American Electric Power’s Clinch River Power Plant near Bristol, TN. Photo by Kent Kessinger.

A ‘CONE OF DEATH’ – Small particle pollution is most concentrated near where it was emitted, placing those who live within a 30-mile radius at 3-4 times higher risk of death from pollution-related causes. Image courtesy of Clean Air Taskforce.
Photo by Kent Kessinger

POLLUTING MORE THAN THEIR FAIR SHARE – While the national and state average pollution rate for SO2 coming from power plants has been falling for the last decade and more, AEP’s Virginia plants have made little progress in reducing their SO2 pollution rate.

Built in 1944, American Electric Power’s coal-fired power plant in Glen Lyn, VA, is the oldest power plant in the state. Still using technologies from the mid-20th century, the Glen Lyn plant burns hundreds of train-car loads of coal every day – at a cost of more than 20 lives/year from pollution.
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After coughing through a streak of bad air days late last July, the dirty Bristol air finally proved too much for Marjorie of Bristol, Virginia. Marjorie, who suffers back problems and an asthmatic sensitivity to air pollution, eventually coughed so long and hard that she ruptured a disk in her back. Now, invasive back surgery is needed to repair the damage.

Not every morning begins so dismally in Bristol, a city that straddles the Tennessee border in the far western part of Virginia, but bad air can ruin anyone’s day. On most summer mornings, Marjorie wakes up and checks the online EPA air quality report, www.AIRNOW.gov, to see what kind of day the wind will bring. For Marjorie, and thousands of other vulnerable Virginians, how dirty the air is will determine what she can do that day. A typical day will score in the “code yellow” range on the EPA’s air quality index, but the air can get far worse than that when the atmospheric conditions conspire to allow air pollutants to accumulate.

A ‘code orange’ day is considered unsafe for “sensitive” people: children, older adults, those exercising outdoors, asthmatics and others who suffer from respiratory disease.

“There are even code red ozone days now in the summer in the Southeast,” says Marjorie, “which means even normal healthy children shouldn’t play outside. On a bad air day, I have to walk the dog early in the morning before things heat up and the air gets worse. I can’t do any outdoor work and stay inside with the air purifiers on.”
“As the summer drags on I get wheezier and wheezier, and I use my inhaler more and more. I cough more and more until I can’t sleep,” says Marjorie, who recently had to go on Prednisone to alleviate her asthma.

“It’s a terrible thing to be short of breath, and have to use steroids to breathe,” she says.

The source of the pollution that afflicts Marjorie is no mystery: coal-fired power plants are responsible for the majority of the air pollution in southwest Virginia. In the case of Bristol, a major source of that pollution is American Electric Power’s Clinch River power plant, a large coal-burning plant, built in the 1950’s, that has installed only minimal pollution control technology. The plant is located just 25 miles north of the city.

AEP’s other Virginia plant in Glen Lyn is about 30 miles west – and upwind – of the city of Blacksburg. Built in 1944, Glen Lyn is the oldest power plant in the state. Like the Clinch River plant, the only pollution control technologies installed at Glen Lyn are inexpensive precipitators to catch ash, and “Low NOx Burners” that were mandated by the EPA and the state in order to reduce ozone pollution downwind.

According to a report by the American Lung Association, more than 450,000 people live within 30 miles of one of these two power plants. An abundance of recent medical research demonstrates that that is a significant health risk. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fine particles fall in a ‘cone of death.’ According to the study, “The risk of death to people living within 30 miles of the plants was found to be 3-4 times that of people living farther away.”

This increased risk is the result of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) emissions combining with other air-borne pollutants to form microscopic specks, called fine particles, that irritate the lungs and increase the risk of lung disease when inhaled. Small particles can also make their way from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing a greatly increased risk of heart disease and even death.

This health risk is significant in southwest Virginia: Blacksburg and Bristol are losing 15 and 26 citizens every year, respectively, based on EPA models. And while Virginia as a whole suffers a significant air quality problem – the state recently scored a grade of “F” in the American Lung Association’s 2005 “State of the Air” report – these two cities downwind of AEP plants share the dubious distinction of making the list of the nation’s top twenty cities for death rates attributable to fine particle pollution from power plants.

