Dave Crashes Coal Prep 2007

The following is an entry from Central Kentucky KFTC member and activist extraordinaire, Dave Cooper.  He tirelessly tours the country with his mountaintop removal roadshow.

After a rather grueling three month schedule of touring on the road show, in early May I found myself with a rare off-week from traveling and speaking to college students about mountaintop removal. With most of my work caught up, and with a beautiful warm spring day outside, I decided to pass the afternoon with a leisurely, wandering bicycle ride around Lexington – a great way to spend a spring day, in my opinion.  You can have all kinds of interesting conversations with people on an afternoon like this, if you try.

As I was riding into downtown Lexington, I noticed a disturbance inside Heritage Hall Convention Center, which adjoins Rupp Arena. There was a crowd of ten or so noisy demonstrators inside, carrying banners and making a ruckus. One of them had pink hair. 

Summer 2005 Mountain Justice Summer Rally in Lexington

"This looks interesting,â€ I thought as I pulled my bike up to the building to look inside. Then I read one of the banners: "Stop Mountaintop Removal!â€ Another said "Ecocide!â€

I banged on the glass and frantically motioned to one of the protestors to let me in through an emergency exit. "Hey Dave,â€ he said. Sheesh, nobody tells me anything anymore. A mountaintop removal protest downtown – hey, somebody email me, guys!

The protestors and their banners were quickly ushered outside by security as I stood off to the side. I peeked inside the convention center to see what the group was protesting.

A big banner said "Coal Prep 2007.â€

Many of the coal dudes were standing in the doorways watching the protestors being shooed out, as they yukked and made clever comments like "Get a job!â€ I saw an open door and ducked inside the hall. 

I was wearing Teva sandals, shorts, and an old Cincinnati Heart Mini-Marathon T-shirt. I was carrying a bright yellow bicycle helmet under my arm, plus a red daypack that said "Sierra Clubâ€ on the back, which was filled with used Mott the Hoople albums I had just bought at Pops Records. I did not have a Coal Prep ID pass hanging around my neck – in fact I think I was the only person in the whole place not wearing a golf shirt with a testosterone-charged corporate logo.

Now, how long do you think it took before they kicked me out?

If you guessed five seconds, you are wrong. Remember, these are coal dudes, and they are as dumb as the rocks that they mine. I casually strolled the aisles of the trade show for well over an hour, looking at enormous rock crushers that crush coal into perfect little cubes, coal slurry processing pumps, compressors, motors and all kinds of specialized mining equipment. As a former mechanical engineer, I find all these contraptions fascinating, and I actually enjoy looking at the seals and the bearings and the couplings and the shiny steel shafts of the new machinery. 

And I felt myself mentally drifting back to my old engineering job, and the days I spent wandering around trade shows just like this one, and the horrible soul-crushing misery of spending days upon days in a windowless, horrible convention center in Some City, USA.

I casually picked a magazine called "Coal Ageâ€ from one of the booths and read a few of the letters to the editor - usually the most interesting part of any publication. John J. Kodak, President of the company called Astrotronics wrote in the April 2007 issue "…we are up against a very outspoken and well-funded opposition consisting mostly of fruitcakes.â€

Well, that sounds just like me, except I’m not well-funded.

I also picked up a copy of a paperback book entitled "Coal Preparation Directory and Handbook 2007â€ from a stack near the entrance. I thought it might be helpful in getting some video images of coal machinery and mining operations for various filmmaker friends’ projects. 

As I perused this book at home before writing this little article, I noticed on the cover in small print: Price $95. Whoops, heh, heh…

Next I had a long discussion with a lady representing a monthly newsletter called Coal Leader. "Coal’s National Newspaperâ€ proclaimed the banner. Posing as an out-of-work mechanical engineer, I asked her about the protestors, and she informed me they were probably from a group called "Friends of Earth.â€ I asked why they were protesting, and
she gave me the boilerplate coal industry P.R. about mountaintop removal creating flat land for development. 

There wasn’t anyone else coming to her booth, so I helped myself to her bowl of Hershey Kisses and started to engage her in a lengthy discussion about the root causes of poverty in the Appalachian coalfields, and why the counties that had mined the most coal had the highest poverty rates, like McDowell County, West Virginia. I asked her why she thought that there were no major universities located in the West Virginia or Kentucky coalfields. 

She finally allowed that the real reason for coalfield poverty was a lack of good roads. I then reminded her of her earlier argument about creating flat land for development, and she conceded that maybe flat land wasn’t all that was needed to build an economy. Next, I started talking about illegally overloaded coal trucks and dust in coalfield communities, and how many families and businesses wouldn’t want to move to an area where they didn’t feel safe driving on the roads.

As I blabbered on about the overloaded coal trucks’ damage to our highways and bridges, and how Kentucky’s taxpayers are subsidizing the road damage caused by the coal trucks, she got a little twisted smile on her face, and she said "Are you with Friends of Earth?â€

"No!â€ I answered truthfully. I smiled self-consciously and said "I was just riding my bike downtown, and I came inside to see the coal showand look at all the machinery, and … well, so I gotta get going and …â€ off I zoomed to the next booth.

I noticed quite a few people discretely drinking from green bottles, which I thought was kind of unusual at a professional trade show. It was only 4:00 in the afternoon, and they were still on the clock … but then I remembered – these are coal dudes, and they had not only the soul-crushing misery of working at an industry trade show, they had the bad karma of all their earth-raping piled on top of their consciences like so many tons of mining overburden.

Look at Bill Raney, President of the West Virginia Coal Association.  I saw him interviewed in both the "Black Diamondsâ€ and the "Mountaintop Removalâ€ documentary films, and I mean, he doesn’t look healthy. In fact he looks so miserable and cynical and unhappy with his life’s work that he could just crawl off under a rock.

And then I thought about some of the young people that I have met at Mountain Justice Summer.  Radiant, bright-eyed … full of life and excitement. Burning with anger over the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains. Creative, funny, outrageous and outspoken.

It’s moments like the Coal Prep 2007 trade show that I thank God for all my friends in Mountain Justice Summer.

At 5:00 the show was over for the day, and I watched the sales reps and the engineers and all of the other coal whores slowly filing out of Heritage Hall with their laptops and their plastic shopping bags bulging full of free notepads, pens and golf tees. I haven’t seen a
line of such unhappy-looking people since the last time I was in an airport. They stared down at the sidewalk, or looked at me with sad empty eyes as I rode past them on my mountain bike. 

"Smile!â€ I commanded them. "Why are you so unhappy?" I pointed across Broadway. "It’s 5 o'clock – and there’s the Big Blue Martini Bar!â€ 

And then, finally - I saw one of them crack a smile.