Mining
San Carlos Apache leader Wendsler Noise Sr. is protesting copper mining on sacred land in the Oak Flat area of the Tonot National Forest in Arizona.
LONG-DISTANCE RUNNING has long been part of Apache traditional lifeways. For Wendsler Nosie Sr., it is a core expression of prayer and communion with the Earth.
In October 1990, the then 31-year-old tribal chair of the San Carlos Apache Reservation ran more than 60 miles in two days as prayerful resistance to the destruction of sacred sites at Mount Graham in Arizona. Two years earlier, Sen. John McCain had turned over Mount Graham to the University of Arizona to install telescopes. Nosie’s prayer run was part of a wider Apache and environmentalist movement to stop destruction of the mountain for the observatory project.
Nosie also was promoting a revival of his traditional Apache spirituality. The prayer run helped him “realize so much about our identity, where we originated and the sacredness of what makes us who we are.” Nosie went on to establish Apaches for Cultural Preservation and the Spirit of Mountain Runners, hosting twice-yearly community prayer runs. Grounded in ceremony, these runs begin at the site of the prison camp where the U.S. Army held Nosie’s ancestors in the 1890s. The destination of the summer run is Mount Graham; in winter, it is Oak Flat, another sacred site.
Oak Flat (Chi’chil Biłdagoteel) is a high desert valley in the mountains east of Phoenix, roughly 2,400 acres of federal land in Tonto National Forest that is sacred to Native Americans. Its fresh springs nurture oaks, making it a traditional acorn-gathering site for the Apache, and its canyons are lush with medicinal plants. The Apache have held ceremonies here for centuries. Nosie speaks reverently about Oak Flat as a place where his people have conversations with angels.
An artisanal miner works at a cobalt mine-pit in Tulwizembe, Katanga province, Democratic Republic of Congo, November 25, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Kenny Katombe.
Christians need better analytical tools that can help us parse out the systems of global exploitation. These systems keep us from loving our neighbors from every nation, which is a central emphasis of the gospel. For example, investigating who is producing the products we buy and under what labor conditions they work can show us where our neighbors are hurting and how we’re implicated.
OUT WHERE Kentucky meets West Virginia, you’ll find one of America’s cultural seedbeds, where Scotch-Irish immigrant traditions took root in the New World. But on her debut album, American Middle Class, singer-songwriter Angaleena Presley, a daughter of the Kentucky mountains (and no kin to The King), paints a heartbreaking picture of what Appalachia has become.
The people of this region were once mostly self-sufficient subsistence farmers. In the early 20th century, they were drafted into the coal mines but brought their pride and independence with them, waging often-bloody battles to establish the United Mine Workers of America. For over a century now, the region’s economic fate has been hostage to the ups and downs of the energy market. As a result, the coal fields have become one of the poorest parts of the country.
The music that flourished in this region became, along with that of low-country African Americans, one of the two great pillars of American popular music. So many country music greats have come from here that Kentucky has a “Country Music Highway Museum” just to honor all the stars (Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, Billy Ray Cyrus, Keith Whitley, and many others) born along U.S. 23.
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CANADIAN MINING companies have left a trail of destruction around the world—mostly in places where people are poor and vulnerable.
The earliest conflicts caused by Canadian mining exploded in Guatemala in the early 1960s when the nickel company Inco dug into the northern mountainside of Guatemala’s largest freshwater lake, Lago Izabal. Almost 155 square miles of traditional Kekchi-Maya land was expropriated to create Inco’s Exmibal mine. As the region descended into bitter war, Guatemalan oligarchs and their military, with the support of Canadian-mining and U.S. geopolitical interests, exterminated all popular dissent. Dozens of Kekchi leaders were killed or disappeared; four prominent leaders who had published a report condemning the Inco-Exmibal deals were brutally assaulted and two of them assassinated. The Exmibal mine operated for three years before Inco abandoned it, never paying a nickel in royalties to Guatemala
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I HAVE SOMETIMES been dismayed by the lack of speed that some churches and denominations have shown when it came to tackling environmental issues. On the question of divestment from fossil fuels, for instance, the Unitarians have been forthrightly in favor, and the United Church of Christ as well (and the Rockefellers!). But the Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Anglicans are, by and large, dragging their feet as usual.
