Old North

LIVING DOWNSTREAM

In Kentucky coal country, Lisa Abbott '92 finds defending mountains harder than moving them

By Eric Johnson & Kelly Kirby
Spring 2012  |  The Scholar

“Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. . . . It mars but never beautifies. It corrupts but never purifies.”     — Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1961)

Berea, Kentucky — Along Route 160, not far beyond Pine Mountain Ridge in southeastern Kentucky, the old mining towns of Benham and Lynch crowd the narrow valley. Once among the largest coal camps in the world, the twin townships now offer a sleepy reminder of a bygone age

Home to the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, Benham and Lynch have been transformed into tourist attractions, trading on the faded icon of gritty, determined men venturing deep underground with headlamps ablaze.

The star attraction is the No. 31 Mine Portal, a truck-sized, half-moon tunnel where a small army of men once ventured into the mountainside, extracting coal for U.S. Steel. For $10.00, visitors can don helmets and venture into the hollowed-out earth, touring the tunnel for a glimpse of mining’s past.

A glimpse of mining’s present is free. A few miles down the road, as Route 160 crosses Black Mountain and begins a steep run of switchbacks into Virginia, the Looney Creek Surface Mine looms into view.

The contrast is staggering. The thousands of miners who worked the old No. 31 tunnel used jackhammers, pickaxes, and railway wagons to painstakingly extract coal and bring it up to the surface. At Looney Creek, a few dozen workers use earthmovers and dump trucks the size of schoolhouses to bring the surface down to the coal. They are steadily removing a mountain.

There are a lot of reasons for the shift from underground mining to strip mining. The remaining Appalachian coal seams are narrower, heavy equipment is heavier, and our collective demand for inexpensive energy is greater. For mining companies, it is often cheaper and safer to simply knock the top off a mountain or a ridge and scoop up the coal beneath. But that ease comes at a price.

The land around Lynch, above the old U.S. Steel mine, is still heavily forested mountainside. Extracting Lynch’s coal was dangerous and dirty, but the No. 31 Mine Portal is now a tiny surgical scar on an otherwise healthy mountain.

The Looney Creek Surface Mine is a gaping wound. It is a vast moonscape of churned rock and mechanically terraced escarpments. It is a barren recess where a mountain used to be.

For Lisa Abbott ’91, that is too much to pay for cheap energy.

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At the wizened age of ten, Abbott informed her mother that she wouldn’t be having children. Children, she decided, meant you couldn’t care about work anymore. Already, Abbott felt she had too much work ahead to hazard distractions.

A few decades have passed since Abbott issued this declaration to her blinking mother, but it hasn’t been forgotten. Instead it’s made its way into family lore and is gleefully recounted when the family, including Abbott’s two young sons, gets together.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about ten year-olds issuing precocious declarations. There’s certainly nothing remarkable about precocious declarations going the way of irresolute things like campaign promises. What’s remarkable about young Abbott’s is that it may be the single instance of inconsistency — ever — between a thing she said and an action she took.

You will seldom meet a person more conversant with her beliefs and values than Abbott, nor one more committed to practicing them. “I’ll act as if what I do makes a difference,” she is quoted as saying in her eighth-grade yearbook.

By her teen years, Abbott began the work she felt compelled to do at age ten, immersing herself in environmental issues. In high school, she was a research assistant at a water quality station on the Hudson River. In college, she served as co-chair for the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), where she helped organize the group’s first national conference.

Before her junior year, she designed her own summer internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council and completed an impressive report on the Chattahoochee River Basin. That, in turn, became the basis for a grant proposal for a clean water campaign in Georgia.

As an undergraduate, Abbott pursued a degree in biology, expecting to build a career doing the kind of fieldwork she enjoyed during her summer internship. But through her involvement with SEAC she discovered community organizing — as she describes it, “a way in which committed activism takes place off a college campus” — and immediately shifted plans.

While still at Carolina, Abbott attended workshops at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee to learn more about the mechanics of organizing and to figure out how her skills stacked up against the work. Highlander is a social justice leadership and training center perhaps best known for working with Rosa Parks prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

While at Highlander, Abbott became familiar with a small but sophisticated organizing group called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), broadly committed to social justice, but heavily focused on mountaintop removal mining.