It’s statistics like these that make many southwest Virginia residents skeptical of AEP’s claim that it “makes every effort to protect the communities neighboring our facilities.” Based on EPA figures, the Clinch River plant kills an estimated 59 people every year from its particle pollution alone, while the more rural Glen Lyn plant kills 21.

“With neighbors like these, who needs enemies?” asks Mary Anne Hitt, Blacksburg resident and executive director of Appalachian Voices.

Residents unimpressed by AEP’s rhetoric

The technology to clean up power plant pollution has existed for decades, and now costs half or less of what it once did. Massive filters, known as a scrubbers, can virtually eliminate sulfur dioxide pollution when installed on a smokestack, promising a breath of fresh air for communities nearby.

So why haven’t scrubbers been installed on AEP’s two coal-fired power plants in Virginia? By AEP’s cost estimation method, cleaning up both plants’ SO2 pollution would cost $270 million. With the company’s status as the largest electricity generator in the US, and having enjoyed a gross profit of $7.6 billion in 2005, any claims of financial hardship are likely to ring hollow.

In fact, there’s little evidence that AEP has ever done more than the bare minimum to protect the communities who live downwind from its plants. When it has installed pollution controls, say critics like Hitt, it was spawned by legislation followed by litigation to enforce reluctant executives to comply with the law.

Of the dozens of coal-fired plants AEP operates across 11 states, it has installed scrubbers on just 6 plants. Only one of those was installed before 2001. According to Pat Hemlepp, AEP’s director of corporate media relations, the company plans to install 8 more to comply with new federal regulations. Unfortunately for Marjorie and other residents of southwest Virginia, the Clinch River and Glen Lyn plants did not make the list of plants slated for cleanup.

What is particularly galling to Virginia ratepayers, though, is AEP’s recent move to raise electricity rates in southwest Virginia to pay for its cleanup in neighboring states, a move made possible by Virginia’s recent deregulation of its utilities. The company seeks to be reimbursed around $13 million dollars for its West Virginia cleanup so far, and will be asking Virginians for millions more as cleanup continues over the next several years.

When it comes to lobbying, however, AEP has been considerably less stingy. The company spent $7,261,051 between 1998 and 2004 on lobbying efforts to influence the rules and regulators that govern it, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

“This is a classic Washington ‘follow the money’ story,” says Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Director Frank Clemente. “When the electric power industry faced strong government attempts to clean up many of its aging coal-fired power plants, an action that would cost the utilities billions, a few dozen corporations and their trade association began an intensive campaign to derail the effort.”

Clemente believes that the industry’s strategy was largely successful, as almost all regulatory changes coming out of the White House in recent years have been heavily tilted toward the interests of industry. Moreover, there has been a constant stream of bills in Congress over the same time period designed to weaken various provisions of the Clean Air Act.

Lost in the loopholes

Even if utilities recognize that they will eventually be forced to clean up or close down their dirtiest power plants, there are lucrative reasons to delay the process.
“These guys play for time,” said Eric Schaeffer, former chief of environmental regulation at the EPA who resigned in protest at White House attacks on the foundations of clean air law. “They know they are going to have to scrub these units, but the longer they put it off, the more money they make.”

According to Schaeffer, that adds up to millions of dollars per year – more than enough to justify the cost of top-notch lobbyists and lawyers.

But in March of 2005, the regulatory landscape changed dramatically for the power companies when the EPA finalized its Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR). That rule, if enforced and complied with by utilities, is projected to reduce national sulfur dioxide emissions by close to 60% over the next decade. However, as with other past regulatory attempts to clean up the dirtiest plants, CAIR has loopholes.

