I read an article in the New Yorker recently where I learned about all of the toxins that are released from wood smoke: Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, benzene, methyl chloride, fine particles, and methyl ethyl ketone. The article is about an quixotic gang of stove makers trying to save the world by engineering highly functioning stoves that cut down on carbon emissions, wood use, pneumonia rates and other unsavory statistics. One team of stove makers was working on an injera stove, designed specifically to be a way to cook Ethiopian sponge bread without deforesting the entire nation.

The house I live in on Coal River is heated by a wood stove. It is also surrounded by mountaintop removal sites and located just upriver from several coal processing plants. In Sylvester, a town about twenty minutes away, coal dust blankets porches and invades the lungs of school children. Taking these things in to consideration, the EPA emissions standards seem pretty incongruous.

To be efficient at burning wood in the bioregion where I live, it is essential to know the difference between and when to use poplar and black walnut logs. Poplar is a soft wood that’s light in color; if you look at a cross-section it often has a darker circle in the center surrounded by a lighter ring. It ignites easily, so you use it to get fires started. Black walnut is darker and harder; it almost has a reddish or purplish tone. It’ll burn for a long time, but you better have a strong fire going when you put that sucker in!

Sometimes I shove giant logs in to the wood stove, on top of dying embers. I do this for two reasons; first off, a big log will presumably burn for longer, secondly, I like the logistical challenge presented by fitting a log almost as big as the stove in to it without badly scarring my forearms.

“You really love shoving those big logs in on top of a fire that can’t take it,” a friend says to me as I tuck balls of flaming crumpled newsprint under the log in a feverish attempt to ignite it, “You’re just squishing all the lit coals to the back, they’re going to die out.”

Dying? You want to talk about dying, mister? Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, benzene, methyl chloride, fine particles, methyl ethyl ketone . . .

As an angsty, mohawk-sporting, Tom Waits-listening youth, no Westchester diner captured my imagination quite like The Star. I even wrote about it in “Live Free or Diner“:

The Star is one such diner. A factory made Silk City model, it was manufactured in Paterson, New Jersey during the 1950s and sandwiched between two buildings on the quieter end of White Plains’ East Post Road. It has five booths and sixteen stools. The short-order cook serves up fried egg & potato sandwiches and cheeseburgers while wearing, without irony, a retro paper cap and grease-stained apron. Specials are posted up on the grill hood; the other dishes are on a four-page menu. Coffee is 95 cents, and so good that my friends and I would buy it to-go in paper cups.

66 1/2 E. Post Road, White Plains, NY

Between punk show sets or after youth activist meetings at the perpetually overheated Westchester Peace Activists (WESPAC) space, we’d loiter on the corner, gulping for air and lighting up cigarettes.

“Let’s go to the Star,” someone would suggest, stamping out his or her butt.

“Yeah, I’m really hungry,” I would respond (I was always the hungry one). Sweaty and exhausted from the mosh pit or an argument over whether investing in sloganized stickers and buttons was a waste of resources; eggs, toast and coffee sounded absolutely perfect.

We’d crowd six to a four-person booth and everyone else would be relegated to the adjoining counter. Last minute set lists were scribbled down on paper placemats, band members crowding around and talking quickly to make their preferences known. Or we’d plan benefit shows to raise money for overseas NGOs and the anti-Walmart protest (complete with a guerilla film screening projected on to the side of the just-opened store) that never quite materialized.

I ended up there tonight, chasing debauchery with a grilled cheese burger (a hamburger patty between two slices of white bread with melted cheese). Walking in, I noticed a few changes– the greasy spoon now boasts iridescent, 1950s-esque tables and water is served with colored plastic straws. I guess when a place gets enough punks, art school kids and favorable reviews in fancy magazines, they start to embrace their coolness.

Still, there is something about late night diner runs that feels simple and calming. Like it’s okay to be a kid, to make a scene laughing, to take forever figuring out how to pay when Nick only has a twenty and Katie only has a ten and Rachel has a few singles but paid too much and needs change. Ah, New York, I’ve kind of fucking missed you.

