Gudmundsson's Mountain Mourning and Stewardship

BJ Gudmundsson’s Mountain Mourning (2007) stands out because it explicitly states its Christian position but also because it too agues for sustainable development without attempting an evenhanded approach to MTR. The film was presented by Christians for the Mountains and bases its opposition to Mountaintop Removal Mining on biblical assertions like “The Earth is the Lord’s.” As in other MTR documentaries, Mountain Mourning highlights the richness of mountain resources and the cultures they have sustained for centuries, but here facts are delivered with sacred music in the background. “Blessed Jesus” accompanies information about the hardwood forests in Appalachia, along with pristine scenes of deer, ginseng, and black cohosh. A billboard declaring, “This is Coal Country” breaks the meditative tone of the film, and the narration reinforces the conflict. The billions of tons of coal used to produce over fifty percent of our electricity results in sulfur dioxide pollutants that are the main cause of acid rain. To more easily reach this coal commodity, according to the film, MTR replaced much of underground mining, the narrator reveals, explaining the destruction left behind when 600 feet of a mountaintop is removed to reach the exposed coal seams, so that dragline cranes can scoop out all the mineral like seeds out of a split melon.

Costs to the landscape range from loss of forests through clear-cutting, erosion, runoff, and black water spills, streams buried by valley fills, construction of slurry sludge ponds to store black water left from coal processing and slurry spills resulting from weakened dams. The film shows floods caused by slurry spills and erosion to illustrate dangerous repercussions of MTR. According to Gudmundsson, half of the mountains in Southern West Virginia will be gone in the next 20 years if permits are submitted and approved at the current rate.  

Other costs are economic but negatively affect human and nonhuman nature, as well. Generated in part by MTR erosion, devastating floods destroyed 5000 homes and businesses in 2001, and 4000 in 2002. MTR’s repercussions are pushing people out of the hollers and into FEMA trailers. Whole communities must be relocated away from MTR sites because of blasting, contaminated drinking water, and dust. An enormous number of jobs have been lost in the state in the last three decades, decreasing the number of miners from 120,000 to fewer than 15,000. Counties in West Virginia are now like Third World countries, the film declares, noting that McDowell County, West Virginia is now the eighth poorest in the United States. Over 3000 children live there in poverty, asserts the narrator. 

In spite of these dire conditions, however, the film begins and ends with hope as it supports sustainable development and maintains its anti-MTR stance. Musicians support a “Vigil for the Mountains” that opens and closes the film, an attempt to raise awareness of mountaintop removal mining and its consequences. Instead of experts offering underground mining as a viable solution to MTR, this film shows us a banner behind musicians at the vigil arguing for alternative energy sources. The film also ends with its beginning Biblical message: “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” a vision that points to the power of a rhetoric of hope, this time based in a more powerful argument for sustainable development that maintains its opposition to corporate coalmining and its exploitation of the natural world.