Her first job with KFTC landed her in a remote corner of eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal mining was most prevalent in the state. For five years she lived and worked there alone, a full hour and a half from her nearest colleague. It was an isolated start to adult life, so she got a dog to keep her company. Then the dog was stolen.

“It was a country song,” Abbott laughed, describing those early years. “I was robbed three times, and by the third time, they had taken everything — there was nothing left. I had a jar where I kept change, and it had one quarter in it because everything I had put in there before had been stolen already. They took the quarter.”

Alas for her concerned parents, neither the solitude nor the serial pilfering was enough to deter Abbott. “I had a job that aligned most closely with my values,” she explained. “It was a job that I loved, and for five years that was enough.”

By year six, however, she began to grow restless and to question long-held assumptions. “I realized that the work just wasn’t enough anymore, whatever I might’ve thought when I was ten. And what was I going to do with that?”

What she did was give her notice to KFTC, get married, have her first child, and pursue an advanced degree in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton — all in the span of three years.

She didn’t stay gone long. Shortly after completing her coursework at Princeton, Abbott and her young family returned to Kentucky and settled in the charming college town of Berea. Though she hadn’t envisioned returning to Kentucky, resuming her work with KFTC was a happy homecoming.

“It’s been almost a decade since we’ve come back, and one of the biggest joys has been that I don’t have all those questions anymore,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll come back at some point in my life, but right now I’m doing what I love, living where I want to live, with a fantastic family and group of friends.”

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Among the more pressing challenges for groups like KFTC is that much of the behavior they seek to stop is, in fact, already banned.

As a matter of law, mining companies cannot pollute streams, cannot permanently destroy wildlife habitat, cannot fill valleys with mining waste — cannot legally do a great many of the things that are part and parcel of strip mining.

But as any speeding driver knows, there’s a difference between what is prohibited and what is punished. And in Kentucky, that gulf is vast.

“They’ve simply stopped enforcing the laws,” Abbott said. For advocacy groups, this presents a trickier challenge.

Nothing illustrates that better than a fascinating chart Abbott assembled from state environmental data. Under the federal Clean Water Act, mining companies are obliged to monitor nearby streams and report a variety of water quality measures to state regulators.

Among those indicators is conductivity, the ease with which an electrical charge passes through water. “Conductivity is useful as a general measure of stream water quality,” the EPA explains. “Significant changes in conductivity could be an indicator that a discharge or some other source of pollution has entered a stream.”

Lower conductivity is generally better; organic material (the stuff that’s supposed to be in a stream) doesn’t conduct electricity well, but various inorganic compounds (nitrate, sulfate, magnesium, sodium, calcium, iron; the stuff that mining runoff puts in a stream) conduct it swimmingly.

On Abbott’s chart, mining companies reported a perfectly stable amount of conductivity—just within the EPA standard—month after month, in stream after stream. In heavy rains and drought, across all manner of geological formations and stream sizes, the lines on the graph remained flat; different mines across the state were reporting identical data.

In 2010, the EPA had a change of heart and required mining companies to aim for a more stringent conductivity standard. As Abbott's chart shows, mine operators were than happy to comply. Instantly, and in perfect unison, every stream in Kentucky dropped to the new standard.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Abbot asked.

And it gets more so. After a years-long lawsuit by KFTC and other interested parties, a state judge ordered independent tests of all those company-monitored streams. This sudden bout of regulatory zeal is demonstrated on the right side of the chart as a kind of color explosion. Liberated from their brazen lockstep, the lines shoot upward at wildly different angles, like a covey of startled quail. This is what real water-quality data looks like.

"None of them are compliant with the standard," Abbott said. "We're talking about 20,000 of these violations."

The point worth dwelling on here is that none of this blatantly fraudulent data was being hidden from state regulators; it was sitting in file cabinets at the Kentucky Division of Water.

But knowing and caring are two very different things. In a sense, KFTC's work on mountaintop removal amounts to an extended plea for Kentuckians and their elected officials to care about the damage in plain sight.

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For most of us, the iconic images of modern political protest are ’60s-vintage. There are banners, loud marches, plenty of chanting, maybe even some arrests. “Protest” calls to mind a dramatic affair.

