Mike Roselle Draws a Line: Facing Down the Machine — by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank

The beard is graying. The hair is clipped military-short. He is a large man, oddly shaped, like a cross between a grizzly and a javelina. It’s Roselle, of course, Mike Roselle—the outside agitator. He and a fellow activist have just spread an anti-coal banner in front of a growling bulldozer in West Virginia on a cold February morning in 2009. He’s in this icy and unforgiving land to oppose a brutal mining operation and will soon be arrested for trespassing. Massey Energy, the target of Roselle’s protest, is the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States, mining nearly 40 million tons of coal in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee each year.

The arrest was nothing new for Roselle, who cut his teeth in direct action environmental campaigns decades earlier as a co-founder of Earth First!, top campaigner for Greenpeace U.S. and later as the wit behind the tenacious Ruckus Society. Unlike most mainstream environmentalists you are not likely to see Roselle sporting a suit and lobbying Washington insiders on the intricacies of mining laws — you are more apt to see this self-proclaimed lowbagger (one who lives light on the land, works to protect it and has few possessions to show for their hard work) engaged in direct, but non-violent, confrontations with the forces of industrialization, using tactics honed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. And his dissent in West Virginia is more than justified.

The mountaintops of the Appalachia region, from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by the coal industry — an industry that cares little about the welfare of communities or the land that it is chewing up and spitting out with its grotesque mining operations.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic waste that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning local communities downstream. Currently no state or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” where entire peaks are being blown apart with explosives, only to expose tiny seams of the precious black rock.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River. The epic spill was over 40 times larger than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the murky Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in the states of Alabama and neighboring Kentucky. The true costs—environmental and social—of the spill are still not known.

As a result of the ongoing destruction of this forgotten region of Appalachia, Roselle and others affiliated with his latest group, Climate Ground Zero, have set up shop and vow not to end their actions until this mining practice has been outlawed. But the West Virginia media, long in the pockets of Big Coal, has not depicted Roselle as a non-violent activist who has been pushed to act because his conscience has forced him to. On the contrary, Roselle has been portrayed as a potential eco-terrorist and a threat, not only jobs in the region, but human life as well.

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