Water, Cool, Clean Water (with apologies to Marty Robbins)

UUCS has focused on Social Justice all month, so while Don took the day off, I gave today's sermon. I have a new respect for ministers who write sermons regularly. Many thanks to all who complimented me afterwards! And many, many thanks to Keith Plumley, Ron Fowler, Joyce Harrison, and Jim Brown for creating the musical part of the service-- it was just perfect!

I'm really looking forward to next week's super-musical service, "Justice in Song
The Rev. Don Rollins: We can’t change the world with music alone, but nei­ther can we change the world without it. Come find out why."
And here is my sermon:

I grew up mostly in Southern California, which is a natural desert. Between May and September, it almost never rains, and total annual rainfall is only 15 inches. That scarcity made water important to me. Our favorite family vacations were camping in the Sierras, and beautiful images of water fill my childhood memories: dark blue water in a mountain lake, Clear, sparkling, ice cold water, snowmelt, tumbling down the rocks in a streambed...

Cool, clean water-- so simple, yet for many people, unattainable.
Only last July, the UN declared clean water a 'fundamental human right.' According to the World Health Organization, 1.2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to clean drinking water, and about 1.5 million children under five die each year from water and sanitation-related diseases.
In developing countries, people dip water out of ponds shared with livestock, or rivers fed by run-off from untreated human sewage. They walk miles to carry home water, this muddy water from dirty rivers and ponds.

Often water is not just contaminated by animals and human sewage. Waste from mines and industries is a problem all over the world. In Honduras, in South Africa, in Nigeria—anywhere there is mining, companies dump lead and other toxins in their waste piles, poisoning water, poisoning animals, and poisoning people.

I could talk to you about how poverty and corporate greed deprive poor people in far away countries of that basic human right, clean water.

But today, I want to tell you a story about water much closer to home, a story about the Appalachians, just up the road from us, and another woman who loved cool, clean, water. Julia, or Judy, Bonds was born the same year I was, the daughter of a coalminer, in Marfork Hollow. She loved living in Marfork Hollow, a narrow green valley in southern WV, where her family had lived for 7 generations.
As a child, Judy fished and swam in the nearby stream. later, as a young divorced mother, she raised her daughter there. She worked in minimum wage jobs, convenience store clerk, waitress, Pizza Hut manager… She was happy to be a grandmother at 45.

"There is nothing like being in the hollows," she once said. "You feel snuggled. You feel safe. It seems like God has his arms around you."

But in the 1990’s, Massey Energy Co., moved in, and began blasting—Explosions of AnFo, a combination of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, shook the earth, disturbed house foundatons, and made sleep impossible. Clear streams turned orange or stopped flowing. The air became filled with dust. Children, including Judy’s grandson, developed asthma. Families began moving out. Judy refused to go. Marfork was home, even as green mountains became ugly, flat scars.

Then her 6-year-old grandson asked her a question: "What's wrong with these fish?"
He was standing in the local creek, holding fistfuls of dead fish, with more floating belly-up around his ankles.

Judy said, "So I began to open my eyes and pay attention." And the more she learned, the angrier she got.

She discovered that Marfork was one of many West Virginia hollows dealing with the effects of mountaintop removal mining, or MTR. This was developed in the 1970s, and big coal compainies began using it more and more by the late 1980’s. It’s cheap because it takes very few workers. They completely blast off the tops of mountains so that huge machines can mine thin seams of coal. This annihilates streams and forests, and causes extensive flooding and blasting damage to homes. The pollution from mining and the toxic chemicals used in the preparation of coal for market have been linked to rising asthma rates and other serious respiratory ailments, particularly among children, like Judy’s grandson. Slurry dams thick with heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury and lead routinely overflow into watersheds, contaminate drinking water and drive toxic sludge into residents' backyards. And thousands of local people are driven out of their homes.

Almost 2,000 miles of Appalachian headwater streams have been completely buried and over 500 Appalachian mountaintops leveled, looking like moonscapes, sometimes covered over with thin grass. Over 800 square miles of one of the most bio-diverse regions of our planet have been destroyed.

All this is to produce low quality coal that is burned to make electricity—producing severe air pollution & coal ash. Air pollution spreads over the region and neighboring states.

The more Judy learned, the angrier she got. And the Pizza Hut manager became an activist, a volunteer with Coal River Mountain Watch, a local grass-roots group.

She learned that Massey planned a dam farther up Marfork hollow - an impoundment that would hold millions of gallons of coal sludge. Her family would be in danger if the dam failed, and such dams had failed before - including in 1972 at Buffalo Creek, W.Va., where 125 people were killed in the toxic flood.

Sitting on her front porch, dusty with ash from nearby blasting, Judy was outraged to hear her grandson describe an escape route should a coal waste dam break and flood their valley. “I knew in my heart there was really no escape,” Judy said. “How do you tell a child that his life is a sacrifice for corporate greed?” She knew that it was time to move. They were the last residents to evacuate from Marfork Hollow.

