Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice by Shannon Elizabeth Bell

Author:Shannon Elizabeth Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Fight for Clean Water in Prenter

In 2007, a new issue of concern surfaced in Patty’s community: water contamination.

After residents of Rawl in Mingo County, West Virginia, discovered that their well water was contaminated with coal waste from a leaking underground slurry injection site, Patty and others living in the Prenter area began questioning whether the same thing was happening in their community. Patty and other employees and volunteers from Coal River Mountain Watch began to investigate the water problems that were emerging in the community of Prenter, where Patty had lived her entire adult life. Patty is certain that her husband’s kidney problems were tied to the water problems in Prenter. In the fall of 2007, Patty helped organize the first community meetings about the water problems in Prenter. She and Maria Lambert—whose story is told in chapter 5—were integral to the fight that ultimately brought clean water to Prenter Hollow three years later.

Most recently, Patty has moved on to working with another community group, called the Boone-Raleigh Community Group, which was started by Lorelei Scarboro (whose story is also in this book).

Patty recognizes that over the past ten years of activism, her perspective on the coal industry has changed dramatically. When she first started working for Coal River Mountain Watch in 2002, she limited her work to the coal-truck issue because she was not sure how she felt about fighting mountaintop-removal mining, since her husband was a long-time underground union coal miner. However, as she learned more about the devastation of mountaintop-removal mining, she became one of the most outspoken activists against the practice and now sees her activism as reaching even beyond issues just related to coal extraction.

[My activism has] opened up my knowledge of different things that I never knew about before. It’s really made me aware of [what] some people call a “web of life,” how everything’s connected. Everything from our food supply to our water supply [to] all the pollution. Everything is connected. [My] dad always gardened, and he would always keep seeds to restart his garden the next year. Well, now through genetic engineering, those seeds are not of any use whatsoever. Not only that, but they don’t know what it’s going to do to you down the line. I never knew this before I became an activist—that the growth hormones and the steroids and the antibiotics that they feed the animals are coming down our food line. I mean, it’s just setting up a whole world of bad. Who would have ever thought, you know, that you’d be learning about stuff like that when you started out fighting your own little battle here about coal? It has become a battle [about] everything.

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