Most worrisome to southwest Virginians, CAIR contains ‘Cap and Trade’ style regulations. While popular with legislators and industry because they allow power companies to flexibly and cost-effectively meet pollution regulations, this approach does not deal well with local pollution problems of mercury and SO2. Instead of telling each individual plant how much it has to reduce its pollution, the EPA now sets a nation-wide ceiling or “cap” on a pollutant. Then, working with states, it divvies out the rights to emit this pollution. Larger plants receive more ‘credits’ – the right to emit one ton of a pollutant – than smaller plants. If a plant cleans up and no longer needs all of its allotted credits, by ‘over-controlling,’ it can sell these extra credits to plants polluting more than their share. Another option for a company like AEP is to over-control at one of its plants and use the extra credits to keep polluting, or increase pollution its dirtier plants.

Though most agree that strategy has been successful in reducing pollution on the large scale, the implications of this type of regulation on the local scale remain controversial. AEP’s plan to comply with the new stricter air regulations makes effective use of the “cap and trade” loophole.

As a result of CAIR, AEP must spend $4.1 billion through 2010 on pollution controls, and another $1.5 billion by 2020. However, AEP’s pollution reduction strategy, made possible by “cap and trade” regulation, is to clean up a few newer, larger plants, where it can gain the most credits. Those credits will be used to keep smaller and older plants like Clinch River and Glen Lyn online, still polluting like they were the mid-twentieth century.

The result is that costs are passed along to rate-payers, either through the cost of building a scrubber or through the cost of buying pollution credits, even if those particular rate-payers, as in the case of southwest Virginia, will not benefit very much, if at all from the clean-up for which they are paying. The SO2 credits AEP will use for its excess VA pollution are worth $20 million, money not being spent on scrubbers close to home.

Electric power meets people power

The problem of poor air quality is not lost on most Virginians, nor is it lost on state agencies such as the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ is already looking at stricter standards on mercury that would prevent utilities from trading credits out of state. But the powerful electric industry has a lot allies in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates, and industry-promoted bills have been introduced into both chambers that would, according to Clean Air Advocates such as the Charlottesville-based Southern Environmental Law Center, “ … remove all discretion from the scientists at DEQ to regulate mercury in a manner best fitting the Commonwealth, and would force on Virginia the weakest regulations in [the] region.”

On the brighter side for residents of southwest Virginia, a bill called the Virginia Clean Smokestacks Act was also introduced into both chambers of the Virginia Legislature in January. A similar bill died last year in a House Committee, but supporters like Donna Reynolds of the American Lung Association see a viable chance for the bill to gain a full vote in the House of Delegates this year. The committee votes are scheduled for late January and early Feruary – soon after this issue goes to press.

According to Reynolds, “Clean Smokestacks does what CAIR should have done” by preventing companies like AEP from using credits it earned out of state to keep it’s dirtiest plants from having to install better pollution controls. It would also impose a faster timetable for cleaning up pollution, but would not mandate SOx reductions beyond what is already written in the federal CAIR rule.

“Clean Smokestacks is not a radical proposal,” says Mary Anne Hitt, “it’s about building off the many years of research that went into the federal CAIR rule and closing one important loophole to make sure that the health of every Virginian is protected.”

Virginia power

In deciding how to approach its pollution reduction strategy, Virginia’s decision-makers can look to the experience of neighboring North Carolina, which passed its own Clean Smokestacks Bill in 2002. As a result of passing that act, North Carolina is creating thousands of jobs in its manufacturing and construction industries and is building two new wallboard manufacturing plants that use large amounts of gypsum, the waste product generated by scrubbers. Counties in southwest Virginia where AEP’s plants are located could certainly use a similar influx of manufacturing jobs.

But clean air advocates in Virginia are more apt to talk about the many health benefits residents of western counties would enjoy should the region’s air get cleaner – not to mention the dozens more Virginians that would still be around each year to enjoy that cleaner air.

“The VA legislature needs to step up and find solutions that will protect our families, our heritage, and our pristine environment,” says Donna Reynolds of the American Lung Association. Virginia’s clean air advocates vow to keep working until they succeed in closing the loophole “that leaves southwest Virginia behind.”

