Coming Down from the Trees

I have spent one month living, sleeping, pondering, eating, reading, singing and dreaming among the four sturdy trunks of this oak tree. The reality of limited resources now necessitates my descent but because Alpha is still blowing apart more of this mountain every day, this is not the last they will see of us. I plan to remain here and fight for this mountain for years to come.

It would be impossible for me to relate here my myriad and overwhelming motivations for sneaking into and occupying a tree beside an active strip mine, an act which some people probably recognize as extreme.  But what I find extreme in the very worst sense of the word is that strip mining has devastated or demolished more than 500 of these ancient, beautiful mountains; that coal companies have stripped more than 1.2 million acres for coal, which is 10 percent of the Central Appalachian Bioregion; and that valley fills have interred more than 500 miles of WV streams.

I am a lover of peace, but where injustice is present peace is a crime. It is like the dreaded still after blasting sirens and before a blast, a morbid complicity saturated with fear and shame. The tree I sit in is not far from what used to be Marfork Hollow, a community that Massey Energy annihilated by evicting those who didn’t own the land they lived on and encroaching up on the land of those who did until they fled from the blasting and the dust. The last to leave Marfork Hollow was Judy Bonds, a great hero in this movement. The story of this hollow does not represent an isolated case of exile, but one example of a pervasive strategy of depopulation that many coal companies employ throughout Appalachia and any place that mine-able coal exists. The product of mountaintop removal mining is extinction—extinction of mountains, communities, species and a way of life. How could we in response demand only amelioration, mitigation, or anything less than abolition?

As I clambered over the slick stones of perennial or intermittent streams to get to my tree, startling a slew of salamanders of several different species, I remembered why I had been willing to put so much weight on my back. I have felt the horror of strip mining’s assault on species’ diversity for many years, and in response I have written letters, tried to educate others, lobbied and volunteered. Yet throughout all of these things, I have felt the frustration of being up against the outrageous power of the coal industry. We do not live within a democracy but within a plutocracy—a government increasingly controlled by economic interests, by state and multi-national corporations. And this sense of legal futility is what has made it especially healing for me to be able to use my body to physically impede Alpha’s operations.Of course, while I wanted to directly oppose Alpha’s destruction of Coal River Mountain with this tree sit, I also hoped to send a message to as many people as I could. I want the knowledge of this sit to galvanize people who have become accustomed to hearing that everything we consume hurts another person, or the Earth, or ourselves, and who’ve become complacent from their resulting sense of powerlessness. We do not need to allow such prices to be paid, but instead can boldly challenge the system that exchanges life for goods and money. In order to utter this challenge in a society shaped by greed, we will need to remember that an act is not right because it is expected, legal or even honorable, an act is not wrong because it is devious, illegal or even shamed.