Sometimes I confess to imagining that God herself might be getting a bit impatient, too—how else to explain the name of the site for the next great fossil-fuel battle?
It will happen in Australia’s Galilee Valley, a remote basin many hours from the continent’s cities. At the moment it’s basically untouched, but plans call for it to become The Biggest Coal Mine on Earth. There is enough coal beneath its soil to provide 6 percent of the carbon that would take us past the two-degree rise in temperature scientists have given as the ultimate red line. That is to say, one valley in one nation (a nation with one-third of 1 percent of the planet’s population) can do 6 percent of the job of wrecking the planet. One valley!
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Two weeks ago in Soma, Turkey, a coal mine explosion left 301 people dead. It was the country’s worst mining disaster, but it wasn’t the first — and it wasn’t the last, as multiple fatal accidents have happened in the two weeks since. The last time a mining disaster caught the world’s attention, we watched and waited and prayed during the rescue operation for the miners in Chile.
In Turkey, people protested in the streets of Soma — protested against Soma Mining for letting this happen, against their government for loopholes in safety rules. In response, the police issued a ban on protests and locked the city down. The ruling political party proudly announces that it has inspected that mine 11 times in the past 5 years; Soma Mining denies negligence. And the families of 301 persons mourn their losses.
This isn’t a faraway problem. In the United States, we don’t do as much traditional mining as we used to — instead, we do mountaintop removal. This has a human cost, too, in more insidious ways. The people living in Appalachia have higher rates of respiratory illness, cancer, kidney diseases, skin ailments, and more. And the landscape, which has the fingerprints of God in it, is being blown apart.
Psalm 95:4-5 says:
“In [God’s] hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are [God’s] also. The sea is [God’s], for [God] made it, and the dry land, which [God’s] hands have formed.”
a Franciscan young adult group at St. Camillus created a large mural about Easter. Photo: Jacek Orzechowski
Last fall, on a Sunday afternoon, as I walked out of the church, a young man tugged on my Franciscan habit. It was Miguel, a member of our Latino choir.
“Father,” he said, “please, pray for the people of my home parish back in El Salvador, especially for one of the priests who has received death threats.”
Startled, I asked: “What is happening there?"
“These priests are organizing against the multinational companies,” he said. “The companies are looking for gold. What will be left for our people? Only poisoned water, a wasteland, and death.”
A few weeks later, I had another similar conversation with a group from Guatemala. Theirs was a similar tale of how indigenous communities were being threatened by mining projects.
As a Catholic and a member of the Franciscan Order, I believe that we are called to “read the signs of the times” and to listen to the cry of the poor and the “groaning” of God’s Creation.
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SOON AFTER Dr. Michael Hendryx assumed a professorship of health policy management at West Virginia University, he started hearing stories of sick people in Appalachian communities near mountaintop removal coal mining operations. Finding no scientific research that examined the correlation between mountaintop removal and community health, Hendryx and his colleagues began overseeing family health surveys and compiling health data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since 2011, Peter Illyn of Restoring Eden (Christians for Environmental Stewardship) has recruited and led student volunteers from Catholic and evangelical Christian colleges in conducting door-to-door community health surveys for Hendryx’s research. Typical volunteer experiences, according to Illyn, include “aha” epiphanies and deepening conversions to God’s justice. Alex Gerrish, a recent Samford University (Birmingham, Ala.) graduate, recalls a searing experience. Her survey team visited a home located close by two mountaintop removal (MTR) operations, where a mother answered the door. She said, “I’m trying to get my son down for a nap,” explaining that her two-year-old had a heart defect. “Now’s not a good time to talk.” Two days later the team revisited the home to be met by an older, tear-stained woman. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My grandson passed away a couple days ago.” He never woke up from his nap. As Gerrish stood in shock, she recalled the statistics on high birth-defect rates in communities with mountaintop removal operations.
Now, more than two dozen published peer-reviewed studies show a high correlation between populations living amid MTR operations and very high rates of morbidity, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, cancer, and birth defects.
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WEAK LAWS AND empty regulations in Canada allow Canadian mining companies to flourish in every corner of the world: Papua New Guinea, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, all over Africa—anywhere local conditions are favorable for producing “low cost” metals; that is, any country where local government control mechanisms are weak or nonexistent.