For more information and campaign updates, visit www.cleartheair.org

INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE MEETS THE MOUNTAINS – Many residents of Johnson County have little use for the pollution and visual scars CAFOs create across their beautiful mountain landscape. Photos by Dennis Shekinah (above) and Z. Lance (below).

Vance Gentry, a dairyman himself, is one of the Johnson County residents supporting the CAFO.
Photo by Kent Kessinger

“No CAFO” signs, like the one in Jack Mays’ yard, have sprung up in yards all across Johnson County in the last few years. Photo by Kent Kessinger.

A conventional small dairy in Johnson County, TN. By Kent Kessinger.
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For 33 years, eight months, and 20 days, Vance Gentry of Shady Valley in Johnson County, Tennessee milked cows at four in the morning and four in the evening. He still wakes up before his alarm even though he sold his herd two years ago, unable to make a living.

Johnson County lies tucked in the Appalachian Mountains in the far northeast corner of Tennessee. It is a county rich in dairy farming, a tradition however that’s been fading as small dairies become unsustainable for local farmers. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) are the new, large dairies that are surfacing all over the nation in rural communities.

Over the past 20 years the number of dairies in Tennessee has dropped from 3,695 to 703. Gentry remembers 11 Grade A dairies in Johnson County alone. Now only one is left. The pressure of high production costs and low milk prices forced Gentry to join the scores of other dairymen that gave up their business after years of struggling to make ends meet. “I was getting the same price for milk I was getting 25 years ago, while the cost of producing milk continued to increase,” he said.

Dairymen buy their equipment, feed, water, etc. at retail prices but sell their milk at mandated wholesale prices leaving little room for earnings. “You’ve got to make a profit and there’s not a lot of incentives to keep you going,” Gentry said. “When it comes down to it, you have to have a bigger operation to maintain a profit.” And that’s exactly what is being built a few miles up the road near the town of Mountain City.

The controversy surrounding a new 690-cow CAFO has polarized the Mountain City community, driving families and churches apart as its residents grapple with the economic and environmental impact this new dairy will have on their town. As the first CAFO in the county, High Mountain Holsteins, in partnership with Maymead Inc, is set to begin milking in June leaving behind a trail of battles. Part of what has stirred opposition to the CAFO is the large number of cows that are kept and fed in a confined area with little access to sunlight, fresh air, and movement. The over 20,000 CAFOs in the U.S. produce 575 million pounds of manure a year, which is stored in lagoons and sprayed on surrounding property. Since 2003, the EPA has set mandatory regulations on CAFOs with additional regulation set by each state.

In the wake of large CAFOs there have been concerns about environmental and economic safety. Counties in six states have enacted moratoriums on new CAFOs awaiting more research on public health affects, environmental damage, and public nuisances. North Carolina recently renewed its ban on any new hog CAFOs after 25 million gallons of hog waste spilled into the New River. In 2003 Mountain City citizens formed the Watauga Watershed Alliance (WWA, formally J4CAW) in the hopes of preserving the local environment and watersheds from the impending CAFO.

WWA President Dennis Shekinah thinks the loss of industry has left the Mountain City area economically depressed and susceptible to large operations moving in. Many people are looking for work. A family that has owned land in town for a century owns Maymead Inc. along with a local gravel company that employs many people in the area. It is this family community and business stronghold of the town that Shekinah says makes it difficult for citizens to stand against the CAFO. “There is a sense among small farmers in the area that they don’t have any other choice,” he said.

In the 1980s there was a milk surplus in the U.S. and the government bought and slaughtered dairy cows in the hopes that fewer dairies would increase milk prices. But according to Tom Womack of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture (TDA), “Tennessee hasn’t seen it occur.” Very few dairymen ever returned to milking. Ever since the county has been starved for jobs and according to the 1999 Census Bureau, 22.6% of Johnson County residents live below the poverty level.

