This is Greene County, Pennsylvania.
It's home to the Bailey Mine Complex, the biggest coal mine complex in North America.
It's the size of Manhattan and it employs about 2000 people.
It's owned by Consol Energy, which was founded way back in 1864.
This is Veronica.
She's an environmental activist and the executive director of the Center for Coalfield Justice.
She lives here.
This is not a lake.
It's a CRDA, a coal refuse disposal area.
Or, in Veronica's words...
And this toxic waste dump is just one of 24 toxic waste dumps in Greene County –
all of which may be leaching chemicals from coal ash into the water supply and the soil.
Consol Energy bought this valley when Veronica was a teen.
She grew up exploring these woods and learning how to drive on this road.
But all of a sudden she just couldn't go there anymore,
not without someone watching.
It changed her life.
Realizing that the coal mine could just take a valley made me aware of the power the company
had over the people living here, and from that point forward I've always spoken out
on how that power dynamic is not equal and that the community members should have just
as much say as an outside corporation.
For generations coal mining in Appalachia has meant good paying jobs, but these days
it means fewer jobs for less money,
as other fossil fuels get extracted.
And the cost of coal on land and on people has become unavoidably apparent.
But what's not so apparent is how to create a future here.
I’m Jacki Huntington, and this is See Here Now.
The Pennsylvania State Constitution entitles the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
to clean air and pure water.
Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including
generations yet to come.
But that right to public goods is often squared against the free market,
and that's where the Center for Coalfield Justice comes in.
The organization has engaged in repeated legal actions to contest Consol's permit applications
for longwall mining.
What's longwall mining, you ask?
The longwall machine is a is a giant machine, and it has supports that support the surface,
or the roof of the mine.
Longwall mining is Consol's bread and butter.
90 percent of Consol Energy’s steam and metallurgical coal is harvested using
longwall mining technology.
And there's a giant blade that breaks up all the coal and then the coal falls onto conveyor
belts, and it leaves the mine.
As you remove that entire seam, there are no pillars that support the surface, and those
supports will slowly move forward, and behind you the ground sinks to fill that void that
you just created.
That sinking is synonymous with subsidence.
Land subsidence can crack home foundations.
People can lose well water.
Public space is under constant threat.
It's caused folks to sell cheap and get out, or just straight up abandon their homes and
leave the county, which only has a population of about 38,000.
Our focus right now is on protecting streams within a state park.
Specifically Ryerson Station State Park.
Public lands — a lot of people in the community use these public lands to recreate.
They're not asking Consol to stop mining.
They're asking the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to not let Consol
do this particular type of mining under public land or near bodies of water.
Because this used to be a lake:
In 2005, due to subsidence caused by longwall mining, this dam cracked, and the lake was drained.
After years of litigation, Consol reached a settlement with the state.
Consol agreed to pay 36 million dollars to rebuild the dam and the lake with the condition
that they accepted absolutely no fault for any of it.
Ultimately, the whole thing fell through.
The land wasn’t stable enough for any of it to be rebuilt.
All of that money is just tied up in state coffers.
Meanwhile, Green County lost Ryerson Station State Park as they knew it,
and people are still super angry.
Despite the way it treats rural landscapes, Consol Energy exists in an antiseptically
perfect business park next to a country club and golf course with its own lake and artificial waterfall –
all protected with threatening signs and cameras.
This is definitely a battle between people and corporate power.
By not getting every ounce of coal out from under the ground, they could protect the streams,
but the corporate greed and the corporate power that drives this company means they
need every last ounce of coal out of the ground without any regard
for what happens to the community left behind.
The future of our next generation – of my daughter – is what’s at stake.
She actually really loves herself, so she might think you’re taking pictures of her.
She loves her picture taken.
She’s very in love with herself.
Veronica’s husband used to be a Marine.
He spent three years working in the coal mines.
He’s going back to school right now on the G.I. bill.
He and Veronica want their daughter to grow up here.
Oh man, you’re growing.
It’d be very easy for us to leave, like many other folks who may think differently
than other people in the county, to just go to an urban center where their thoughts are more–
more alike with their neighbors, but we feel a responsibility to stay.
“On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but he was still hungry.”
I haven’t been too concerned about my health growing up next to this, but now that I’m
responsible for this beautiful little girl, I’m very concerned.
You wanna just sit in your crib?
And there could come a day, if her health is jeopardized, that we do have to walk away
from a place that we call home.
Veronica is checking in with supporters of the Center of Justice to record their concerns.
Hi, I'm Veronica.
I'm with the Center for Coalfield Justice.
Do you have time to talk about why you care about Ryerson today?
This is Randi.
She lives just a few hundred feet away from a coal prep plant.
The coal train passes through several times a day
and sounds like a ghost storming its way through her backyard.
My dad was a coal miner and my grandpa was a coal miner.
My brother is a welder.
They're blue collar.
I'm the only one that went to college in my family.
I grew up in the coal fields.
I grew up playing in coal ash, and I thought it was actually pretty cool.
Didn't know what it was.
Conveyor belts crisscross the county.
They ferry coal through its stages of mining cleaning and disposal into CRDAs like this one,
which has overtaken this valley.
The scale here is massive.
This truck is just a regular sized truck.
Can you imagine standing down there?
