About Mountain Reporter Network PlaceStories

The Mountain Reporter Network is a digital storytelling and community journalism project taking place in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, a region that has historically produced much of the coal mined in the U.S.

 

Appalachia is a beautiful, mountainous region with culturally rich and resourceful people with a strong heritage of self sufficiency. However, over one-hundred years of coal mining have taken a heavy toll on the land and the people, and now mountaintop removal/valley fill mining, a radical form of strip mining, threatens total destruction of the mountains and all who live there. Members of the Mountain Reporter Network want the world to know the true costs of mining and using coal.

 

The Mountain Reporter Network is using PlaceStories as part of efforts to develop an alternative, community-based media network that shares the stories of local citizens who are living with the true costs of coal and fighting for community survival. By sharing our experiences through PlaceStories we hope to expose the human and environmental devastation caused by the coal industry, influence policy decisions on the state and federal level, and build and strengthen the base of community activists in the Appalachian Mountains and beyond who are working for a sustainable future.

 

The Mountain Reporter Network is coordinated by the Center for Rural Strategies (ruralstrategies.org) and Feral Arts (feralarts.com), with grassroots partners Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (ohvec.org), Coal River Mountain Watch (crmw.org), Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (kftc.org), and the media center/community radio station Appalshop/WMMT (appalshop.org).

THE PROBLEM

Much of America’s thirst for electricity is fed by a devastating form of strip mining called mountaintop removal, a quasi-legal practice that is destroying the land and people of central Appalachia, and one that could increase dramatically if the coal industry’s calls for subsidizing the production of Liquid Coal (i.e. synthetic fuels) are supported as the key to national “Energy Independence.”

Mountaintop removal entails the blasting of entire summits to rubble, as much as 800 to 1000 feet of mountain top, in an effort to reach thin seams of bituminous coal as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Millions of tons of rock, topsoil, trees and other vegetation are dumped into the valleys below. More than 1,000 miles of streams have been buried in this way, and an EPA study found that 95 percent of headwater streams near mines have been contaminated by heavy metals leeching from the sites. Over a million acres have been strip-mined in Kentucky since 1980; the numbers in West Virginia are worse. These mountaintop removal sites stretching across Appalachia -- lifeless gray plateaus resembling lunar wastelands -- will soon reach the size of Delaware. The largest man-made monuments in the eastern US are now massive valley fills 1000 feet deep and stretching for up to five miles in length. The impact of this massive deforestation has been noted in studies on global warning.

This practice also devastates Appalachian communities and cultures that have existed in these mountains for hundreds of years. Entire settlements have been forced out by rockslides, catastrophic floods, poisoned water supplies, constant blasting, destroyed property, and a loss of community and shared heritage. These fractured communities show the typical symptoms of hopelessness, including OxyContin abuse rates higher than anywhere in the country.

But mountaineers have been fighting against strip mining with some success for many years, despite powerful energy corporations, “special interest” politicians, regulators who won't regulate, and news media that don't report the news. What started in the 1960s and 70s as small bands of individuals fighting strip mining on a local level has evolved into statewide citizens organizations working for environmental, economic and social justice in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as a number of regional environmental justice advocacy groups. Recently, many of these groups have come together in an alliance to stop mountaintop removal mining, and to promote renewable energy and a sustainable future for the region.

WHY A MOUNTAIN REPORTER NETWORK?

In the same way that they have historically controlled the region’s towns, stores, schools, doctors and churches, the coal industry has kept a tight rein on the media in Appalachia. All of the groups involved in this partnership have first hand knowledge of the manner in which corporate control and influence over the mass media keeps our stories from reaching a broader audience.

In West Virginia, Big Coal owns interests in the West Virginia MetroNews Radio Network (with newscasts carried over radio stations across the state), West Virginia Media Holdings (four TV stations and the weekly state “business” newspaper) and several state newspapers. In papers where there is no direct coal-related ownership, the coal industry is a major advertiser that many papers are reluctant to anger. Over the airwaves, there is a virtual black-out of mountaintop-removal-related news.

In Kentucky, the two major papers have a good record of reporting on coal issues but both have their biggest footprint in central Kentucky, far from the coalfields.  In reality most residents and policymakers in the coalfields get their news from distant television stations, Clear Channel radio affiliates, and local weeklies now mostly owned by corporate media. When they report on coal issues, which is rarely for television and radio, the coverage strongly favors the industry perspective.

Not hearing alternative voices in the media leaves local citizens with the perception that the coal industry is much more important to the economy and their livelihood than is actually true. The issue is consistently framed as jobs versus the environment, but little analysis is made in local media of the current and long-term costs to society, nor is there mention of the boom/bust cycle of the coal industry and the increasingly mechanized nature of mountaintop removal which employees fewer and fewer miners. People hear of the importance of the coal industry to the economy, but that doesn't jibe with the poverty they see in their communities. The industry uses the media to brag about creating flat land for all kinds of industrial development, but folks live below barren wastelands prone to severe flooding.

Couple that with the coal industry's century-long campaign of intimidating opponents and you find a reluctance to speak out. It takes a lot of courage to speak up against what has traditionally been the main industry in your community, especially one that has a history of bullying, threatening and actually attacking its detractors. Residents know the truth, but they have had few examples of their peers speaking that truth within their communities and on the airwaves. Without alternative opinions in the media, local people believe there is general consensus among community leaders and political elites that coal is good for the region and they have little way of learning about real options for moving the region towards an economic and environmentally sustainable future. The Mountain Reporter Network strives to bring forth these other voices.