So it was a little jarring to see Abbott and her colleagues quietly seated in the waiting area of Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear’s office, turning down offers of coffee and candy from the governor’s diligently polite staff.

It was June 23rd, a Thursday, and the legislature was not in session. The State Capitol in Frankfort had an empty, hushed feel. Even the handful of tourists wandering through to see the ornate, Beaux-Arts building with French replica staircases were quiet in their appreciation.

Assembled in the governor’s anteroom were Abbott and three volunteers from the KFTC office in Berea; a man named Rick Handshoe, who lives downstream from a mine in Floyd County; and an exceedingly tall, courtly fellow in a tan suit.

Handshoe was there because his creek keeps turning orange, and he would like someone to take an interest in the problem. The tall fellow, Wendell Berry, was there because President Barack Obama recently awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and it seemed unlikely the Capitol police would make a scene by evicting him.

Berry is an oddity in Kentucky, a man regarded as a civic treasure for decrying the general direction of society. He has written more than forty books of poetry and essays, mostly about mankind and our conflicted relationship with nature. He owns a farm in Henry County, and he has publicly described the government of Kentucky as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal corporations and of any other corporations that bid high enough.” Still, everyone in the Capitol seemed to adore him.

After Berry visited the White House last year to collect his National Humanities Medal, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway was kind enough to send a congratulatory note. He invited Berry to call on him if he could ever be of service. Berry promptly took Conway up on the offer, requesting a meeting for Handshoe and KFTC to discuss the orange creek issue. Berry has been an ardent supporter of KFTC, offering his lanky frame and understated gravitas wherever it might do some good.

The half-hour meeting wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, but Abbott and her volunteers had no intention of wasting a trip to the Capitol on a short, closed-door session. So there they all were at 10:30 in the morning, patiently waiting for Governor Beshear to return to his office so that he might be urged to hear Handshoe’s petition.

“Two state agencies have said, ‘You know what, Rick? We don’t respond to calls about orange water anymore,’” Abbott explained. Handshoe had been through this routine before, the last few times the upstream mining operation released wastewater into his creek. “Now they’re just throwing up their hands and not responding at all.”

Even though it was as quiet as a library in the governor’s office, a half-dozen people sitting around and looking aggrieved was enough to attract the lone reporter prowling the Capitol building on a languid summer morning. It is to KFTC’s everlasting luck that the reporter was Ronnie Ellis. 

Ellis’s mere presence in an out-of-session, news-free Capitol attests to his status as a dying breed in journalism. Few news outlets can afford a full-time reporter in the statehouse, and fewer still employ a multi-decade veteran like Ellis.

He serves as the Frankfort reporter for Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., and his stories get picked up by local papers and websites across Kentucky. He wandered in wearing a sport coat and an open-necked shirt, sat down next to Handshoe, and began taking notes.

Whether out of boredom, genuine sympathy, or a deep-seated belief in the journalist’s creed of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, Ellis decided to lend a hand.

He called the governor’s press secretary and found that Beshear had already returned — through a side door — and would be exiting again shortly, with no intention of seeing the aggrieved citizens in his lobby. A small press conference on an unrelated matter was scheduled to begin just down the hall.

This presented a choice for Abbott. Be content with a mild-mannered sit-in here in the governor’s lobby, or use the press conference as a chance to make some news?

“The issue of mountaintop removal has gotten a lot of press coverage nationally,” Abbott said. “But within the state, it’s sort of a shrug-your-shoulders attitude.” Abbott took a quick poll and found that the group was not inclined to shrug and go home.

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To give Governor Beshear his due, the brief in favor of coal is as compelling as it is succinct: we need it. The United States has the largest proven reserves of coal in the world, and almost half of our electric power comes from burning it. On this, industry supporters and environmental activists agree: we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

The coal lobby has developed a catchy slogan to drive the point home: Coal Keeps the Lights On! It is so pithy that it fits on a license plate, which you can see within a few minutes on any eastern Kentucky highway. Drivers wishing to show their support for coal can get a jet-black specialty plate — “Coal Keeps the Lights On!” running in bright yellow across the bottom — through the state’s Motor Vehicle Licensing System. It costs $44.00, including an automatic $10.00 donation to the Kentucky Coal Association.

