June 4, 2006
 
Memorial at Cemetery in Midst of Mountaintop Removal Site Caps Off ‘Healing Mountains’ Confab
 
By HNN Staff
 
Ripley, WV (HNN) – More than 300 mountaintop removal opponents attended the Healing Mountains Memorial Day Weekend conference at Cedar Lakes Conference Center.
 
About 100 conference attendees stayed through Memorial Day to attend a memorial service at an old mountaintop family cemetery surrounded by thousands of acres of denuded, devastated landscape— mountaintop removal mines on Kayford Mountain.
 
The conference educated people on mountaintop removal coal mining, in which coal companies blast up to 800 feet off richly-forested mountains to access thin seams of coal in Central Appalachia. The resulting rubble is dumped into narrow valleys, burying biologically-crucial headwaters streams.
 
Scientists estimate that more than 400,000 acres of forested mountain have been forever destroyed and over 1,200 miles of streams have been buried or severely impacted. Entire communities have been eradicated by mountaintop removal mining.
 
“Family roots go back for generations in the hills and hollows of Appalachia,” said Carter County, KY resident Tonya Adkins. “Now, people are being forced to make the gut-wrenching choice of living under unbearable conditions caused by mountaintop removal mining, or leaving their homeplaces forever. Mountaintop removal contaminates drinking water wells, damages homes from blasting, and causes massive flooding, not to mention the danger of sludge dam breaks. This mining practice is completely immoral. People’s lives should not be made expendable for the sake of coal industry profit.”
 
Conference keynote speaker Doris Haddock, better known as the 90-something “Granny D” who walked across America to raise awareness of the need for real campaign finance reform, described mountaintop removal: “Great electrical shovels, like invading space monsters, take apart our mountains...The question for environmental activists is this: can the planet be saved even if many of the people do not understand the problem or, despite the ready facts, are insistent upon staying the course of self-destruction because it profits them in the short term?”
 
Granny D urged young people to set goals for their communities, states and nation. Conference attendees – from 19 states and the District of Colombia – spanned four generations, including a large contingent of students and young adults. Hundreds of young people will heed Granny D’s advice as they participate in Mountain Justice Summer, www.mountainjusticesummer.org. On Memorial Day, about 100 conference attendees carpooled to Kayford Mountain to see mountaintop removal first hand. The mountain is the ancestral home of Larry Gibson, who led 85 people, including four elderly Catholic Sisters, on a long, hot walk through a biological wasteland to attend a memorial service at the Stover Cemetery. The old mountaintop cemetery, covered with daylilies shaded by maples, sassafras, basswood and many other hardwood tree-species, is an oasis surrounded over 12,000 acres of active and “reclaimed” mountaintop removal mines operated by subsidiaries of Arch Coal and Massey Energy.
 
Laws require mountaintop removal operations to relocate cemeteries from mining, or to not mine within 100 feet of cemeteries and to give people access to cemeteries remaining on otherwise mined land. Coalfield residents frequently report that they are denied admission to cemeteries; when they are allowed in, they are almost always accompanied by guards. This time, Gibson and his fellow mountaintop removal opponents were granted access to the cemetery after signing a company form. (For photos of Kayford Mountain, see www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/010/index.html. Photos of the Memorial Day event will soon be posted on OVEC’s People in Action galleries at www.ohvec.org; these photos will be available for publication. You may also e-mail vivian@ohvec.org for photos.)
 
Allen Johnson, co-founder of Christians for the Mountains, led the prayers on the mountaintop. Scientist Mel Tyree read Chief Seattle’s 1854 statement in memory of his friend Lone Wolf, who had planned to read the statement at the Stover Cemetery memorial before he died just a month earlier. After other speakers, memorial service participants joined hands and reflected in silence, then vowed to abolish mountaintop removal coal mining.
 
“Healing Mountains was a powerful and inspiring gathering, culminating in the memorial service at Larry Gibson's family cemetery up on Kayford Mountain,” said Heartwood organizer Andy Mahler. “Eighty-five people streamed through the gate where some had previously been denied access, climbing steep and treacherous rubble, surrounded by a scene of utter desecration, to the little island of green at the summit. There we paid tribute to those before us who have loved these mountains and to the indomitable power of the human spirit. We made a vow that together we would forever end the practice known as mountaintop removal coal mining."
 
The Healing Mountains conference combined Heartwood’s 16th annual Forest Council with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition’s (OVEC) 6th annual Summit for the Mountains. The two groups organized and hosted the event. More than seventy businesses, groups and individuals co-sponsored Healing Mountains, including Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Sierra Club Central Appalachian Environmental Justice Program, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Model Forest, and SouthWings.
 
Heartwood is an association of groups, individuals, and businesses dedicated to the health and well being of the native forest of the Central Hardwood region, and its interdependent plant, animal, and human communities. OVEC is a grassroots organizing group based in Huntington, W. Va. For more information, see www.heartwood.org/home.php and www.ohvec.org.
 
Links to co-sponsoring groups websites include:
 
www.christiansforthemountains.org/
 
www.coalfieldsustainability.org/signon.php
 
www.sierraclub.org/environmental_justice/appalachia/index.asp
 
www.kftc.org/
 
www.wvhighlands.org/
 
www.southwings.org/