West Virginia: More on Direct Action opposing Mt. Top Removal
We leave the old skid trail, now covered with thick brush and thorny
vines, and head up the steep slopes through the big trees. All morning
we had trudged up the hill on a confusing network of abandoned logging
roads, encountering nothing more than the tracks the animals had left
in the fresh snow, each set of tracks with its own story to tell.
Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roselle03112009.html
This issue has previously been covered here:
http://forestpolicyresearch.com/2009/02/12/west-virginia-direct-action-star-hosts-summer-campaign-to-oppose-mt-top-removal/
and also here:
Then I spot the footprints on our makeshift trail. Someone has been up
here recently. Rounding the hill, we almost stumble upon an excavator
loading blasted rocks into the beds of massive trucks. Just below, out
of sight from the big machine’s operator, we find a rare flat spot
sheltered by big tress and covered with logs and dry leaves. We take a
short break and while we are resting a helicopter hovers high above
and spots us.
It makes a broad turn and now flies low over our
position. In the helicopter is Don Blankenship, CEO and major
stockholder of Massey Energy, the owner of the Edwhite Mine, the one
we are about to enter. We wave to him and start up to the berm. Just
below the excavator, we unfurl our banner, made from an old tarp which
read simply: “Stop.” By now, Massey’s security, in their silver
pick-up trucks with flashing lights, begin to appear, all holding
cameras.
Spotting us, the excavator drops a large load of rocks and
trees just in front of us. When the machine goes back for another
load, swinging the huge bucket on the large tracks back towards the
hillside he was busy tearing down, we stand beneath him. When he
swings back around, we hold our banner high. He stops the machine and
gets out to stand on the iron treads. He begins to shout at us and we
answer politely that he is in violation of the law and will have to
shut down. He turns off the machine.
We now continue up onto the hard packed surface and watch as two trucks loaded with rocks come out and drive by us. Two more empty ones go in. The next truck that comes out stops as we step into the center of the road. Work comes to a complete halt until James Guin McGuiness and I are arrested by Trooper Mike Smith, who also arrests Antrim Caskey, a photo journalist who accompanies us… After getting out of the police stationed (we were not jailed) we went to Power Shift, a very big and much ballyhooed
conference in Washington that was to be attended by 12,000 student
activists and was to be followed by the Capitol Climate Action, a call
to mass civil disobedience by writers Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry and
top NASA scientist Dr. James Hanson accompanied by several dozen Coal
River residents who wanted to get arrested. Billed as an historic
action, the event did indeed recede quickly into history. No one back
in West Virginia saw it on TV or in the newspaper, and of course when
we got home nothing had changed. Every day except Sunday, at around
4:30, the blasts go off at the mine and it rattles the panes in my
window.
Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roselle03112009.html