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apocalyptic-poems · 11 months

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Long but really fascinating article on an atheist, LGBT, sometimes vegetarian environmental activist who has sacrificed his dreams of going to art school to battle coal companies. Highly recommended reading.

"Coal has stalked Junior Walk his entire life. He remembers his elementary school in the mountainous southern reaches of West Virginia being caked in coal dust, and the representatives from the nearby mine showing up to hand them out mollifying squeezable toys in the shape of lumps of coal.

That school was subsequently shuttered and is now wreathed in weeds, a replacement established a few miles away to escape the shadow of the mine. Walk’s childhood home sits a few hundred yards from another mine, Black Eagle, that spectacularly disgorges coal via a conveyer belt into a huge heap by the main road, like a sort of Stygian waterfall.

Walk followed the path of many of his peers, as well as his father and grandfather, by working for the coal industry in its Appalachian heartland, doing jobs in security and maintenance. But as he saw the black rocks being clawed from the guts of the mountains and thought of the local people being sickened by this work, Walk began to see coal as an implacable foe.

“People are getting exploited, people are getting poisoned, people are losing their lives to the activities of this coal industry,” said Walk. “I’ve seen friends and neighbors getting sick and dying of cancer and heart disease and having babies with birth defects.”

Since he was 19 years old, Walk, who is now 33, has risked the wrath of his community by actively campaigning against coal, firstly through direct protest action and, more recently, in more novel ways. Standing as a lonely opponent of an industry that still holds the region in a tight grip, Walk is now fixated upon the destruction of his nemesis. “My ultimate hope is to shut down the coal industry,” he said. “In order to get anything else new here, you’ve got to burn it down first.”

He has a perfect weapon to do this: a drone."

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"Sometimes Walk sees waterways blackened by mining debris, other times leaks in sludgy ponds meant to contain the industry’s waste. On one occasion Walk said he saw boulders the size of cars, formed by machines slicing into the side of a mountain for coal, perched perilously over a public road. “I sometimes get footage of huge plumes of blasting dust that some people just think is fake, like I work for Industrial Light & Magic or something,” he said.

This work has resulted in a handful of fines being imposed upon mining operations, not sufficient to challenge the industry’s dominance but enough to act as a thorn in its side, an insurgent guerrilla campaign in the mountains of an otherwise pacified state. “I just want to do anything to be a pain in the ass to the coal industry,” Walk said. “Anything that can cost them a dollar, because the only thing these people care about is the money in their pockets. Our community is expendable to them.”

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"Inevitably, there has been a backlash to this work. Walk – who has a beard that would be at home in a Tolkien novel, wears army green and chugs sweet tea from a large can – is a recognizable local character. His iconoclastic campaign against coal has, he said, resulted in his car brakes being cut and even him being shot at.

At one point, as we drove through one slate-grey mining site, Walk saw some company employees ahead and did a swift U-turn, while offering advice on how to shelter behind a car wheel during a gunfight as we retreated. He previously used a four-wheel ATV to conduct the drone work and has sped away from security guards he feared could kill him and dump his body in one of the holding pits containing syrupy mining slurry.

“I don’t have a lot of friends around here,” Walk admitted. His father, who is now ill with what Walk calls “prep plant shakes” – a Parkinson’s-like condition allegedly spawned by his work in a coal preparation plant – is supportive but has faced fury from colleagues over his son’s activities.

It hasn’t helped Walk’s popularity that he’s seen as transgressive in other ways – he’s an atheist in a deeply religious area and he despises Donald Trump, who won West Virginia by a thumping margin in the 2020 election, to the extent he turned up to a rally of the former president with a “Fuck Trump” sign, prompting a volley of threats.

For a while Walk was a vegetarian, which upset his mother more than his anti-mining work or his sexuality.. He is also, as he puts it, “a big old queer”.

“It was easy for me to make the leap to do this work because I was already somewhat a pariah in the community,” said Walk. “I already had a reputation as being different, being weird. I didn’t give a shit what people thought of me.”

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"Walk is disdainful of the in-vogue mantra of a “just transition” to clean energy jobs for people in his community, who are, studies show, at increased risk of diseases of the heart, kidney and lung, as well as other conditions such as asthma, from living amid the air and groundwater pollution of coalmining projects. Coal is also the dirtiest of fossil fuels, supercharging the global heating that has spurred the astronomical temperatures that have scorched the US and elsewhere this summer.

“They want to hem and haw about a just transition, to me that’s just an excuse for inaction,” said Walk, who is unsentimental about the popular image of the put-upon, toiling coalminer that Trump tapped into during his 2016 presidential run, when, during a rally, he donned a helmet and mimed using a shovel.

“People are getting sick and dying because of this activity. What comes after that isn’t up to me, it’s not my problem. I don’t care. These people hitched their wagon to a dying coal industry, they can be out of work for all I give a shit.”

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“Coal is such a source of pride and identity but the state’s political leaders are in denial about the need to transition from it, it’s a massive failure of leadership,” said James Van Nostrand, an expert in energy and sustainable development, who recently departed West Virginia University.

“Coal is being crushed by overwhelming market forces but the state has just doubled down on it. It’s the classic resource curse – the counties in the state with mining are the poorest. There is no opportunities, people are trapped because their rotting houses are worth almost nothing, the conditions are awful. Coal companies scar the landscape and taxpayers pay to clean it up. It’s shameful.”

For Walk, the fight to change the entrenched status quo can sometimes feel futile. He did once dream of going to art school, of leaving this place as many young people aim to do. But he’s now resigned to continue tangling with coal for the remainder of his days.

“I can’t give up,” he said. “They’ve already pretty much won. They can do whatever the hell they want, but I’m still alive. I’m still breathing, and so I’m going to cost them as much money as I humanly can while I’m still on this earth. Because I’m right and they’re wrong.”

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