Mountain Top Removal: “We must unite as one and start strategizing”

WEST VIRGINIA — Mountaintop removal is waging war
on communities, up and down the Coal River Valley. Everyday, more, and more communities are pleading, “What can we do to fight this monster?” With reduced regulations, and more permits being filed everyday, and with the blessing of
the present administration, it’s getting harder, and harder, to hold these companies accountable. Those workers on these [mountain top removal] sites are getting just what they paid for, to this criminal enterprise: “You give us your lives, and we’ll supply you with a payday.” These workers, along with surrounding communities, are breathing in toxins, from the dust from blasting agents, and the thick billows of poisonous particulates, that are affecting people’s lives for miles. Health studies being abandoned; it doesn’t take a scholar, to understand what’s going on. These companies are saying, “If we
can’t buy them out, we will just kill them off.”
Birth defects, kidney disease, lung disease, cancers, are also raging in the valley, with unexpected illness, well above that of non-extractive areas. Those people in communities that are near these sites, are paying the true costs of the criminal company’s profits, and they’re paying for it with their lives and their properties.
When people ask, “What can we do,” the answers are few. We can raise Hell, protest, shut ‘em down, burn ‘em out, but whatever we choose to do, the fact is, we are very limited to what we can do. It will take extreme measures, to stop these bastards. But the worst thing that we can do is, Nothing.
The first thing we must do is to unite as one, and start strategizing, as one, on what our actions will be. One thing for sure, before we start, is to make sure NO OUTSIDE entity comes in and tells us, “this is what we’re going to do,” and it will happen, believe me. It’s going to take an effort much like the effort of those 10,000 miners, and Mother Jones as they marched across Blair Mountain back in 1921, to bring justice to the communities like Matewan, Paint Creek, and Cabin Creek. These are desperate times!
Chuck Nelson is a fourth generation West Virginia coal miner with almost 30 years underground. He is now retired.