You can read about the action here.

The banner hanging on the drill rig two protestors are locked down to.

 

This is an open letter to friends & family, explaining my actions:

This morning, I locked down inside a drill rig on Coal River Mountain, the last high elevation mountain in the Coal River Valley that hasn’t been mountaintop removed. This rig is being used to build a road that will facilitate mining. My affinity group has taken action to stop mountaintop removal before it even begins- if completed, it will render the last high elevation range in the range in to a series of pancake-like plateaus.

Mountaintop removal is the most egregious example I know of humanity’s reckless abuse of nature. It is much more than just a stark metaphor, however- it causes real, tangible effects on the lives of folks in the coalfields and the lives of those downstream. Residents of the Coal River Valley struggle daily for their health, air and clean water. Sludge impoundments threaten the lives of valley residents, keeping them up at night, worrying- it is incomprehensible to me that coal barons can sleep soundly (do they?!). Yep, part of why I’m locking down is a big “Fuck you!” to King Coal (and, in a broader sense, Big Energy).

I’m also thankful for the things I’ve learned in the Valley and for the people who have been fighting mountaintop removal. Our best organizers are local residents who have worked tirelessly to expose the illegality of MTR and valley fill permits, win over supporters and get the word out about this devastation- I am so completely humbled by the work they do. I’m also humbled by friends and fellow activists who have been arrested multiple times taking a stand against mountaintop removal, the least I can do is step up and take my turn.

I’m a New Yorker and college girl who has only been here a few months, but the Coal River Valley has altered my perceptions of what it means to live with the land. A friend and I were talking the other day about geography- about how people build their homes in the natural hollows carved in to the mountains and how the main road follows the curve of the valley. There are cultures of knowing here- knowing how to use and respect the land through hunting, foraging and gardening. In the midst of one of the most egregious ecological catastrophes exists incredible pockets of sustainability.

Civil disobedience is hard (sometimes scary) work, but it is just that- work. As you read and think about this action, challenge yourself to come down and pitch in. Our needs don’t end with arrestables- we have a lot to do and all good work, including washing dishes and mixing compost, is important work.

Thanks for your support!

Love & Mountains,

Dea

It is debatable whether biomass can be down renewably or sustainably, or if it will cause pollution and clear cutting.

Of course, the question remains, “Is anything that’s better than coal good enough? Do we want solutions that smooth over the problem, or that get to the root of the problem? Are we idealistic and selfish to disparage community choices that don’t fit in to our radical greenie framework? Where is the balance struck?”

]]> http://darlingswillbekilled.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/down-by-the-green-river-where-paradise-lay/feed/ 0 deag http://darlingswillbekilled.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/zine-review-%e2%80%9cbeing-the-adventures-of-one-fine-summer-a-personal-zine-in-photobook-form%e2%80%9d-by-magpie-killjoy/ http://darlingswillbekilled.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/zine-review-%e2%80%9cbeing-the-adventures-of-one-fine-summer-a-personal-zine-in-photobook-form%e2%80%9d-by-magpie-killjoy/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:21:41 +0000 seams and story http://darlingswillbekilled.wordpress.com/?p=98 Continue reading →]]> Magpie Killjoy is, as usual, experimenting: with form (publishing a zine as a glossy $7 book), with photojournalism (“There’s a lot that I don’t like about the photojournalist world . . . from the bullshit faux objectivity to the insistence that it is a photographer’s right to photograph—and profit off of—anyone and anything they see,” reads the Intro) and with a genre he calls environmental war photography. The results are mixed; some of the chapters are expertly crafted, with well-written narrative and photographs that support the storyline, while others read/view like gallery shows shoved in to book format.

Photo by Magpie Killjoy

The photographs, of course, are striking- punks playing guitar and fiddle in a West Virginia family’s living room, tattooed fingers bloodied from digging in to roadkill, an abandoned mailbox at a mountaintop removal site, a tintype photographer on a shoot. The anarchist photographer and founder of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness Distro has a knack for capturing overlooked and unusual detail.