Jack Mays grew up in Mountain City and had a 75-cow dairy in 1985. Nine years later he went bankrupt. “It took 5 or 6 years to get out of debt,” Mays said. “When I started dairying it was 14 dollars for a 100 pounds of milk and when I quit it was 8 dollars a hundred. It just got so you couldn’t make it. They’ve now skinned the whole county getting ready for CAFOs.”

Mays says that although there were cows grazing on all the fields in the area when he was growing up a 690-cow dairy is different. Mays is particularly afraid that when this dairy CAFO is built, a hog or poultry CAFO will follow. “It’s a rotten deal and I don’t understand how [local commissioners and residents] can stick their head in the sand and just let this damage be done to Johnson County,” he said. “This county will be 50 years recovering, I really believe that.”

Although dairies, particularly large ones, bring in support industry to the community like the plumbers, electricians, and farmers to grow feed for the cows of the CAFO, Mays worries in the long run it will hurt the local economy because it will drive away tourists or newcomers to the area.

“Property values will plummet,” he said. “People are going to quit moving here. Down the road us electricians, plumbers, painters are going to hurt without tourism or people moving to town. These people aren’t going to pay this big money for these properties and smell cow manure and fight the flies. It’s just a devastation to Johnson County.”

The site for the CAFO is near Roan Creek, which was declared endangered by the Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation (TDEC) and in 2005 considered the 5th most endangered river in the nation by American Rivers, a national environmental organization. The creek was put on TDECs 303d list which restricted TDEC from allowing any new pollutants into the creek. WWA is concerned that the lagoons that hold the cow manure will leak into the ground water, Roan Creek, and flush into Watauga Lake. TDEC along with the help of TDA grants CAFO permits. They did grant a permit to High Mountain Holsteins.

According to Tisha Calabrese-Benton of TDEC, “The authority to regulate CAFOs is limited to aspects of the facility that affect, or are likely to affect, waters of the state. It is the duty of the Department to scrutinize every proposed operation to be sure that it meets all requirement of the rules.” And according to TDEC, the High Mountain Holstein CAFO will not endanger the waterways. “It is our responsibility to follow and enforce the laws and regulations that govern us for the protection of human health and the environment,” she said.

University of Tennessee Dairy Specialist Kristy Hill maintains that there is no best terrain for the spread of cow manure. “Each terrain has its challenges,” she said.

“How [the manure] is applied, when it’s applied, and how much it’s applied will affect its potential to have a negative environmental impact.” Although Shekinanh of WWA counters that “even a well run CAFO still poses a huge risk for ground and public waters” because of potential flooding and leaks into near by wells and springs.

In 2004 there was hope for those opposed to the CAFO in Johnson County. Early in the year, Johnson County Commissioners passed four resolutions that declared the CAFO “not a normal agricultural activity.” The resolutions gave the county legislative power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens by prohibiting the CAFO. But the following September, the commissioners rescinded all four resolutions because state officials could not define ‘normal’ agricultural activity.

In September 2005 Johnson County Citizens Committee for Clean Air and Water (now Watauga Watershed Alliance) filed a lawsuit against the EPA because TDECs was not enforcing the Clean Water Act. The lawsuit was dismissed on grounds that the EPA has not determined that Tennessee is out of compliance and therefore the EPA has “no non-discretionary or mandatory duty to perform.”

“There would have to be a lot of damage before adequate regulations would be put in place,” said WWA lawyer Joe McCaleb, “but you’d hope that the state wouldn’t allow that to happen.”

WWA founding member Steve Ferguson said, “Anytime you’re in an environmental struggle there will be points where you feel a loss and points where you feel a win. It’s a long uphill struggle to educate and get support for a vision of the future that’s built around an environmental stewardship. This is true of every environmental struggle. Perseverance over time is what will determine the end and a lot of people here are willing to persevere.”

Hill of the University of Tennessee said that although she too wants a clean environment, the cost of regulations on dairies is very high in part because the government controls the price of milk. “Expensive regulations are being forced on an already struggling industry, an industry that can’t roll their increased cost of production onto consumers,” she said.

