mines. In 2000, more than 300 million gallons of coal slurry broke through the bottom of Massey’s Martin Co., Ky., impoundment, and into the deep mines beneath, then exploding into two watersheds, smothering aquatic life over 100 miles of streams. “Someone in jail said something to the effect of ‘I actually work there, yeah that dam’s gonna break,’” Ethan, one of the 17, said. A Brushy Fork failure would be over 23 times larger than Martin County.
Saturday’s two backcountry actions were followed by a picket at the mouth of Massey Energy’s Marfork mining complex, which includes the Brushy Fork dam, where more than 75 Coal River Valley residents and supporters emphasized the deadly danger of that impoundment: the 72-foot peak depth of the sludge at the Head Start facility there should the dam break. Seven people crossed the line onto Marfork’s property and were arrested for trespass.
While the Kayford Eight were released the same day, the other nine fared differently. The two Brushy Paddlers and four of the Pettus Seven are being held for $2,000 each, cash only. We know you love and care about the people of Appalachia! Now is the time to demonstrate your support through a donation to help bail out these committed and passionate activists. We really need your support more than ever at this crucial juncture in the movement to end mountaintop removal mining!
To donate by paypal and get more information, please go to The Mountain Justice Web Site.
If you want a vacation this summer visit the Appalachian Mountains. (The above photo is a recent Will Gudmundsson shot of the Greenbrier River in Southern West Virginia.) It may be your last chance to see some of these rivers and hills because by the time the Obama administration is done they (these mountains) won’t be standing on this earth as we now see them, and the rivers will be filled with sludge.
by Ronald Scott
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