Maybe I’m biased because I currently live in West Virginia and fight mountaintop removal full time, but Killjoy is at his peak with his environmental war photojournalism. “O Coal!,” the zine’s first chapter, is a photo series of activists exploring MTR sites and cleaning up after a flood in the coalfields, accompanied by text outlining Killjoy’s experiences in Appalachia. The chapter ties in contemporary and historical resistance- in one part, the author explores an old mine guard bunker in the woods, once used by a coal company to attack unionized workers. While the narrative veers towards simplistic, his evocative language challenges the reader to go and see the destruction for themselves. As a media maker caught up in press releases and advocacy journalism, it’s easy for me to forget just how important personal narrative (from the perspective of both hellraisers and curious outsiders) is in capturing the emotional edges of struggle.

As Killjoy leaves the coalfields and heads west, the narrative falls flat. His talent for mise-en-scene and for conveying the stories he has heard is suppressed in favor of vague perzinish writing. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, he writes that he “ . . .may or may not have cried [because of the square being dominated by condos and a Clear Channel Billboard.]” “Well did you or didn’t you?” I want to ask him, challenging him to go further with his writing, “Why does what has happened to the physical space matter so much?” The well-developed essay that begins the zine led me to expect the in-depth writing from subsequent chapters.

The photographs are still stunning, snapshots of lives being lived with a certain transgressive intensity. There is shadow play on a Tennessee River and in “Chapter Three: Butchering a Fawn on a Sunday”; a jarring visual essay of friends carving roadkill. The final photograph in this section is a bloody hand boldly holding the fawn’s heart in the air, triumphant.

Photo by Magpie Killjoy

Killjoy’s best photographs and writing serve as well-crafted dispatches from radical culture and resistance. By blatantly embracing subjectivity, “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” begins to deconstruct the false paradigm of the objective and distant photojournalist.

There is a stark difference in his work covering environmental atrocities and his other photographs- while the latter work well without much text, he uses essay to string the former together into coherent and alluring stories. It’s not that I prefer one style over the other; perhaps “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” should have been two separate projects, not a pastiche of summer adventures having little more than linear time connecting them.

Of course, every new experiment is by its nature haphazard. I hope Killjoy and others continue to work with the photo zine form and the complicated possibilities of anarchistic photojournalism.

Birds Before The Storm

The college poets were reading Zong!, a book of highly visual poetry based on an 18th-century lawsuit over 150 slaves drowned aboard a slave ship so that the owners could collect insurance money. I’m not normally a huge fan of poetry, but it was exhilarating to see words fragmented and formed in to textual whirlpools that dealt with real events, real history.

Magi asked her students how they physically read the piece, “Out loud?” Max S. said he rocked as he read, feeling the motion of the ship in poet Nourbese Philip’s lyrical rhythm.

I wanted to drop in to college at once. To read poetry and literary journalism, write complicated criticisms of the work and develop my own. I wanted to have long winded conversations with students who understood writing over cups of steaming overpriced cappuccino at the coffee shop down the street. I wanted to read novels on the subway and write character sketches of old women in kerchiefs at Brighton Beach. New York, New York, take me back! I cried in my head, West Virginia is hard and the writerly life would be quite charming!

Of course, I will return to West Virginia sometime this week, as soon as possible. I’m getting a different kind of education in the coalfields. I’m learning to chop wood and stoke a wood stove, how to write press releases and be an organizer. (I’ll journal about being out of school for the first time in 15 years in a later entry. Much too much for this one.)

Accruing life experience is possibly more valuable than attending writing workshops, because it gives me interesting topics and ideas to address in my nonfiction. By forcing myself out of academia, a place that is almost too comfortable for a nerd like me, I also push my writing in to real life, with all its jagged edges.

Magpie and I have been discussing the writing life via email. Here’s something he wrote to me recently: