A story of coal and conflict

It was a slap heard all round the coalfields. Cordelia Ruth Tucker, wearing the fluorescent striped shirt of a miner, strode past West Virginia state troopers and into a stream of marchers protesting against mountain-top removal mining to deliver an audible smack.

The Rock Creek woman isn't talking as she awaits trial on a battery charge. Her neighbour, environmental activist Judy Bonds, says that she was on the receiving end of the slap.

And Bonds fears that more blows will follow as the fight escalates over mountain-top removal, the uniquely Appalachian form of strip mining that involves blowing tops off mountains and dumping the rubble in valleys.

For nearly a decade, environmentalists and the mining industry battled in courtrooms and the Capitol. Arrests were unheard of.

But this year, as mountain-top removal has drawn more scrutiny from regulators, policy-makers and the public, the activists' strategy changed.

There have been nearly 100 arrests in 20 protests, most involving trespassing. Led by a new group called Climate Ground Zero, the activists have chained themselves to giant dump trucks, scaled 80-foot trees to stop blasting and paddled into a nine-million-gallon sludge pond. They've blocked roads, hung banners and staged sit-ins.

Virginia-based Massey Energy claims that a single three-and-a-half-hour occupation at Progress Coal Co in Twilight cost the company $300,000.

Two environmentalists pleaded no contest to battery after that incident for trying to push past a miner and climb a 20-storey earth-moving crane.

Anti-mountain-top removal activists say the industry and its allies are stoking fear and anger among miners and their friends by accusing environmentalists, Congress and the Obama administration of trying to kill coal through regulation and permitting.

Massey equates anti-coal with anti-American. Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy blames the planned layoffs of 482 miners on a lawsuit by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Both sides are fighting for a way of life. The miners see the mountains as their livelihood. The environmentalists see them as divine and irreplaceable creations and the companies stand by and watch, stirring the pot endlessly.

Since that slap in June, conflict has manifested itself mainly in harsh words and shows of force - shout-downs by hundreds of miners at an Army Corps of Engineers hearing, a bare-bellied miner's profane, throat-slitting gesture at a picnic for environmentalists on Kayford Mountain, a vitriolic online tirade in which someone using the screen name "Superhippieslayer" warns: "Look out, violence is coming your way. There is a group ready as we speak to eliminate the threat."

The bitter feelings bubble up in comments posted on YouTube video links to incidents like the June 23 protest march where Bonds was slapped.

Hundreds of abusive comments were posted after she spoke at a December 7 rally in Charleston.

It's got to the point where Bonds has installed home-security cameras, carries a gun and checks her car for dangling bomb wires.

"I feel a sense of dread," she says. "You're taking your life in your hands if they know who you are."

Lorelei Scarbro, an activist with Coal River Mountain Watch, said that the industry provokes the miners as it demonises the environmentalists.

"It's not the working man that's the problem here," Scarbro says.

"It's the industry and the way they continue to use and exploit people on both sides of the issue, whether it's the working man trying to take care of his family or the environmentalist trying to take care of us all."

Environmentalists use words like "corrupt," "greedy" and "thugs" to describe the pro-coal Establishment. Industry counters with words like "hippies," "extremists" and "terrorists."

The West Virginia Coal Association dismisses much of the inflammatory language as harmless rhetoric, to be expected when jobs are on the line.

"We absolutely don't condone people who use threats, intimidation and general thuggism," says senior vice-president Chris Hamilton.

However, "from our standpoint, it's more difficult to engage in constructive discussion with someone who has as their primary objective to shut the industry down."

Neither side is backing down.

"People are not going to just roll over and let their livelihood be regulated out of business," says Beckley coal lorry supplier Carl Hubbard, who bemoaned "limp-wristed greeniacs" in a recent newspaper column.

"God put that coal here for us to mine, in my view."

There have been pleas to tone things down. In July, after the South Charleston Museum board of directors cancelled the premiere of the film Coal Country over unspecified security concerns, the West Virginia Council of Churches begged both sides to respect the rights of lawful assembly and free speech.

Months later, executive director Dennis Sparks is still waiting.

"There's not a day goes by that we don't lift it up in prayer."

Politicians and power brokers have generally responded by inciting or standing indifferent. Take state Senate Majority Leader Truman Chafin.

"The Lord didn't create many things without a purpose. But mosquitoes and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) come close, I think."

US Senator Robert C Byrd recently became an important exception, rebuking the industry.

"The most important factor in maintaining coal-related jobs is demand for coal," he says. "Scapegoating and stoking fear among workers over the permitting process is counterproductive."

Elsewhere, rhetoric might be dismissed as just that, but the coalfields have a bloody history.

In 1920, a shootout between unionising miners and coal company security guards left 12 men dead on the streets of Matewan, West Virginia.

The 1921 battle of Blair Mountain, an armed union uprising, eventually required the intervention of federal troops. During a union strike in the 1980s, car windows were smashed and shots were fired.

"But this is different," says William Kovarik, an associate professor at Radford University in Virginia who studies and teaches the history of environmental movements worldwide.

Now the conflict is between miners and people within their own communities.

"Union and non-union workers are being told by management that their livelihoods are at great risk from out-of-state environmentalists," Kovarik says.

"Management is going out of its way to equate them with terrorists, when in reality, they are their own neighbours, grandparents, retired coal miners and college students."

Activist Chuck Nelson, a former underground miner from Glen Daniel, said that the longer surface miners face uncertainty, the more the danger grows. The federal government must act soon, one way or the other.

And if the EPA comes down on the environmentalists' side?

"Well," says Nelson, "there's a possibility it might not be safe to live in the Coal River Valley."