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Religious traditions are rich with stories of pilgrimage, a journey for spiritual enrichment that involves travel to a place of meaning. This chapter reveals how people of faith made a pilgrimage to eastern Kentucky to experience firsthand the devastating impacts of mountaintop removal on God’s land and the people of Appalachia. The journey described in this chapter involved twelve interfaith pilgrims in an encounter with mountaintop removal that included flying over the mountains, hiking on mining sites, praying with local ministers, and scattering wildflower seeds on mined earth. This chapter highlights the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which helped coordinate the experience. The spiritual journey revealed lessons for other faith communities: connecting pilgrimages to sacred places, working with local organizations, creating an immersion experience, using prayer as a grounding force, hearing testimonies of faith, and reflecting on feelings and actions.

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.

This chapter presents some of the research on MTR’s impact on biological systems, including human communities. In addition to considering multiple natural systems and sciences, this inquiry must attend to the economic and political contexts in which MTR operates. MTR has had catastrophic effects on the environment of Appalachia and a negative economic impact on the states where it operates; it has been the subject of numerous contentious court battles and policy reversals. However, the apparent certainty of these conclusions is misleading. The available data on MTR are incomplete, and more research is needed. More important, the research that exists is often contested or denied. After considering the various effects of MTR on the environment and society, the author argues that analysis of these data must be guided by an ethical approach that is capable of negotiating the value relationships involved in this issue.

This introductory section describes key features of MTR and the debate surrounding it. MTR is a highly controversial form of surface mining that uses explosives to remove vast amounts of material from mountaintops to access the coal seams beneath them. The author’s theocentric approach, based on the work of H. Richard Niebuhr, examines and challenges key discourses in the MTR debate, seeking imaginations that center on divine purposes rather than human ones.

In this case of mountaintop removal for coal in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, Laura Bozzi explores the delicate insider-outsider tension of keep-it-in-the ground (KIIG) politics. Mountaintop removal activists recognize both the deep sense of place, history, and culture of the peoples of Appalachia and the impacts of mountaintop removal and coal on local and global ecosystems. This chapter shows how the quick violence of destroying mountains, streams, and rivers creates a slow violence of lung cancer and other diseases, along with diminished educational, employment, and retirement opportunities. Appalachian peoples are effectively pursuing a KIIG politics based on the reality of decreasing coal reserves, ever-increasing mechanization, and declining market share on the one hand, and a dire need for a solution that marries well-being and livelihood on the other. Finally, this chapter explores the uneasy transition of fear of a way of life for locals with the lack of transparency of coal companies.

This concluding chapter places the process of critical examination and transformation of imaginations in the larger context of the moral life of the church. This process is a central feature of a pattern for theocentric moral action: a set of concrete practices intended to enact and sustain the theocentric imaginations described throughout the book. The author responds to the criticism that this approach leads only to resignation and undermines any possibility of a strong prophetic challenge. He does this, first, by arguing that this criticism misunderstands key features of Niebuhr’s position and represents the absolutizing of the relative against which he warns, and second, by calling for careful and active attention to the places of Appalachia—that is, by really loving the mountains. He argues that viewing MTR as representative of a new geological epoch—the anthropocene—may be the strongest theocentric challenge to the practice. Finally, he offers some specific guidelines for an ethical response to MTR.

This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, it looks at the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Conflicts of this sort are often associated with globalization. The chapter reveals how people experience in their daily lives the local effects of global processes. In their opposition to mountaintop removal and other coal industry practices, citizen activists narrate a revised version of local and regional history, in order to situate themselves and their position in relation to the black rock and its industry that had fed them for generations.

This chapter introduces Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) as an organization and describes its formation, organization and growth over the first five to seven years of its existence. The outrage that greeted mountaintop removal coal mining in the late 1990s was by no means new to the Appalachian region. Time and again conditions of social relations and political and economic domination have given rise to reform movements. Author Stephen Fisher argues that for an enduring social movement to achieve substantive change in Appalachia, it must transcend single issues in ongoing, democratic, membership-driven organizations. He cited groups like Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition as existing examples of the activism he described.

Chapter 1 begins with a description of the historical roots of exploitation in Central Appalachia, revealing how the economic, political, and social structures of the region have long been influenced by its ties with the coal industry. An overview of the declining coal economy and the rise and fall of the union is then discussed, followed by an account of the earliest attempts to end surface mining in the 1960s and 70s. The next section details the myriad environmental injustices that face the coalfield region today, including mountaintop removal mining, flooding, coal waste impoundment breaches, water contamination, coal dust air pollution, and high rates of a number of chronic health conditions, including cancer, heart disease, respiratory conditions, and depression. The final section of this chapter describes the present-day environmental justice movement that is fighting to hold the coal industry accountable for the harms it has brought to the Central Appalachian region. The chapter closes with a reminder of the puzzle that frames this book: given the enormity of the coal industry’s deleterious effects on local communities, why are there such low rates of movement participation at the local level?

