Editor:

The West Virginia delegation; hang your heads in shame! Every chance I get, I’ll be holding a sign at Sen. Byrd’s fund raiser. I am a coal miner’s daughter, and a resident in the coalfields. We are the real mountaineers of West Virginia. Most of us are poor and some of us are poor and elderly. Our homes, our water and our heritage are all that we have. We live in these hollows amid the ridges of the great Appalachian Mountains. We live on the land our fathers before us lived. We draw water from the same wells our fathers used. We have no place to go, so we endure the coal companies blasting out our windows, destroying our homes, polluting our water, polluting our air, dumping tons of earth in our streams cutting off our water supply and building huge sludge (mine waste) ponds that will wipe out communities like Buffalo Creek.

Ironically we don’t mind so much being poor, but are we not human beings and don’t we deserve the same rights as the wealthy? Will Sen. Byrd and his delegation put us up in their mansions? Will this evil greedy practice known as mountain top removal end only when it reaches the rich neighborhoods?

May God help the residents and the "real" coal miners – the underground miners like my father. God also knows that most "deep" miners are against mountain top removal. Many deep miners have told me that they know mountain top removal and its machines will soon replace their jobs. But they are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs now. A lot of non-union deep miners have had their wages and benefits cut a few months ago. These company tactics are so subtle and yet so much more sinister than the tactics used in 1921. Many people are wondering just where Cecil Robert’s head has been. Something is very wrong on Coal River. Eleven coal mines are operating in the Whitesville area, but that town is dying. The busiest places in town are the funeral homes for us and the boarding houses for the out-of-state workers. It is a shame when delegations from other states hear us crying out and can feel our pain and suffering, but Senator Byrd turns a deaf ear to us. We Appalachians might be poor, but we are not as stupid as our delegation thinks we are. So go ahead Senator Byrd run us out of the mountains and destroy our homes and our water; we just might show up at your doorstep, homeless and thirsty. As for the Clean Water Act; what is wrong with you people? Nothing can live without clean water, and surely our elected officials are smart enough to know that, aren’t they?

Julia Bonds

Whitesville Nov 23, 1999 ª

I hope you will understand if I express one concern I have about the Conservancy, which I joined recently. Although I found many of the articles in the Voice very interesting and informative, quite a few of them seemed to be tinged by a sort of extreme leftist world view that had little apparent connection to conservation issues. I no longer have the one issue, but I recall, for example, a favorable reference to the American cold war traitor Alger Hiss and another piece breathlessly peddling, as if it were an original idea, the very old and discredited chestnut that Christ was in reality a social revolutionary. I believe there were also critical references to missile defense efforts and military spending. Missing was any fair consideration of pro-ecology positions that might appear politically incorrect, such as concern about continued rapid US population growth caused by mass immigration.

Of course, the authors have every right to express whatever opinion they choose. I can only say that this kind of ideological fixation is irritating to me personally and probably to many other people who would be in strong sympathy with your commendable efforts to save Blackwater Canyon and other natural sites in WV.

Sorry it's taken so long to follow up on my earlier email, but I didn’t have a chance to write before I left for Babylon DC last week, and then the weekend was taken up with holiday prep.

But to continue our discussion of the complaint you passed on to me about "extreme leftists" writing in the Voice: the language of the complaint, with its perceived concerns about Alger Hiss, Christ as social revolutionary, missile defense and military spending, immigration and use of such terms as "politically incorrect," as well as the not-so-subtle suggestion of censorship, identifies the writer as being as extreme on the right as any of your writers are on the left -- a traditionalist, and probably elderly (a relative term when applied by a couple of codgers like ourselves). In other words, a person who enriches the diversity of the Conservancy by not conforming to stereotype. So his (or her) complaint should be treated with respect, although with due consideration of the nature of the source.

Like you, I don't recall any references to Alger Hiss or missile defenses, though they may have been mentioned incidentally in one of those filler blurbs you sprinkle throughout the Voice. Whether this is a reflection on the confusion of the writer or on our own short term memory problems is something I'll leave for someone else to figure out. But I will address those issues probably related to columns I've written on population (October 99) and Jesus vs. agribusiness (July 99).

On population, the complainant wrote, "Missing was any fair consideration of pro-ecology positions that might appear politically incorrect, such as concern about continued rapid US population growth caused by mass immigration." This criticism is unfair on at least three counts. First, I was dealing with population as a global issue; and though I didn’t refer explicitly to US immigration patterns, it was implicit in references to the global refugee problem and population migration. As I recall, it was also discussed in my earlier column on urban sprawl. Second, in point of fact, immigrants today make up a smaller percentage of the US population than they did in 1900. Third, describing this position as "politically incorrect" ignores the fact that the national Sierra Club -- that bogeyman of right wing fantasies -- adopted that very position, engendering great controversy.

The writer’s dismissal of "the very old and discredited chestnut that Christ was in reality a social revolutionary" reveals a profound ignorance of current scholarship on the historical Jesus. It is probably a reference to the Roman Catholic idea of "liberation theology," which was not so much discredited as forcibly repressed, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that the leading advocate of the view of Jesus as social revolutionary is also recognized as the most prominent scholar of the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan, whose latest book, "The Birth of Christianity," is a detailed study relating the mission of Jesus to the concept of social justice central to the religion of Judaism, and clearly expressed in the writings of Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Amos. This view has also been reinforced by other historical and archaeological research.

I hope this is helpful. ª

Dear Sir:

I think it would be a nice legacy for the Underwood administration if they could say when you left office you had saved the Blackwater Canyon from destruction. I have been studying the issues and have been stymied with the private property rights and the only thing that I can come up with to save the values of private property is for society, as a whole, to insist and expect that all persons, no matter what their resources, treat their property as a living trust. In a world without sufficient resources and with an all but wrecked environment it is no longer possible to allow anyone to be irresponsible in land ownership. So when John Crites acts as if he is a good trustee of the land, then and only then, can he be allowed to direct its future. To try to log land known to be the home of endangered species and further along in environmental healing than most of the rest is grounds for doubting the reliability of the man to manage this land. Land which is more valuable than gold or diamonds.

I will be in the crowd in Charleston on Monday.

All I can say about John Crites and all those who, like him, put private enterprise above the welfare of the community that they will go to their graves, as the poet has said, "...unwept, unhonored, and unsung." While I am here, I’d like to say that the government needs to rein in the developers of Teays Valley who have been busily turning Putnam County into the slum of the future for the last ten years.

Thank you,

(Ms.) Erica Louise Francks, Ashland, KY.

P.S. I realize I am not a resident of West Virginia, however I work there, attend Marshall University, participate in Kanawha Trail Club activities ( I trust you will act to keep the Kanawha State Forest safe for future use?) , and spend most of my money there. I’ll also probably move eventually since, as my daughter tells me, I seem to be already there in spirit.