I’m a city kid. When I think about poverty, that’s the kind I mean. And I’m part of that young, queer, artsy population that’s always the first step in gentrification—we find our affordable, “quirky” housing in low-income neighborhoods, and then our white faces make it safe for developers to buy up property, driving out the long-time residents. Which, of course, I hate. Beyond the fact of rising rents forcing me out in turn, I can’t stand seeing the destruction of my adopted neighborhood. This vibrant community is being ripped apart at the seams, patched with Starbucks and vague, lifeless brushed steel—and I am complicit.
So, reducing our social impact has become a huge topic of conversation among my friends. How can we alleviate what feels like an inevitable consequence of being white and broke? When I was planning for the Poverty Initiative’s trip, the word “gentrification” came up as it usually does, and I joked that I didn’t think it was going to be a huge issue in West Virginia. Rural poverty is a result of too little economic investment, not too much, right?
(Parenthetically, it turns out that the eastern panhandle of West Virginia (where we didn’t visit) is going through something very much like urban gentrification. Folks who work in DC have been moving further and further out, in search of lower rents, and the low cost of living in West Virginia is apparently worth the hassle and the gasoline consumption of a two-hour commute into the city. In turn, commercial development and fancy new housing complexes are booming in these areas to serve the new, presumably moneyed, population. Just as this pattern of development is the norm in every major city these days, it seems like it’s spreading further out into many previously-rural areas.)
As expected, what I knew of as “gentrification”—new, $1.5 million condos springing up in poorer neighborhoods—wasn’t the issue in the parts of Appalachia we traveled in. The poverty I saw for the bulk of the trip was a result of all the local industries having disappeared. When those jobs are replaced, to some small degree, it is by corporations like Wal-Mart. The coal companies got rich at the expense of West Virginia’s citizens and resources, but at the same time, they did provide employment (and, occasionally, some measure of security) for a huge percentage of the population. Now that they’re gone, mechanized, and/or have replaced the local labor force with their own people, not much is left except multinationals like Wal-Mart.
This sprawling symbol of the demise of local business, boycotted by good liberals the world over—those who can afford to, at least—this is the largest employer in West Virginia. Much like the miners who were paid with vouchers that could only be spent at the company store, their poverty-level wages mean that suddenly, Wal-Mart’s “discount” prices are all that the workers can afford. So, yes, perhaps Wal-Mart is bringing jobs to West Virginia. But on the other hand, any money they might bring to the area goes right back into the company coffers because their employees have no choice but to support their own wealthy employers.
In the end, though, the state of West Virginia has little choice but to welcome coal mines and Wal-Marts; these are the only companies willing to invest in a region with such little economic power. As is often the case with investors seen as essential to a region’s economy, the state government seems to be willing to give these companies anything they want, to the point of draining any of the land’s natural resources. Even when lawmakers see the destruction being wrought, they are scared silent by the prospect of upsetting the company that is their county’s only economic base, or they are outvoted by their peers who are.
At the end of the week, we paid an unplanned visit to Larry Gibson and Kayford Mountain, where his family has lived for over 200 years. He took us up to what he called the “gates of hell”—a Mountaintop Removal site eating away at his beloved mountain. These gorgeous mountains, which in summer are covered with a lush carpet of trees, fluffy greens of every possible shade and more; these mountains that have sustained generations of families like Larry’s; these mountains where no matter how poor you are, some food will grow for you; these mountains are being reduced to desolate, gray piles of gravel, where nothing can grow. The only life that’s found on one of these sites is encased in steel—a handful of machine operators, each hidden away inside an enormous yellow piece of de-struction equipment.
This wasn’t my first visit to a Mountaintop Removal site. In 2001, the summer after I finished high school, my church youth group went on a mission trip to the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia (also home to Kayford Mountain), which has been ravaged by strip mining for decades before Mountaintop Removal took over where it left off. We spent the week repairing homes in the community, many of which had been devastated by the floods and landslides that are the results of such extensive mining. While it was a valuable experience—seeing the destruction wreaked by coal mining on individual families was a shocking first look at rural poverty—we didn’t talk about any of the reasons that such poverty exists, or even challenge the idea that poverty should exist in the first place.
