No
Alternative
Dig
out our coal, turn it into cash.
Starve out
our homelands, but keep your wallets
fat.
Shake down our houses, with your big old
draglines.
And bury our families, deep in
them mines.
I
heard these lines, sung by the The Local Honeys,
for the first time back in April when the
acclaimed folk duo from Kentucky, Montana Hobbs
and Linda Jean Stokley, performed at the
Bioneers Conference in Berkeley. The words are
from their award-winning song, “Cigarette Trees,” which was
inspired by a coal slurry pond disaster in
Martin County, KY, back in 2000. That was the
first time I heard of the disaster, which
spilled 250 million gallons of liquid mine waste
into local waterways and, to this day, has left
people there struggling to find safe drinking
water.
“You
know how people have neighborhood watches? Well,
in Martin County, they have ‘black water
watches’ so that the first person who sees black
water come into the creek can notify the rest of
the people in the area,” Stokely told me when I
met up with the duo later.
Both
women spoke quite a bit about Kentucky. About
how the beautiful land was prone to
catastrophes; how industry influence keeps them
stuck with “shitty politicians representing us
to the rest of the world”; and how you can’t
really call a terrible flood "a natural
disaster" when “they have blown the top of the
mountains off.” But most of all, they spoke
about how all these — the ravaged land, the
stranglehold of the dying coal industry, the
corrupt politicians — are not the whole
picture.
From
music and bourbon to horses and grand vistas,
Kentucky and its people have a lot more to
offer. But to see that, we need to set aside
“age-old stereotypes that are still being used
to keep Appalachians down,” Hobbs said. And,
above all, she said, our nation needs to support
the creation of alternative economies in these
places. Because so far, “Kentucky and Appalachia
haven’t been offered another option.”
Instead,
one of the big projects proposed in the state
right now is a $500 million federal prison —
atop a former toxic coal mine.
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