CALL TO ACTION

Rev. Ryan Dingus
Copper Creek, Russell County
President, Progressives for the
Virginia Coalfields

The current coal boom has not caused a building spree, nor a spike in employment, nor any other noticeable effect on the region aside from one very different and far more sinister: The mountains are disappearing. The people in them are dying faster and more painfully than ever before, there is no control, no reserve, no measure or dignity or courtesy. The streams, the forests, and the very air are being destroyed, and those people supported by them. The very population has been targeted as the greatest obstacle to the growth of coal consumption. They are the useless baggage of these mountains, which must be cast aside along with the forests, the biomes of diverse life, even the geology and even the dirt--all blown up, pushed over the hill and into the valley, buried and covered with toxic debris, all to get to that Black Gold. No tears are shed, no fines levied, no charges filed for this cruel act of murder, this rape of the land which now has become nothing short of ethnogenocide.
I issue therefore a call to action, that we who do not want this use every method and means at our disposal to end it, not only for the sake of Appalachia but for the sake of us all. For I promise you it will not stop here. It will not stop until it is your door that faces the destruction, your life that shall be taken in an “act of God,” your world that shall end.