Reclaiming Earth Day: Guerilla Reclamation Actions in the Coalfields

How do you celebrate Earth Day, when your homeland or homeplace has
been stripmined into oblivion?

For my family, standing in the ruins of our 150-year-old homestead in
the devastated historic community of Eagle Creek, in the Shawnee Forest
of southern Illinois, we turned to guerilla reclamation: My billie
boys, the 9th generation of Eagle Creek ancestry, planted the first
native plum trees on the unmanaged grassland reclamation site, in what
was once one of the most diverse forests in the nation.

We raised the dead on Eagle Creek for Earth Day this year.

Ten years ago on Earth Day, the scene was entirely different.

I stood with my mother and Uncle Richard at the rim of a lunar
expanse of ruts and rocks and broken earth. We had to protect our eyes. A
dark wind swept along the ridge. Howling little eddies of fury. Huge
trucks stormed in all directions. It looked like an earthquake had
devastated the area.

How green was our valley of Eagle Creek, when my mom and I last walked
these hills together. Corn and sorghum tassels had jutted out from the
slopes like ancient signposts. The rolling forests seemed eternal in
those days, protected by sentries of hickory, oak, maple, gum, beech,
dogwood, and wild grapevines that thickened up the ramparts of Eagle
Creek with the intrigue of danger.

Our family homestead, known since 1849 as the Oval Hill Farm, sat on a
knoll in the eastern shadows of the Eagle Mountains, which withdrew to
the upheavals of 400- million-year-old faulted ridges that were older
than many American ranges. Our ancestors had first moved into the area
in 1805. On the southeastern horizon, the promontory outlook of the
federally protected Garden of the Gods Wilderness area, one of a handful
of such protected areas in the American heartland, retreated into the
traces of the Shawnee National Forest boundaries that looped around the
panhandle of our hollow with the intransigence of a national border.

On a clear day, as a child, I once pretended to be an eagle and took
flight down the hill, rose above the forests, and soared beyond the Ohio
River and Kentucky, which lay only twenty miles away.

"I can't believe this," my mom whispered.

We could see the route of destruction. The first explosions had taken
place in the summer of 1998. The coal company had set off the ammonium
nitrate-fuel oil blasts in the surrounding Eagle Creek valley, gnawing
away at the edges of our family hill. One thousand six hundred pounds of
explosives sat in each hole like a land mine, set to ripple across the
valley with enough thunder to bring down the walls of Jericho.

The Wisconsin glaciers that had encamped on the Midwest never reached
our boot-heel range of southeastern Illinois. The dense forests
crowning our hillsides and hollow, like most of the Shawnee hill region
from the Mississippi to the Wabash River, once rivaled Appalachia or the
Ozarks for plant diversity. Some even called it the Illinois Ozarks. It
was that rare main chain of mountains and hills to stretch east to
west. Over 1,100 plant species, 270 birds, two score of mammals and
reptiles.

Then came the reckoning on our hillside along Eagle Creek. After
harassing and intimidating our last remaining cousin on Oval Hill, a
coal mining company had bought most of the hollow where my extended
family had lived for two centuries and blasted away the old homeplace.

The throttle of machinery, an industrial cocktail of explosives, and a
handful of large equipment drivers removed our Oval Hill farm and
leveled the ridge by the end of the fall. Flattened the knoll to its
knees, and then to ashes. The old pond, the four native plum trees, the
sorghum and cornfields, the garden, the barn, and the 150-year-old log
cabin were buried in a crater formed before the Paleozoic era.

Despite all of the laws and regulations on the books for stripmining
and reclamation obligations, a 2006 study in the International
Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environmental examined 80 years
of reclamation efforts and came to this conclusion: The forests and the
fertile farmlands are not coming back. The report found: "Mined land
cropped for bond release commonly becomes unmanaged grasslands. Scant
mineland is returned to trees, with survival and growth poorer than on
reclaimed minelands pre-regulation. Problems include high soil strength,
poor water relations and excessive ground cover. Sustainable plant
communities have not developed."

My little boys planted the first trees in the ruins of Eagle Creek.

An estimated 960,000 tons of coal were stripped from our ancestor's
original farm and adjoining areas. Shipped to a medium sized coal-fired
power plant, it would have generated roughly 2.06 MWe of electricity,
based on typical estimates of burning coal. That would have been enough
electricity to supply American demands for approximately four and half
hours.

That was the exchange rate of our dirty energy policy for my family,
like tens of thousands of Americans besieged by stripmining in 24 states and several Native American
reservations: 200 years of history, for four and half hours of
coal-fired electricity.

This Earth Day, however, those four and a half hours marked the
beginning of reclaiming our land, and heritage, from the coal industry.