The prevalence of the plate hints at another of KFTC’s challenges: support for the coal industry is deep and sincere among many Kentuckians, especially those in elected office. “The powers that be in this state are firmly aligned behind the status quo,” Abbott said. “The coal industry dominates at every level of state government.”

As a result, KFTC spends a lot of time and energy prodding reluctant Kentucky officials to enforce federal laws. Environmental lawsuits tend to become case studies in federalism.

During the 2011 session of the Kentucky legislature, the state senate easily passed a resolution declaring Kentucky a “sanctuary state from the regulatory overreach of the United States Environmental Protection Agency,” apparently in the belief that coal companies are suffering an excess of regulation.

This was in response to the EPA’s renewed efforts to enforce the Clean Water Act. Under federal law, the Army Corps of Engineers can issue a permit allowing strip mines to dump thousands of tons of waste— all of the non-coal parts of a mountain—into neighboring valleys. As the EPA describes it:

Mountaintop mining is a form of surface coal mining in which explosives are used to access coal seams, generating large volumes of waste that bury adjacent streams. The resulting waste that then fills valleys and streams can significantly compromise water quality, often causing permanent damage to ecosystems and rendering streams unfit for drinking, fishing, and swimming. It is estimated that almost 2,000 miles of Appalachian headwater streams have been buried by mountaintop coal mining.*

The Corps of Engineers has historically taken a laissez-faire attitude in issuing these permits, and the EPA has rarely exercised its authority to review them. The Obama administration sought to change that, pushing the EPA to more closely assess the environmental impact of valley fill.

“The EPA is, for the first time, making some efforts to enforce existing laws that have been on the books since 1977,” Abbot said. “It’s not a new law; they’re just saying, ‘let’s take this seriously.’”

This has not gone over well among industry supporters. “They are career bureaucrats who sit in their ivory tower in Washington, D.C., and decide what the science should be,” said David Gooch, president of the Kentucky Coal Operators and Associates, during testimony last year before the state legislature.

In Kentucky, that represents a mostly bipartisan sentiment. Governor Beshear is a Democrat, and his 2011 State of the Commonwealth speech earned one of its strongest ovations in response to a demand for Washington to butt out.

“Coal provides 90 percent of our electricity and— because our rates are low—has helped us build a robust manufacturing industry,” Beshear said. “But all that is in jeopardy because Washington bureaucrats continue to try to impose arbitrary and unreasonable regulations on the mining of coal. To them I say, ‘Get off our backs! I will fight you for the right to cleanly and safely mine coal.’”

That kind of rhetoric — pitting hardscrabble, salt-of-the-earth, coal-loving Kentuckians against meddling environmentalist outsiders — particularly galls Abbott.

“That charge gets bandied around a bunch because it’s effective,” she said. “But it simply isn’t the case. The folks who are working against mountaintop removal in Kentucky are the people who are drinking the water, living with the dust, people whose children have asthma because they live near the coal prep plant. If you look at the people protesting in the governor’s office, they’re the people who live with this day-in and day-out.”

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Abbott’s upbringing is about as far from that of those she works with as you can imagine. Raised in New York, she was a celebrated student at the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts.

She came by her commitment to social causes honestly, crediting her parents and unique childhood on the pastoral campus of Millbrook School where her father was headmaster with instilling in her “a deep sense of responsibility to live as an engaged, questioning, compassionate, and equal citizen of our global world.”

It’s the kind of earnestness that might, in less self-aware hands, trend toward tedious. So it’s important to note that while Abbott is serious-minded, she hardly takes herself seriously. With an easy laugh and nimble sense of humor, Abbott is more a calming presence than a rabble-rouser. And while deeply committed to acting on her beliefs (she drives a Prius), she isn’t in your face about them (there are no bumper stickers on it).

When asked about an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Tar Heel in protest of the first Iraq War, she responds with a sheepish laugh. “I think I’ve grown a little bit. I don’t think I’m quite as self-righteous as I used to be.”

For all her devotion to environmental causes, it seems an unlikely dream for a 22-year-old to leave Chapel Hill for an isolated life in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, much less so for a Groton School Crocker Prize recipient and Morehead Scholar. Did she ever worry that she was giving something up to become a community organizer?

