about

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. Over one-hundred years of coal mining have taken a 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 coal

But mountaineers have been fighting against destructive and illegal mining practices 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.

 

The Mountain Reporter Network is using Place Stories 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 Place Stories 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).

 

 

For over 100 years, central Appalachia has been a rich land with financially poor people.  Transnational corporate ownership and exploitation of the region"s natural resources in complicity with local, state, and federal governments has siphoned off the region"s wealth and abetted corporate abuse of the land and people. The infamous Harlan County, for example, has produced over 1 billion tons of coal in the past century, yet today is one of the poorest counties in the nation.

 

Nowadays much of the thirst for electricity in the U.S. is fed by a devastating form of surface mining called mountaintop removal, a quasi-legal practice that is destroying the land and people of this part of Appalachia, and a practice that could increase dramatically if the coal industry"s calls for subsidizing the production of "Liquid Coal" (i.e. synthetic fuels) and "Clean Coal" 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.
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. Through Place Stories, citizens throughout the region will share their stories of a beautiful land and long time communities being destroyed for coal.

 

 

 

"never let bandwidth stand in the way of a good story"