She Took On Big Coal: Mining Crisis in Appalachia
The making of an unlikely activist.
By Tamara Jones
UPDATE: Stories of mine safety concerns after the explosion that left 29 miners dead, and of tough new EPA regulations on water quality in mountaintop-removal mining, have filled the news. Here, a profile of activist Maria Gunnoe, who has been taking on the big coal companies, such as Massey (the company whose miners are trapped), over mining procedures and environmental fallout.
Grabbing a late lunch at a deserted Chinese restaurant in a tired West Virginia town, Maria Gunnoe piles her plate with greasy noodles and wontons, her voracious appetite belying her compact frame. Between bites, she holds forth on the cause that consumes her life: what she sees as the rape of Appalachia by the mighty coal industry. “They depend on two things,” Gunnoe believes, “our people being uneducated, and our people being poor.” She has been both. Now she is neither. And for her, silence is not an option.
A grassroots activist who declares, “I’m not an environmentalist, I’m a survivalist,” Gunnoe can spend hour after hour quoting the Clean Water Act, indicting regulatory agencies and describing the selenium levels of mutant two-headed fish in polluted streams. Just shut up, her own husband has been known to beg her.
Gunnoe, 41, is petite and girlish, 125 pounds of sinewy muscle in jeans and hiking boots, with the chiseled cheekbones of her Cherokee grandfather. A diamond stud dots the cartilage at the front of each ear, and the frames of her reading glasses are filigreed with tiny peace symbols. The corners of her deep-set brown eyes turn downward, giving her a look of perpetual sorrow, and her tanned hands sport two Band-Aids and a thumb ring, but no wedding band. Her marriage is fragile. That, too, Gunnoe indirectly blames on the mining companies....
Read more of her story at:
http://www.more.com/news/womens-issues/she-took-big-coal-mining-crisis-appalachia
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