“I never have,” she responds simply. “I absolutely love the life I lead. I try pretty hard at what I’m doing, yes. But I don’t see what I’m doing as somehow noble or sacrificial. I’ve gotten to work with some of the most courageous, smart, caring people I’ve ever encountered. I live in this really neat town with an amazingly diverse community of friends. And I get to talk to Wendell Berry once a week. And that’s pretty neat.

“I think I’m one of the luckiest people I know,” she assures. “I’ll let you know if I meet someone who I think is luckier than I am.”

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Back in the Capitol building, Abbott made a decision. If Governor Beshear was going to stiff-arm Rick Handshoe and his orange-water problem, then KFTC would make an appearance at the governor’s afternoon press conference.

Suited dignitaries gathered in the press room just down the hall from the governor’s office, waiting to see a trade representative from Taiwan present Governor Beshear with a $20,000 check for flood relief. The KFTC members filed in quietly and made their way to the back. Berry sat down closer to the front and began taking notes—“I like people to know I’m paying attention,” he explained—and a volunteer unfurled a small poster (“Water Trumps Coal”).

The facial expression of the Taiwanese trade representative progressed from genial to confused to deeply displeased. The governor and his aides kept their camera-ready smiles glued in place, and Ronnie Ellis failed to suppress a grin.

There was no shouting, no chanting, no interruption of Governor Beshear’s remarks about the generosity of the Taiwanese people. But as the press gaggle ended and Beshear made his way to the door, Rick Handshoe was waiting.

Polite but persistent, he made his way to the Governor and pressed a thin sheaf of papers into his hand. Beshear thanked him and walked down the corridor, glancing at the detailed autopsy of Handshoe’s dead creek. The Governor ducked into a side door and was gone.

This, for KFTC, is a victory. The afternoon’s meeting with the attorney general was downgraded to a brief sit-down with an assistant AG—he cautiously promised to “make the attorney general aware” of KFTC’s complaints—and Ronnie Ellis wrote a fine story about the glaring failure of state government to do anything whatsoever about polluted mine runoff in Floyd County.

Abbott wasn’t quoted anywhere in the article, which is a deliberate element of KFTC’s strategy. “One of the bedrock principles of KFTC is that our staff don’t speak on behalf of the organization,” Abbott explained. “If anything is going to be said in the name of KFTC, it’s going to be said by volunteer leaders.”

That stance is both a defensive measure, helping to diffuse the charge of KFTC as a bunch of meddling outsiders, and part of the long-term goal of building civic know-how in politically isolated regions of Kentucky.

“It reinforces that the organization’s mission is really and sincerely leadership development,” Abbott said. “It helps people find their own voice and build the skills and confidence to speak out on the issues that are affecting them.”

And so it was Handshoe who emerged front-and-center in Ellis’s coverage. “These are good tax-paying people,” he told the reporter. “We may be from the hills, but we’re supposed to be part of Kentucky. We don’t feel like it.”

Despite Ellis’s best efforts, few outlets picked up the protest. Handshoe’s creek continued to turn orange without turning into a scandal, and Beshear cruised to reelection a few months later with almost 57 percent of the vote.

“It’s not that people don’t care,” Ellis said, explaining the tepid response to stories like Handshoe’s. “They’ve just given up.”

Abbott has not. In a 2010 speech marking the 100th anniversary of Carolina’s Campus Y, Abbott urged a crowd of UNC students and alumni to avoid the sense of paralysis that can take hold in the face of a seemingly indifferent world.

“Each of us, whatever course of life we take, needs to pursue our lives as if our actions matter,” she said, hearkening back to her own eighth-grade promise and the guiding principle of her life. “This is, I think, an operational definition of hope.”

It’s a good one. And in eastern Kentucky, Abbott’s hope is making the mountains just a little bit harder to move. ◆

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* EPA Press Release. “EPA Issues Final Guidance to Protect Water Quality in Appalachian Communities from Impacts of Mountaintop Mining / Agency to provide flexibility while protecting environment and public health.” 7/21/2011.

Originally published in The Scholar, the alumni magazine of the Morehead-Cain Foundation at UNC Chapel Hill.

See full issue here (pdf).