Dan?
This is Dan.
I own 84 acres here.
I have great water supply.
I have streams coming down the hills that are on the back side.
I think they'll be destroyed because they're gonna longwall that.
They're —
they're going to start 500 feet in back of my house.
They think that I won't — my water won't get destroyed here, but…
They think.
They used to say it wouldn't, now they say they don't think it'll be destroyed.
Why is it so important for you to stay and not just leave like so many other people have done?
This farm's been in my family since 1851.
I want– I like it here.
I wanna stay here.
And they're not buying me out.
It's not on now, but this used to be bright, like, it was lit up like a ski slope.
Right right.
Yep.
So when I was in college I thought it was a ski slope.
I thought it was a rollercoaster when we moved here.
If we can just be done with the actual trains, how great of a bike trail would that be?
Mmhmm.
That's that's like — that's like a dream, you know?
Yeah.
I guess the good thing about living down here... the tradeoff is I don't live on the main street —
The traffic.
— where all the trucks go by.
Yeah. It's one or the other.
Consol urged its employees to be active on social media —
defending the company’s reputation.
The Center for Coalfield Justice's Facebook page has a 2.8 rating with 267 reviews.
There's a lot of one star vitriol.
"All I can say is you people tried this stuff for a lack of better term before, but at Bailey
we will be mining, and if we take your water, the law says we must provide you with water
until your water situation is resolved.
I can assure you that Consol Energy does not in any way wish to harm the environment.
Most of the employees at Consol are very avid outdoorsman and love the outdoors."
Veronica doesn't think that arguing on the Internet amounts to much.
She doesn't respond to these comments.
She invites folks to call her or to come into the CCJ office to talk in person.
"This is a company who relies on donations from multimillionaires to line their pockets
while trying to put the hardworking people of this country out of jobs to prevent the
environment from being disturbed, even know — even knowing it can be restored to as good
or better than it was before."
I would say it gets really hard sometimes hearing "multimillionaires lining their pockets"
when I probably struggle more financially than most of the people that are writing the comments.
The Center for Coalfield Justice won its appeal contesting Consol's permit —
sparking a landmark legal change.
When applying for permits from the Department for Environmental Protection, extraction mining
companies cannot budget to rebuild what they expect to destroy.
Now their mitigation plans can only go so far.
In November, people bussed in to march on the business park where Consol and other energy
companies are headquartered.
Veronica was involved in a road blockade that interrupted the business park's morning commute.
So that the people that worked there, for one day, could actually feel the same exact
impact that folks on the frontlines feel every day.
I wanted to talk to the people on the other side of the story.
My colleague Taylor reached out to some of the commenters on CCJ’s Facebook page
and found a coal worker and his wife who were interested in talking to me.
They were excited.
I was excited.
I planned to meet them over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, during one of this guy's rare days off.
He just had to clear it with Consol HR.
He said he wanted to connect me to some folks at Consol who could tell me what was
“really going on.”
But when I arrived in Pittsburgh on a Saturday night after flying in and renting a car,
I got a text message from his wife.
I just found out that I am unable to interview the Consol employee that I was planning on interviewing,
who was down to be interviewed, and Consol won’t let him do it.
And I found this out because his wife said that Consol said that they reached out to
me and told me that he was unable to have contact with media.
But they didn't reach out to me.
I looked through my phone calls, I looked through my email.
There's nothing from them.
And now I'm just here, and what am I supposed to do?
Figure it out, I guess.
I should have expected this.
In the past Consol has threatened to fire employees for talking to media...
which sucks, but I get it.
What incentive do they have to let that guy talk to me?
I spend the weekend grasping for a plan B and singing along to Christmas songs on the radio.
I visited workwear stores.
I saw lots of oil and gas workers traveling in from out of town to work there.
It was a holiday weekend and the beginning of hunting season, and no one was getting back to me.
I visited the CCJ office.
Veronica was putting together a donation page for Giving Tuesday.
Consol recently split its company into two companies —
separating out oil and gas from coal —
ensuring they'll be primed to suffer minimal financial losses as the coal in the
ground is continually depleted —
becoming more expensive to extract.
The Center for Coalfield Justice continues to focus on protecting water.
It's the only economic asset in our community that is not tied to the fossil fuel industry,
and we know that the coal industry is not going to be around forever —
no matter what happens with regulations, the resources themselves are just going to be depleted
and it's important while we have coal mining in the area to protect and preserve what we're gonna
need in the future as well.
Living in Greene County seems like a compromise.
Many people bank on the promises of a big employer at the expense of natural resources.
And that can seem like a pretty safe bet.
Nature appears to be abundant in southwestern Pennsylvania.
What's one valley filled with toxic coal waste, when you have another just across the ridge line?
But homes, streams, and parks have been undermined literally and figuratively by Consol Energy.
It could be only a matter of time before the clean air and pure water
is an unquestionably broken promise.
If they continue to make these decisions they have to be held accountable for them.
And it's clear that our legislators are not holding them accountable.
Our regulatory systems are not holding them accountable.
And so those of us that are living in these communities are going to do what it takes
to defend our homes and our families and protect our futures.
I'm sure that Consol would rather see us stop doing everything we're doing,
but that's a day as long as I'm living here they will never see.