It’s time to listen to the people

By RONNIE ELLIS
CNHI News Service

December 08, 2007 02:25 pm

— FRANKFORT
Rep. Harry Moberly is right: It’s one thing to listen to testimony about mountaintop removal — it’s another to witness its effects firsthand.
But the physical evidence at Montgo-mery Creek in Perry County pales compared with the eloquence of those who spoke to lawmakers Monday during a tour of a mountaintop removal site. McKinley Sumner, Evelyn and Sam Gilbert, Truman Hurt, Ricky Handshoe and Carl Shoupe aren’t your everyday environmental activists. They aren’t in all cases the most worldly or sophisticated spokespeople for a cause. But they have lived the experience of coal — most of them from both sides.
“I have a complicated history with coal,” author and musician Silas House said. “My family was able to rise above poverty in large part because of the jobs provided by the coal industry.” His mother was proud to be a coal miner’s daughter and his grandfather lost a leg to coal mining, but six months later returned to the mines and worked in them another 20 years.
Then House flew over the area in an airplane, and “I could not believe such disrespect could be done to the land, to the people, to my heritage. I’m not asking you to ban coal mining, but I am asking you to say, now listen, we can mine coal but we’ve got to do it with some integrity.”
He talked about how it feels for eastern Kentuckians to feel “invisible,” to feel ignored by government, to have their customs and way of speaking derided. They are invisible, House said, when officials say there is no outcry against mountaintop removal from eastern Kentuckians themselves or when they claim the water pollution is their own fault, the result of straight-pipe sewage disposal.
Patty Wallace, “the housewife from hell” from Lawrence County, told the lawmakers she has a college degree. But, “You don’t need a degree. These people who live up in these hollers, they may talk funny but their brains work! They can tell you more about mountaintop removal than these people with a degree.”
They did — the ones who live right up against the mountains being blasted into oblivion. Any stereotypes of ignorant or funny-talking hillbillies vanished immediately. Sam Gilbert painted pictures with his words of “the dust that hovers in the valleys” and the creek that runs “like chocolate milk.” Aged and nervous, McKinley Sumner voiced the outrage done to his property on which his family has lived for generations, his voice cracking in defiant anger.
I know other good people from eastern Kentucky who have a different view of mountaintop removal. They argue it produces economic benefit and jobs for a poor region and supplies needed flat land for industrial sites; infrastructure and tourism. They say the people who spoke Monday at the Kodak Church of the True and Living God don’t reflect the way a majority of eastern Kentuckians view mountaintop removal.
Maybe not. We should listen to both sides. But we should let eastern Kentuc-kians themselves do the talking, and not the coal operators and politicians, some of whom are in the pockets of the coal operators.
The people I heard Monday reminded me of the very mountains that formed who they are, their character and their dignity. The people of eastern Kentucky — not the coal, not even the mountains — are its greatest resource.
It’s time the rest of us see them and hear them.
Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. He may be contacted by e-mail at rellis@cnhi.com.