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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