“This is my home. I’m not going to let them run me out of my home. Maine is pretty, but it doesn’t have mountains like we’ve got — like those that hug from God. Us hillbillies like our hills. You can feel the ancient energy here. We are the most homesick people in our life.”
Julia “Judy” Bonds, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in a wooded corner of West Virginia’s Coal River Valley called Marfork Hollow, where six generations of her “great-greats” worked, lived, and were buried. Bonds is the co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch, which organizes against the coal companies’ destructive practice of mountaintop removal.
Majora and Judy survey the effects of mountaintop removal.
Unlike traditional coal mining, mountaintop removal uses explosives to blow the tops off mountains, freeing up the coal inside to be scooped into trucks and driven away. The force of the explosions — from nearly 3 million pounds of explosives per day — crack the foundations of nearby homes and send dangerous silica dust into the air, ravaging the Appalachian mountain range and forcing communities to abandon their homes. The results of the explosions, such as contaminated water tables, serious erosion, and loss of vegetation and wildlife, endure for decades.
Mountaintop removal has a long history in Appalachia, but it wasn’t until 1998 that Judy Bonds began fighting back. That was the year she watched her six-year-old grandson stand ankle-deep in a stream full of dead fish and ask, “What’s wrong with them?” Soon after, Bonds started making phone calls and attending rallies. Before long, she and a small group of volunteers began Coal River Mountain Watch, a grassroots group working to organize the residents of southern West Virginia to fight for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Judy with a jar of contaminated water.
In 2003, Bonds won the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded annually to one person from each continent. Bonds is quick to say that this honor does well to debunk the stereotype of the “ignorant hillbilly.”
Since winning the award, Bonds has been received warmly across the nation and has been featured in National Geographic, Vanity Fair, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
T-shirt swap! Majora in a tee from Coal River Mountain Watch, Judy in a shirt from the Sustainable South Bronx
At home in West Virginia, it’s sometimes a different story. Bonds’ high profile has meant that she lives in fear of coal trucks swerving into her path on windy mountain roads, keeps guns at home, and has surveillance cameras scan her property day and night. A friend mows her lawn wearing a bulletproof vest.
Judy feels undeterred, though. She believes that the fight against mountaintop removal is so important that she can’t stop until they do. And besides, she says, “in order to be in this movement, you can’t be a pansy.”
Visit the home of Coal River Mountain Watch
See Judy Bonds featured in Moyers on America: Is God Green?
Become Judy's friend on Facebook