“From an environmentalist’s viewpoint, [regulations] may not be strict enough,” Hill continued. “From a producer’s viewpoint, they are too strict. From my viewpoint, there are kinks in the system. The regulations were written prior to educating producers about environmental issues and agriculture. Had anyone spent some time to educate and work with producers at the fore-front on the affects of animal waste on the environment, waters would be a lot cleaner than they are today.”

But Steve Ferguson of WWA thinks that the regulations are not nearly enough and the EPA no longer works for the betterment of the environment. “The EPA is not the Environment Protection Agency, they are the Industrial Protection Agency,” he said. “The EPA has been shanghaied, de-toothed, sedated, and taken away.”

Nonetheless, Shekinah still has hope for their fight with the CAFO even though many people in the community have given up. “Spirits are high at WWA,” he said. “The dismissal of the lawsuit against the EPA is not the end of our fight; it simply defined the future of the fight [for] a clean productive community. We need to have more cooperation from local government and next year we will elect more proactive representatives and we will garner alliances with other community groups.”

Both Shekinah and Hill agree that Americans demand cheap food and the industry will have to accommodate that fact, even if it means sending little operations out of business. Womack of TDA said, “It’s an economic advantage to have larger herds that small dairies can’t weather. Higher production costs, low milk prices, labor demand, and an aging farm population make it tougher for small dairies to make a profit.”

Back in Shady Valley on the side of one of Gentry’s milk barns is a peeling mural of cows being milked. He sold off the last of his dairy equipment this summer and was sad to see it go. “Dairying was a good life,” he said. “Hopefully my children and grandchildren will keep the farm in the family, although I don’t expect any of them to ever milk cows again.”

Maymead Inc. and High Mountain Holsteins declined to comment for this article.

SHARP-EYED AND WAGGY-TAILED – Border Collies are renowned for their skill and agility – not to mention their enthusiasm – when it comes to herding.

A LOVE TRIANGLE FOR THE AGES – The historic relationship between people, dogs and livestock goes back for millenia. In an age of big industrial livestock production, sheep dog enthusiasts like Colin Cleer keep this relationship alive more out of love than practicality.

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It is a windy October afternoon, the livestock trodden grass of an open field along the Cowpasture River in mountainous Bath County, Virginia, bristling slightly under the pressure of the breeze. Today Big Bend Farm, a quiet stretch of riverside pasture and woods belonging to Barbara Ray, is playing host to dozens of four-legged creatures—not livestock, but dogs from all over the state and all over the east coast. With silken coats ranging in color from blue-black and frothy white to dusky spotted browns, these high-strung border collies have come with their handlers to enjoy a sport that is more than 130 years old.

One of the event’s participants and sponsor of the annual Highland Sheep Dog Trial in April, Donald McCaig, stands nearby, his black and white border collie Luke poised obediently at his side. McCaig’s wiry gray hair pokes out from under a green cap and his solid face is at once stern and intensely interested in these animals—both sheep and dogs. He has been sponsor of Virginia’s second oldest sheep dog trial for 19 years, though he does not plan to hold the event in 2006.

“Virginia is the biggest sheep state on the East Coast,” says McCaig, “and people will travel a good distance to participate in these trials.” Sheep dog trials like the one McCaig hosts each April test both the dogs’ ability to maneuver sheep as well as the handlers’ ability to control the dogs through voice and whistle commands.

It is an age-old art that has its earliest recorded beginnings in Wales in 1873. The first sheep dog trial in the United States was held at the Chicago Exposition in 1885. McCaig says the trials were designed to help select the best breeding stock for working sheep dogs. “These are the only livestock dogs in the world,” McCaig notes of the impatient, ever willing to serve border collie. “Everywhere there’s livestock you’ll see these dogs.”

“It’s a genetic strategy,” McCaig says of the trials. “These trials are so much harder than farm work that this is where the sires and dames for breeding stock are selected. The trials are a model of what the dogs do at home, only harder.”