This chapter describes the rise of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) and the uproar that accompanied it both in West Virginia and in Coal River. The conditions that facilitated MTR in the late 1990s included trends in industry stimulated by neoliberal corporate restructuring, labor relations, politics, government, and regulation. Manifestations of these conditions on multiple scales from federal regulations to local businesses have shaped the battle lines in Coal River. Out of these conditions, the chapter chronicles the emergence of a fresh round of activism against strip mining and the emergence of Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) within that activism. It also traces the history of Whitesville and Sylvester, two towns that sit side by side in the heart of Coal River.

This chapter considers the significance of prominent women's leadership in the movement to stop mountaintop removal. The prominence of women in leadership positions is a signature characteristic of Appalachian community activism, including the CRMW and the Friends of the Mountains (FOM) networks. However, the role of women is related to the decline of the union and the shifting sites of organizing within the community. Though women have always been active in social issues in the coalfields, the union's historically dominant role in organizing activism limited women's ability to rise to leadership positions. Organizing outside of the union affords women greater flexibility to link together social issues that a labor perspective may not have addressed directly. As such, women are able to forge a more comprehensive approach to social justice built upon different symbolic capital foundations.

This chapter studies how a commons approach to environment and community sets the mountaintop removal movement apart from other environmental and activist positions. The commons approach includes humans as active participants in the environment. In contrast, the narratives that have greatly influenced modern discourses of environment—industrial progress and wilderness protection—both exclude humans from the environment. A commons perspective allows activists to create a more comprehensive discourse in which environment and economy are not opposed, but are necessary and complimentary components of any community. The discussion of the commons is heavily indebted to Mary Hufford, who has written extensively on the commons, based on years of very public ethnography in the Coal River region.

This chapter discusses the origin of the John Henry legend and how it has been attributed to West Virginia around the time railroads expanded into the new frontier, seeking the region's rich raw materials. Though there are many interpretations of the legend, John Henry still serves as a parable for the shift to modern industrial society and its ramifications. The social struggles represented by the conflict over mountaintop removal belong not to John Henry's era, but to a subsequent social shift that West Virginians and Americans in general struggled with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the relationships between corporate efficiency and community bonds are similar enough to warrant revisiting the parable.

This chapter discusses how knowledge of the mountains and getting along in them has taken on renewed importance with the advance of mountaintop removal coal mining and restructuring in the coal industry. For generations, living in the mountains and mining the coal beneath them combined to become the distinctive markers of life in the Appalachian coalfields. The relentless expansion of mountaintop removal mining across the landscape since the late 1980s disrupted this symbiotic relationship between life inside and outside the mines. The spread of mountaintop removal brought a dilemma to dinner tables and living rooms across the region: are they coal people or mountain people? For the first time, many people felt compelled to choose because the two sources of identity, intertwined for so long, now seemed to be in stark opposition.

This chapter examines the varying strains of environmentalism and/or activism that run throughout the work of southern writers including Janisse Ray, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Mary Hood, Ann Pancake, Silas House, and Denise Giardina. It explores the relationship between environmentalism and poverty as it discusses waste, throw-away culture, recycling and sustainability. It argues for a move from regionalism/nationalism to localism/globalism and questions the false dichotomy between the Global North and Global South. The chapter turns to Appalachia to consider the impact of Mountaintop removal mining (MTR), and it interrogates both the economics that often drive the poor to undertake environmentally destructive jobs and the activism that exists within poor communities.

Despite its effacement from official history, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain entered history and folklore as the culmination of the West Virginia Mine Wars of the early twentieth century. Ninety years later, the site of that battle, a former national heritage site, is threatened with destruction by the coal extraction process known as mountaintop removal. In June 2011, several hundred people set out to retrace the route taken by miners from Kanawha to Mingo counties. This march invoked a history of resistance in the Appalachian region to promote a vision for the future that included community empowerment and a diversified economy. Drawing on oral histories of participants in the 2011 march and my own experiences as a marcher, Brown examines the ways in which the march used the past to challenge the power encoded in a landscape defined by intensive resource extraction.

This chapter examines the dramatic changes within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)—once the most powerful force in American organized labor. By the end of the twentieth century, the UMWA seemed incapable of organizing nonunion mines, even in the region that once provided its strongest support. Over its lifetime, the UMWA has moved through three distinct eras: confrontational organizing, labor brokerage, and crisis management. John L. Lewis' legacy as union president transformed the union from a fractured organizing body to a streamlined labor broker, negotiating contracts and winning the best possible wages and benefits. However, in Coal River, the community and environmental activism of the late 1990s emerged as a challenge to the leadership of the UMWA, this time demanding a strong stance against mountaintop removal.