by Frank Young, President

Laura Forman, organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), died December 10, 2001 of apparent heart failure. Laura died doing what she enjoyed most- demanding that public agencies do what the law requires to protect citizens from run-away industrial polluters.

I first met Laura about 1992, just as the Apple Grove pulp mill campaign was getting organized. She had came to a meeting at Point Pleasant with fellow OVEC organizer Dianne Bady to help Mason County folks understand what the pulp mill would have really meant to the people there.

By the mid 1990s, some folks, even some environmental leaders, were saying that the pulp mill was a "done deal", that it would happen, no matter what. But Laura reminded us that the issue was not yet settled. And Laura and OVEC continued to hold informational meetings and plan and sponsor public rallies about the project.

Laura and OVEC held public debates in Huntington- debates that were boycotted by the public officials and private developers who didn’t want a public discussion of the pulp mill issues. Laura helped organize in Point Pleasant where the public crowd on the outside was essentially shut out from the elitist local movers and shakers meeting on the inside, and at the governor’s mansion at Charleston where we repeatedly brought our pleas for justice and dignity, only to find that suddenly the governor had more important business elsewhere.

In the late 1990s, while Highlands Conservancy lawyers were waging the mountaintop removal / valley fill battle against King Coal and its political minions in the courts, Laura was helping the people of southern West Virginia find the courage to wage battle in the hills and hollows of communities that had up until then been told to know their place and to take whatever coal and its political army threw at them.

And just this year, when coal executives and their official government apologists were blaming God for the summer floods that wiped out whole communities, and were ridiculously suggesting that mountaintop removal mining actually helped prevent flooding, Laura suggested to the people that it was not a sin, and was not unpatriotic to speak the obvious- that flooding was the worst where mountains had been leveled and where the streams nearby were completely filled with mountaintops, and the streams further below choked with sediment from above so that the storm water had nowhere to flow except through people’s yards, through people’s homes, through their workplaces- and through their very lives.

But where ever her work took her, Laura always performed with energy, and with dignity. Oh yes, with dignity, even while donning the language and garb of a chicken to draw attention to a gubernatorial candidate who was too chicken himself to dare debate his several learned opponents, choosing instead to debate only one old, worn out, oft defeated septuagenarian.

Laura’s death is a tragic, immeasurable loss. Laura gave some of us the inspiration to go on when our outrage was otherwise sometimes spent. We will miss her terribly.