Yesterday the website Daily Kos and the Sierra Club hosted a live chat with Ashley Judd about mountaintop removal mining and its impact on Appalachian communities.   Apparently a huge number of people participated in the chat.  From the Sierra Club:

According to Kos, the 1-hour live chat got over a million page views from about 90,000 unique visitors - more than the audience of many cable TV shows. Around 200 people participated directly in the live chat, leaving nearly 400 comments.

One thing interesting thing to come out of the discussion, is the possibility that Oprah might be interested in doing a piece about mountaintop removal.  As one of the most influential media figures in the U.S., she could drive millions of people to learn more about the destruction of the Appalachian mountains.  Hopefully this new national attention will help push our new Congress to do the right thing and finally pass the Clean Water Protection Act.

Teri Blanton, Sen Kathy Stein and Rep. John Yarmuth

It was a great event!  I Love Mountains Day 2009 saw another strong turnout in Frankfort as hundreds marched and rallied in support of clean water and protections for Kentucky's mountains and coalfield communities. The march was energetic, the speeches were phenomenal and the determination to retake state government from special monied interests was undeniable.

"I'm glad to be here today with people who are not afraid. We can take back our democracy. We're doing it, we're doing it today," said KFTC Chairperson K.A. Owens.

Watch a short video of the event by David Stephenson, photojournalist with the Lexington Herald-Leader, or another video by Mike Wynn of the Winchester Sun. 

View this photo album by Ann Olson

More than 700 people started the rally in downtown Frankfort at the Kentucky River, whose headwaters are severely damaged by coal company pollution. This included a group of people who had marched from Lexington to Frankfort to draw attention the issue.

The crowd marched — including 96-year-old Marie Cassidy from Louisville — about a half mile to join a another crowd waiting for them on the front steps of the state capitol, greeted by music from Ben Sollee and David Martin Moore.  Speeches by Sen. Kathy Stein, Rep. John Yarmuth, K.A. Owens, Randy Wilson, Silas House, Ashley Judd, Lyle Snider, Willa Hood, Emily Gillespie and Teri Blanton, as well as music by Public Outcry and the Reel World String Band followed.

Willa Johnson talked about growing up in McRoberts in Letcher County where abuse by coal companies is a daily occurrence.

"I am 23 now, and still live in the mountains I love, and my family still struggles to hold on to what is theirs. My grandfather, a retired coal miner, at the age of 84 fights daily for his land. His home is falling apart from the blasts, boulders litter the family cemetery behind his home and the MTR company behind his home trespasses to clean up their dirty mess from time to time thinking that he doesn't realize what is really going on. What that company doesn't know is that age doesn't matter, strength and determination is what counts, and at 84 years old he's going to keep fighting for what he loves."

Featured speaker Ashley Judd was equally strong in her condemnation of the coal industry's disregard of people and planet.

Let me be clear.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is a tragedy.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is a scourge on our people and on our land.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is devouring vast acreages of irreplaceable hardwood forests, filling our sacred hollows, burying precious headwater streams, and eliminating wildlife habitat. And, with its monstrous equipment and mechanization, it is also eliminating coal miner’s jobs.

 
But the emphasis was largely on water, protecting Kentucky's rivers and stream from the coal industry's practice of dumping its toxic mining wastes into the headwater streams of the Kentucky, Big Sandy, Cumberland and Licking rivers in eastern Kentucky. "Not One More Mile"  was the chant for the day as the defenders of Kentucky's precious people and places said that 1,400 miles of streams buried or severely damaged by this practice is already way too many.

Speakers emphasized that by being so bound to coal and protecting the industry that Kentucky is losing out on opportunities to transition with the rest of the nation to a green energy economy. Some of the loudest cheers came when speakers talked about bring these jobs to the coalfields.

Media coverage:

• Ronnie Ellis with CNHI News Service
• Charlie Pearl in the Frankfort State Journal
• Tom Eblen in the Lexington Herald Leader
• David Stephenson's video in the Herald-Leader
• Mike Wynn in the Winchester Sun
  
• James Bruggers in The Courier-Journal
• Kristin Espeland on WFPL-FM
• Silas House blog
• Mark Grayson at thelevisalazer.com
  

 KFTC's I Love Mountains Day is just wrapping up in Frankfort today.  W'll report back fully with many more pictures, videos, quotes, and stories,  but here are the very first pictures from the day.

Click on any of these pictures to visit our flickr account and see hundreds more pictures.

   

   

      

     

I Love Mountains Day is Tomorrow (Tuesday) and we're looking forward to a fun-packed day with a powerful march and rally with over 800 participants!

Come on out, and visit KFTC.org/Love for details.

One of the cool things about KFTC’s Fall Fundraising Campaign is that we have a chance to talk with our members and find out more about the people who make up this organization. Tonight I had the pleasure of talking with Janice in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Here’s what I learned:

Janice and her family joined KFTC earlier this year after attending a fundraiser that was organized by high school youth at the First Unitarian Church in Louisville.

At that event, participants were urged to attend the upcoming I love Mountains Rally in Frankfort. Janice decided she ought to learn as much as she could about the issue before going to the rally. She gathered information from KFTC and other websites. A week later, she and three others took a road trip to eastern Kentucky to get a first-hand understanding of the situation.

“I used the Kentucky Gazeteer maps,” Janice explained. “Those maps have shaded gray areas that are labeled ‘altered terrain.’ We figured those would be areas where there had been a lot of mining. Then we looked those areas up on Google Earth and headed out to find them.”

Janice’s carload traveled widely in and around Hazard.  “Of course some areas were blocked off and it was hard to get up on some sites. We followed trucks loaded with coal and several trucks filled with nitrogen. We learned that the nitrogen is not used for fertilizer. It is used for explosives.”