We had Wednesday afternoon free to spend as a youth group. While other church groups found public pools, went to the movies, or relaxed in some other way, our pastor decided, for reasons he never explained to us, that we should visit one of the coal mines to which so much of that area has been subjected. So without any introduction beyond “we’re going to a coal mine,” we sat through a video and a lecture on the “revolutionary new mining practices” we were going to see, both produced by the coal company. I wish I could see those now, knowing what I do about the social and environmental effects of these practices, but at the time we were a bunch of bored high school kids sitting through a presentation on something none of us knew anything about or really had any interest in.
We spent the rest of the afternoon driving, in our minivans, around on the winding roads cut through the giant piles of rock. Afterwards, there was a general consensus that this was a terrible way to spend an afternoon, but there was really no discussion of why we felt that way. Thinking back, I remember feeling (in addition to boredom) like we were wandering around some kind of desert wasteland. I knew that coal mines were supposed to have lots of people working in them, but I didn’t see a soul. I assumed maybe they weren’t working that day. Nothing much seemed to be happening in this surreal, lunar landscape—gray and dusty as far as I could see, interrupted only by occasional yellow machines with 9-foot tires. It was dead, silent, vacant, and I wanted nothing more than to be out of there, back out into the lush green mountainscape I was already coming to love so much.
On top of Kayford Mountain, with Larry, we walked half a mile or so on his property before we got to Hell’s Gate. Though I was in a group of 50-some people, I felt such peace and calm, being on top of that mountain in its natural state. The quiet beauty of the mountain settled around me, and the non-stop motion of the week was briefly forgotten. In that short walk, I realized why all those Biblical writers considered mountaintops to be sacred spaces, where one can be closer to God. There is something special, liminal, something not-quite-definable about a mountaintop.
Our path led us across the literal gate, the property line, and then the earth fell away. It was a bite out of the land, a sudden ragged ending to the soft mountain on which I stood. Where the greens and reds and browns of the mountain should have been, there was just gray. Acres and acres of gray nothingness. As I contemplated the deathscape laid out before me, the only word that made sense was “rape.” I was looking at the bloody, eviscerated vagina of America, where capitalism has left West Virginia lying out to die.
I had to step back. I had to put a camera between me and this vision of my own bleeding body. I stood in the epicenter of the systemic exploitation that is corporate greed, cutting its wide swath on the earth and its people. The black dust I saw, in a few scattered stripes, was the prize, the price tag put on God’s body, the earth. I saw “Everyday Low Prices”, I saw luxury condos, I saw New England grocery store aisles full of papayas and mangos in January, I saw all the amenities I have been taught that I deserve. This, there on the mountain, is the price I pay daily; if the destruction I saw is what it takes to power a coal plant, then the energy I consume for my transportation, my eating habits, my laptop—my lifestyle is making that coal mine necessary.
Suddenly, gentrification was the issue again. Disguised in a different form, certainly, but what I saw on that mountain was Larry Gibson’s family chased out for coal, for profits, with no regard for where they will go or how they will live when their land has been chewed up and spit out into the valley. I might as well have been watching the African-American families of Harlem being driven out for the Lenox Grand condominiums, or the Dominican and Puerto Rican families of Providence’s West Side pushed aside for Rising Sun Mills. The message is the same, the disrespect is the same.
No people, no culture, no homeland is worth as much as profit. The exploitation crosses divisions of race, language, or region: wherever people with less money own or possess something that people with more money want, the result is the same. Nothing can stand in the way of The Market, and as we continue to focus singlemindedly on Progress and Wealth and Energy, countless millions are evicted, literally and symbolically, and left to die by the wayside, having been stripped of land, culture, and dignity.
