I keep waiting to be “unfriended.” To logon to Facebook and see an irate comment posted on my wall; to notice I’ve lost a few followers on Twitter; to watch at the grocery store as another mom from my son’s school whips through produce with barely a nod in my direction.

The message these former friends would send would be this: You’ve gotten too political for us. You keep harping on the same thing all the time.

No, I haven’t said one word about health care, or joined the Facebook group “I bet we can find 1,000,000 who think whatever,” or the group “I bet we can find 1,000,000 people who think the opposite of whatever.”

But the past few weeks, I feel like I have not shut up about mountaintop removal, also known as MTR.

Mountaintop removal photo courtesy of Appalachian Voices - http://www.appvoices.org

If you’re not familiar with MTR, it’s a method of coal mining in which the tops of mountains are literally blown away to get to coal seams inside. Debris from the blast typically goes into the valley below, clogging streams and seriously impacting the environment and human health. You can learn more at ilovemountains.org.

Where I live near Nashville, it’s pretty flat, so saving the mountains isn’t exactly at the top of most middle Tennessean’s minds. But it’s a different story in east Tennessee. Our state hasn’t experienced nearly the devastation that West Virginia and Kentucky have, but mountaintop mining does occur. To help protect Tennessee mountains, a couple of my friends founded an organization called LEAF, initially for the purpose of offering educational resources about MTR and creation care to churches.

But they soon realized that education alone wasn’t enough. LEAF has four years attempted – and four years failed – to get legislation passed in Tennessee to ban MTR. (Our last attempt, just last week, ended when a subcommittee managed to avoid a vote through procedural manipulation. But good news from the EPA on April 1st may help change next year’s strategy.)

Each of those years, I’ve done a little more on behalf of the organization, making my own visits to the legislature, writing letters, sending emails, speaking to groups in middle Tennessee, and this year doing a lot with the organization’s social media outreach. Which brings me back to why I’ve been saying so much on my personal social media accounts about this issue. Each year when we’ve realized the bill is dead again, I always regret not having done more. This year I decided I had to step up and keep this issue in front of my friends and followers. I had to keep trying to make people aware of this issue, one “status message” at a time.

Someone called me an activist recently, and I’m not at all sure I’ve earned that title. Even among good friends, I’ve never had the inclination to say much of anything political – before now.  Yet in a time when the political climate is so uncivil and partisan, I’m proud to be associated with a group which, as the Tennessean said in a front page story just yesterday, is “scrambling the usual political spectrum that places religious groups on the right and environmentalists on the left.”

Like many of us here on Risk a Day have acknowledged before, what’s risky for one person may be a breeze for another. Bringing up MTR all the time – in social media as well as in person – has definitely pushed my comfort zone. But then I think of West Virginia, where hundreds of mountains have been destroyed. Where the fight to stop MTR has been long, and violent at times. Where people like Maria Gunroe have their comfort zones pushed with sand in their gas tanks, bullets in their pets, death threats. I think of my friend and LEAF co-founder Dawn Coppock and her simple mantra, “God is big.” And I think I can keep doing my little bit. One status message, one email, one conversation at a time. My real friends will understand.

—

More personal stories like Maria’s are in the book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Silas House and Jason Howard

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Kory Wells would like to say she brazenly tossed aside her twenty-year career as a software developer to forge a lucrative career in poetry. She’s content to report that she now writes poetry, prose, corporate communications, and the occasional snippet of software code in a life-work balance that functions pretty well most of the time. Author of the poetry collection Heaven Was the Moon, she’s been recognized by Ladies’ Home Journal for her “standout” writing in the anthology She’s Such a Geek. Visit Kory's website.
Email this author | All posts by Kory Wells