"We followed a steep mountain road that seemed likely to lead to one of the sites of gazetteer's 'altered terrain'. Suddenly the steep road leveled out. We were on a high plateau chopped out of the surrounding mountain horizon. On one side of the road stood a high wall surrounding something like a country club or gated clubhouse. Beyond that lay an enormous warehouse and gigantic lumber yard with thousands of huge trees lined up as logs. We were a bit surprised to see the lumber yard because we had read that many of the big trees are never harvested but pushed off the mountains to end up in the streams or as land fill. But we have also heard that some of the flatted areas have been finished for "show" while many others have not.

“On the other side of that same road was a lone, newly-built mansion-sized house in the middle of a barren field. Then we climbed over the top of an odd embankment which was next to the road and above the field. From the top we could look down into a huge, black pond banked entirely by shale, gravel, and dirt. We climbed down the slippery loose-packed wall to look at the oily water. A black scum coated the edge. I assumed this was what is called a "slurry pond"--a toxic chemical residue mixed with water and coal. It struck me as the hidden price tag for the display of wealth just beyond the embankment.”

Janice and her companions talked with many people along the way, including a number who believed that mountaintop removal mining is necessary and good for the local economy. “It is not a simple issue,” she noted.

“We met one very personable fellow whose father had been killed in a mine accident. He had leased some land to a coal company to be strip-mined, and was enthusiastic about the possibility of planting chestnut trees when the mining was finished. He told us the trees could grow in gravel, without any soil, as long as they had water. It wasn’t clear where the water was going to come from.”

“I do think differently about water after that trip. Our neighbors in Louisville and many other communities get their drinking water from the Ohio River, which is fed by the Big Sandy River and the Kentucky River where all that mining is taking place. All the sediment and pollution we saw flows downstream.”

One week after her visit to eastern Kentucky, and two weeks after learning about KFTC for the first time, Janice joined with 1,200 others at the I Love Mountains Rally in Frankfort.

Janice acknowledged that, as a resident of Indiana, the issue of mountaintop removal coal mining isn’t her most pressing concern. But, she added, “Now my antennae are up. It doesn't matter that I left the mountains of Barbourville, KY when I was five and have rarely been back, or that I have never lived in West Virginia or Virginia. Kentucky's problem is ours. Your air, your trees, your streams, your natural beauty, and your coal are resources for both our states, our country and this our only planet. Your water is us!”

Welcome to membership in KFTC, Janice! We are glad to have your support and involvement. And thanks for the good conversation.

Anyone reading this blog entry can help KFTC raise some funds AND have great conversations with terrific people like Janice. Please contact your local KFTC office to volunteer to make phone calls over the next 10 days. Our goal is to have a good conversation with every person on our mailing list, and encourage members to renew their dues or make a special donation at this time. It’s fun, and these calls help ensure that KFTC has the resources we need to keep building momentum for social justice in Kentucky.

                                                           — Lisa Abbott

A number of people have inquired about getting a copy of the text from Wendell Berry's impassioned speech at the I Love Mountains Day Rally.  For anyone who is still interested in reading it, we've put it online, and you can download it here.

With a single AP photo and a two sentence caption, the Lexington Herald-Leader appeared uninterested in reporting on our I Love Mountains Day rally.  The paper has since been flooded with calls and letters criticizing their  poor coverage of this important event.  Eleven of these letters were published in Saturday's editorial page.

Clean water matters

The Herald-Leader can cover every aspect of meaningless news but can't provide adequate coverage of an important issue to all Kentuckians: clean water.

There was a rally in Frankfort on Feb. 14 in support of the "Stream Saver Bill," but there was no news story in the Herald-Leader. More than 1,200 Kentucky citizens and taxpayers who actually want to protect Kentucky's water attended, but the Herald-Leader seems only interested in covering meaningless stuff.

Having clean water and protecting against a water shortage should be more important issues to Kentuckians than deciding what to buy their sweeties for Valentine's Day.

What is wrong with the Herald-Leader? Has it been bought, as legislators in Frankfort have?

Clean water and air matter, not profits for coal mining executives and their bought flunkies.

Linda Sizemore
Richmond

Disappointed in paper

The Herald-Leader's lack of significant coverage of the large rally on the ice-covered steps of the state Capitol on Valentine's Day is very disappointing.

Attempts by legislators to ignore such input from citizens trying to get a hearing on the "Stream Saver Bill" may be attributed to their being in bed with surface-mining interests. I hope the Herald-Leader is not subject to the same sordid connections.

Maybe the rally was too peaceful and friendly. Civil disobedience or a few arrests might have made better news copy.

John Payne
Berea

Publish Berry's speech

What a shame that the Herald-Leader did not see fit to give more attention to the huge rally that took place in Frankfort on Valentine's Day. More than 1,200 people from all over the state came to protest mountaintop-removal in Eastern Kentucky.

Kentucky author Wendell Berry gave a wonderful speech, which, at the very least, deserved publication in the paper. People from Eastern Kentucky were there to testify to the devastating effects of mountaintop removal, which is ruining their drinking water and turning their beautiful land into a horrible moonscape.

I'm disappointed that the Herald-Leader did not provide more enlightening coverage of this vital issue.

Dianne Shuntich
Richmond

Along with the many, many people who were taking photos at Thursday's I Love Mountains Day rally, we had a number of people there shooting video.  So if you weren't able to come, take a few minutes and see what you missed!

Here are a couple of clips shot by Mimi Pickering of Appalshop

People filling the tunnel between the Capitol and the Annex.
By Laura Heller

And here are some by Jim Pence, from the HillbillyReport.com