She hadn’t saved her hollow, but she worked harder to save her mountains. She became executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch. She became a passionate and inspirational public speaker and a community leader. She learned how to challenge the mining companies' federal and state permit applications. She worked with college-educated environmentalists and college professors, and educated them because she brought something to the cause that they couldn’t—the deep understanding of a hillbilly woman!

Embracing her hillbilly identity, she shrugged off the argument that rural people needed the coal industry's jobs. "If coal is so good for us hillbillies, then why are we so poor?"

She worked 90 hour weeks for $12,000 a year as director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Then, in 2003, she was awarded the prestigious $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize. She didn’t know what that was, but she quickly found out.
“The Goldman Prize honors grassroots environmental heroes from the six inhabited continental regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. These “Grassroots” leaders are involved in local efforts, where change is created through citizens’ participation in the issues that affect them. By recognizing these leaders, the Prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people, ordinary people like us, to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.”

After paying for her grandson's braces, helping her daughter buy a car and paying off the family's mortgage, Judy donated nearly $50,000 to Coal River Mountain Watch - an amount equal to the organization's annual budget.

In the 2008 book, Coal River, the writer Michael Shnayerson quotes her as saying "We’re a colony here, and the coal companies rule. We can complain all we want, but those complaints are just swept aside in the name of progress and jobs. It's like we're selling our children's feet to buy shoes." As more people became involved in fighting MTR, Coal Companies fought back – and many people in the small Appalachian communities were afraid to speak out, or believed their lies. The closer to success the fight got, the more of a price Judy paid.

Coal River Mountain Watch co-director Vernon Haltom said,

“Judy endured much personal suffering for her leadership. She endured physical assault, verbal abuse, and death threats because she stood up for justice for her community. I never met a more courageous person, one who faced her own death and spoke about it with the same voice as if it were a scheduled trip.”

Yes, Judy was diagnosed with lung cancer last summer. Cancer rates are high in coalmining country, and Judy’s years in Marfork Hollow, breathing toxic dust, may have caused that cancer.

But the fight against MTR continued. Years ago she envisioned a “thousand hillbilly march” in Washington, DC. In September 2010, that dream became a reality as thousands marched on the White House for Appalachia Rising. Senators, Representatives, and the EPA became more responsive to the outcry against the devastation of MTR! Amber Pennington, Jinx Jenkins,, and I were lucky to be there. Sadly, Judy Bonds was not—she was too ill.

“But Judy had done all any one person could conceivably do to stop mountaintop removal.”

Judy fought for her community’s rights, and for all Americans’ rights to clean water & clean air. She fought to save some of the oldest mountains on earth. She was stricken with cancer… but kept fighting. She could see victory ahead, with the national attention that MTR was getting, with a huge rally in DC… with the EPA suspending and reviewing some mining permits, including the biggest, Spruce Mine.
She passed away early this month. A week after her death, the EPA vetoed that Spruce Mine permit, one of the big goals in her fight. That one big win sets a precedent for reviewing and vetoing other permits. And it saves many miles of pure creeks and streams.

Bo Webb, another 6th generation West Virginian & leading activist, was a close friend of Judy. He said, “I can feel Judy nudging each of us, “Hey guys, We are the ones We have been waiting for.” I believe she knows that the battle for our mountains can be won, as long as the rest of us keep fighting.

Judy Bonds was an unlikely hero, but she is an example to us all. She fought for her country, that the mountaintops would stay green, rich in plants, birds, squirrels, and deer, that the streams would stay clear and full of fish, that children could grow up safe and healthy in those hollows. That the beautiful Appalachians would be here for generations to come.

Another unlikely hero, Helen Keller, said that none of the things we cherish in life will be ours unless we act courageously—Judy Bonds did.

What can we learn from Judy Bonds? She opened her eyes when her grandson asked her "What's wrong with these fish?" standing in the creek, holding fistfuls of dead fish. And she took action.

There are too many injustices to count them, too many people, animals, and places in need of help. Our world is being destroyed in so many ways, in pursuit of easy money. Sometimes we just want to keep our eyes shut and concentrate on living our personal life as well as we can –

But we all need to keep our eyes open and take action for the things that are most important to us—those may be Environmental causes like Appalachian Mountaintop Removal, Reducing energy use, Clean water all around the world, or more Wildlife Habitat as our cities grow. Or they may be People Causes, like Homelessness and Hunger in Spartanburg, or Mothers and Babies in Haiti.

I love how churchmembers and friends here reach into their pockets and help with these problems—that is wonderful. And it’s very important. You can’t solve problems without money.

Actions are harder than donating money, but also more personally satisfying. And group actions can be the most satisfying of all. If you haven’t taken some actions lately, I invite more of you to join us in actions – perhaps not going to Haiti with Ruth Stanton in March, but making a baby blanket to send with her… Or go with our church youth group to Beckley, WV and see Mountaintop mining sites. Work with our grade school students, the Earth Scouts, in creating wildlife gardens this spring. Help develop the Green Sanctuary Action Plan. And today, Stop at our table in the Fellowship Hall and sign our new round of letters to Congress and the EPA to stop Mountaintop Removal!