Today, Canadian companies account for 75 percent of mining worldwide, and their practices are rife with abuse. The companies promise sustainability, responsibility, and a “win-win” situation for all, but there is a fundamental contradiction between their claims and the reality of massive open-pit, cyanide heap-leach mining, which devastates surrounding communities and the environment.
Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold to be refined ... They put their hand to the flinty rock, and overturn mountains by the roots. They cut out channels in the rocks, and their eyes see every precious thing ... But where shall wisdom be found? —Job 28:1, 9-12
THE DIRT ROAD twists down into a gully at La Puya, Guatemala, and up the other side, slipping between the knee-high fields of holy corn. The river doesn’t run anymore at the bottom, but the butterflies gather in remembrance of the water of times past. Hundreds of them rest and then flutter suddenly up as a woman goes by to gather fresh basil or chipilin from the little herb and vegetable garden that grows in tires and the ground all along the blocked access road leading into the proposed gold-mine site.
La Puya is the curve in the road where a thorn tree used to stand, throwing fine sharp needles down on unsuspecting passersby. Now it is a well-ordered encampment of neighbors from the twin municipalities of San Pedro Ayampúc and San José del Golfo, 10 miles northwest of Guatemala City.
These women and men are here in a startling act of markedly Christian peaceable resistance. They have been at the gates around the clock and around the calendar since March 2, 2012, when a lone woman pulled her car across the access road to the mine, blocking some incoming machinery. Then a bus bumping down the main road stopped, and the passengers piled off when they saw what was happening.
Then more people came, and dozens stayed. They settled in for a long night that became a long season of resistance. Local communities had had enough of the obfuscation, lies, and manipulation from Radius Gold, a mining company based in Vancouver, Canada.
Francia -- Photo curtsey of Elizabeth Palmberg
Most real-life law students I've met are at way, way less risk of being murdered than their counterparts in a John Grisham novel--except for Francia Marquez. The Afro-Colombian activist and mother of two has received multiple death threats as she advocates to keep her home community from having their ancestral home stolen by a land-grab big mining project.
There's gold in them thar hills in Francia's home, La Toma, in Colombia's Cauca province. Families in her hometown have lived for generations off of small-scale, by-hand gold mining. (Francia herself still puts in some mine time when she visits home, although these days she's spending the most time in her legal studies in Bogota.)
But lots of larger-scale mining concerns want in on the action. Some have sent in bulldozers illegally. Others are joining the land rush of getting mining concessions from the national government--notwithstanding laws on the books that give local communities various rights, including prior consultation on any mining projects.
Indigenous communities -- and local church leaders -- stand against open-pit mining that threatens to despoil Patagonia.
Beginning with churches near the coalfields, more than 750 local and national religious leaders have put forth “A Call for Justice at Peabody Energy” that backs miners seeking to organi
When the Sago mine explosion trapped 13 West Virginia miners 250 feet below ground in January, I was deep into Kettle Bottom, a stunning collection of poetry by Diane Gilliam Fisher that i
If Tennessee Ernie Ford were to sing his blue-collar anthem "Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get?" to the residents of the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia, they would answer: property damage, dried up wells, respiratory illness, and explosions 100 times more powerful than the Oklahoma City bombing.
The latest technique in strip mining—mountaintop removal—involves detonating explosives to blow apart the top 1,000 acres of a mountain and using a dragline (a mammoth bulldozer) to dig away the soil and reveal seams of coal. The excess dirt is then deposited in valley fills, mountain streams that support the regional ecosystems as well as providing area residents with a source of water.
This is the latest of the ongoing battles for economic survival in the mountain communities of central Appalachia. In the last 40 years, the number of coal-industry jobs in coal-rich states such as West Virginia has dropped from 138,000 to 16,000, while the amount of coal mined annually is the highest ever. With the steady decline in jobs and the increase in the threat to the visual legacy of the mountains, citizens are fighting to take back their mountains—and their futures.
In Harlan County, Kentucky, citizens organized a local chapter of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) to stop mountaintop removal. Robert Gipe, an organizer with KFTC, said the group asked themselves what the pivotal issue was. "We found a strategy that gives citizens something to do," Gipe said. They drafted a "Lands Unsuitable for Mining" petition to declare Black Mountain a public land trust. By focusing their efforts around protecting the state’s highest peak, the group was able to draw greater public attention to the extent of mountaintop removal in eastern Kentucky.