image by Charlie Brewer

This is guest post by playwright, actress, and activist Sarah Moon, who is developing the play Current Changes in Empire, about mountaintop removal coal mining and the history of electricity, in collaboration with arts and activism organization Headwater Productions. A staged reading of the work-in-progress, directed by Steph Pistello, is being presented at Dixon Place today, September 16th. Visit http://www.dixonplace.org for more information. I saw this play a few months ago and was very much touched by its historical, rational, and personal take on Mountaintop Removal coal-mining. -ed.

My collaborator Steph Pistello and I decided we wanted to do a play on the subject of mountaintop removal coal mining in May of 2007 when our theatre company performed a series of short original pieces at two New York events organized by the Coalfield Delegation to the UN. When we got to the media action event at Daj Hammarskjold Park, just outside the UN, we saw the coalfield delegates gathered in front of large, color banners showing mountain top removal sites.

Leading, long-time activist Larry Gibson stood in his fluorescent yellow shirt and cap that both read “We are the keepers of the mountains. Love them or leave them. Just don’t destroy them.” Activist Judy Bonds spoke to the crowd and smashed a piece of coal against her cheek, impressing on me the violence committed against both the land and the people who live on it by the coal companies.

In mountaintop removal, the trees are clear-cut and the mountaintops blasted away with heavy explosives to reveal coal seams that are then dug up by massive machines called drag lines. The practice is devastating to the land, its animals and its peoples, hastening floods, extinctions and polluting headwaters that are the water source for much of the Southeastern United States.

Watching the people who lived in and around mountaintop removal fight for their homeland, I felt deep sympathy, but I didn’t yet feel personally connected to the issue. It felt like our performance piece had been developed on their behalf. I actually felt somewhat timid about imposing our vision of the issue upon them. I felt confident about our piece only from my stance as an actor. By becoming an Appalachian affected by MTR in performance, I felt I could be legitimately connected to the issue.

In one of our pieces, five of us stood in front of a wash tub with wet rags containing charcoal. As we counted to 450, the number of mountains that had, at that point, been destroyed by MTR, we “washed” ourselves with rags. The wet charcoal in them stained our arms, hands, faces and legs. After the performance, a few people said, “Oh, Sarah, your face!” I couldn’t see myself but they told me that my cheeks, nose and chin were black. Silly as it may seem, this made me feel more legitimate. But once I’d washed the black off in a nearby fountain, I was just a compassionate outsider again.

That night we performed again at an Episcopal Church in Harlem. Halfway through the evening, Bobby Kennedy Jr. took the stage. There’s no way I can do justice to his speech. I can only say that it changed me. He opened up the issue of mountaintop removal by showing how it was symbolic of a much deeper, spiritual problem in America—the severing of America’s covenant with the land. He talked about the sweeping landscape paintings of early American artists and the spiritual awe and deference that they depicted. He asserted that American identity had been long-defined by a deep appreciation for the land. Our forefathers marveled at the scale of the American West and our ancestors carved out their new lives from this land.

As he spoke, a sense of purpose formed in me—a desire to unite our future with our past and cover the chasm that has grown between American people and their land since the beginning of the Industrial Age.

After listening to Kennedy’s speech, I no longer felt like an outsider on the issue of mountaintop removal. I felt that, as an American, I was part of it. I saw it as the single most blatant example of a national issue—Americans’ deteriorating appreciation for their land. Just as the Appalachian Mountains can’t be separated from the rest of America, neither can our treatment of the land be separated from our own survival. The land is what feeds us, heals us, and spiritually sustains us. As Kennedy said, in a Boston Globe article from 2005 ‘’To me, the environmental work is spiritual work—we have a biological drive to consume the planet, to compete, and ultimately to destroy what God has created, and that can only be overcome with a spiritual fire. I don’t think nature is God, or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe it’s the way that God communicates to us most forcefully.”

I walked away from that evening with the conviction that none of us are outsiders on this issue. The imaginary line I had placed between myself and Appalachia dissolved. I felt strongly that our next project should be a full-length play on the subject of mountaintop removal.

I began making plans for an initial research trip to Kentucky and West Virginia where our company dramaturg Ingrid Nordstrom and I would do interviews and a fly-over tour of mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia. The trip was eye-opening, but it felt like just grasping the tip of the iceberg. I realized how naïve I was about the complexity of the issue and left with a million more questions than when I began.

After the trip, at the urging of Tammy Horn, I began reading Jeff Goodell’s Big Coal. As I read this book, I learned a lot more about the larger industry of mountain top removal and its historical legacy, how it is intertwined with the inception and spread of electricity in America. The practical connection between myself and mountaintop removal finally dawned on me in full. 50% of America’s electricity comes from coal. I was helping blow up mountains every time I switched on the lights, turned on my computer, nuked leftovers in the microwave, charged my cell phone, tuned on a fan….

It’s impossible to research this issue and not be changed. My research on mountaintop removal has definitely affected my life personally. It has opened my eyes to the devastation of resource extraction throughout the world and reinforced my longstanding belief that, in contemporary American society, corporations come before people. So much of what we are doing to keep the engines of industry turning is injurious to human life. With each barrel of oil we drill, with each ton of coal we dig, we are degrading the land we need to grow food, sustain wildlife, and build homes on. With our ever-growing consumption of fossil fuels, we are hastening our own destruction. It’s a difficult concept to grasp both emotionally and intellectually and even when one has grasped it, it can slip away again. Holding onto it can change your life.

(This article continues tomorrow.)