Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) and Alternative Solutions to Mountaintop Removal Mining

After watching Big Stone Gap (2014),  a less than memorable romantic comedy about a pharmacy owner who falls in love with a Virginia coal miner in Appalachia, I yearned for more authentic representations of my mountain home.  B.J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) offers a glimpse. 

Rise Up! West Virginia presents new, radical arguments against Mountaintop Removal Mining. The film demands alternative energy sources to meet sustainable development goals and effectively maintains its rhetoric against MTR. Even though the film and its subjects strive for and build their arguments on the need for wider distribution of fair use commodities, they also argue against coalmining in general and maintain their position against MTR and corporate coalmining throughout the films. The fact that a large percentage of America’s power is coal generated does not sway them from their demand for new forms of less destructive energy production and consumption.

Rise Up! West Virginia presents George Daughtery, a West Virginia attorney, arguing, “coal mining hasn’t saved the state yet” by effectively juxtaposing images of the pristine mountains that may become a memory with the hell MTR leaves in its wake. Judy Bonds’ narration accompanies pristine images of West Virginia mountains that provide, as Bonds explains, the “sense of place [that] pulls at you” and “makes Appalachians who they are.” With authentic Appalachian music performed by West Virginia musicians, the film highlights this need for a sense of place, even providing a “Bambi shot” of a doe in a hardwood forest. The pure scene is contrasted with shots of mammoth blasting destroying a mountain in Boone County, so, as the film states, the mountain’s “guts are blown out” in a “manmade destruction.” The film also sets up Appalachians as victims like the mountains, both of whom are exploited by corporate mining companies with progressive views of resource exploitation. The film argues that their state has been turned into a Third World colony and will be abandoned after all the coal is brutally extracted.

After this opening that establishes the film’s conflict, a focus on “sustainable energy and jobs” is reinforced with a musical celebration of the land that remains at the Mountain Keepers Music Festival with Larry Gibson, a landowner surrounded by MTR because he refused to sell his land or mineral rights. The festival is meant to provide a voice for the anti-MTR movement and to support alternative and sustainable energy sources that will provide jobs for the region. These anti-MTR protesters align with the pristine nature that could become a memory, like the fish in hollers, thousands of acres of virgin forest, and sandstone rocks now lost because of MTR. 

Although this film documents jobs lost because of the move to MTR, arguments against coalmining chiefly rely on its environmental consequences: timber lost to clear cutting, sludge dams breaking and destroying towns and water sources, valley fills polluting wells and clogging up rivers and streams, blasting not only decapitating mountains but covering whole towns with toxic coal dust, even after covering a processing plant with a dome. 

And the coalmining companies, especially Massey, are established as the culprits for this destruction to the land and people of West Virginia. A child in the film explains, “These coal mines are making us kids sick,” while explaining Massey’s attempts to expand a coal preparation plant near a school. The government, too, is held responsible for ongoing destruction, since they overturn stays on permits and allow MTR and its consequences to continue. 

The film’s ending maintains both the bifurcation between the big guys—corporate miners—and the little guys—citizens of West Virginia. But it also continues its argument for sustainable development. Back at the music festival protestors argue, “Turn off electric gadgets and demand renewable energy.” And they offer suggestions for winning the war against MTR. According to the film, Appalachians should elect responsible people to public office and think of their neighbors. They should make phone calls and write letters. In a nod back toward nostalgia, the film ends with another Bambi shot in a pristine forest and an exclamation: “She’s worth more than all the power in the world,” so “Rise Up! West Virginia,” the film asserts, providing a sense of hope that moves beyond the seemingly hopeless context established in other anti-MTR documentaries. With viable solutions to not only MTR but also coalmining and our reliance on coal for our electricity, hope is preserved.