And the sport is becoming ever more popular, even among handlers who are not farmers themselves, as both McCaig and Ray are. “25 years ago, there were about 10 sheep dog trials in the U.S.,” says McCaig. “Today there are about 400 a year.”

Virginia hosts about 20 sheep dog trials each year, and both McCaig’s Highland trial and Ray’s event draw handlers from as far away as Michigan to compete, and a fair number of participants are established national competitors. McCaig says Virginia is home to six of the top sheep dog handlers in the country.

Among the more expert handlers in Virginia is Tom Wilson of Gordonsville. He has worked with border collies for more than 35 years. On his home farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Wilson has 500 sheep and 120 cattle, providing his dogs ample opportunity to ply their trade.

“In competition, the dog’s talent and nature have to come together,” explains Wilson. “The dog can’t be too excitable. This work is very exact, and the dog has to be very obedient.”

While all sheep dog trials are a little different, the trial today at Big Bend Farm, like most trials, is designed to be nearly impossible. “It is excruciatingly difficult to win,” says McCaig. “It is deliberately made difficult so it’s on the edge of undoable. We are choosing the breeding stock for the ordinary farmer who doesn’t have time to train.”

Each handler begins with 100 points, Ray explains as the trial gets underway, and has 10 minutes to encourage his dog to maneuver four sheep around an expansive field, through three gates, and into a quadrant-shaped corral. The competitors cannot gain points, only lose them. The trial judge deducts points for every flaw, and it is of no benefit to the handler and dog to finish early. “Anything less than perfect results in a deduction of points,” Ray notes, as she watches a handler maneuver his border collie around the field with voice and whistle commands. Winning scores are typically in the 90s.

“It’s the most difficult dog training art form there is,” McCaig adds, as he watches a spry collie crouch low to the ground, eyeing his little flock, waiting for his handler’s next command. “Supposedly it takes as many years as the dogs have legs and a tail to become trial ready.”

Some trials, like the Big Bend competition, host both novice dogs and handlers as well as expert participants. Wendy Villarreal of Michigan often competes in Virginia trials with her two border collies, Breezy and Dexter. She is a relative newcomer to competition, having started working with sheep dogs eleven years ago. She started competing eight years ago.

“I fell in love with the dogs when I saw the Oatlands trial in northern Virginia,” Villarreal explains. “I think the communication between the handler and the dog is fascinating.”

McCaig says handlers can enter any dog of any age in the open trial, though he’s only seen 10 dogs that were not border collies ever compete in a sheep dog trial. “Sheep dogs make horrible pets,” he says. “They don’t have an off switch. If they don’t have this work, they get really squirrelly. They are not trained by treats and love. They’re desperate to work.”

The collies’ vast intelligence and interest in herding is evident in the intense expressions of these dogs, who sit patiently at their owners’ sides, watching the competition, as if quietly yet excitedly awaiting their turn to run. While Big Bend’s trial doesn’t draw many onlookers, McCaig’s annual trial in neighboring Highland County drew 600 spectators last year. “It surprises me,” he says, “that year after year we get more and more people who just come to watch.”

For anyone who has a dog at home that he feels he struggled just to train to sit and stay, watching a sheep dog trial can be a humbling experience. Sometimes these collies belie a hint of stubbornness at masters who will not let them take after the small herd, but mostly they run, sit, lie down, circle, and approach the sheep with willing response to the handlers’ voice and whistle directives. “You can’t force sheep to do anything,” says McCaig, as he watches a stubborn ewe decline to enter the quadrant at the end of the run. “You can only encourage them.”

The same might be said of these amazing border collies. The handlers tap into the dogs’ natural willingness to work and please. “These dogs are genetic obsessive compulsives,” notes McCaig with a laugh. “And sometimes I think it transfers to their human handlers as well.”

More information on sheep dog trials is available through the Virginia Border Collie Association, which you can visit online at www.virginiabordercollieassociation.com. You can also visit the United States Border Collie Club at www.bordercollie.org.

Southwings, the environmental flying service of the South, is an organization of about a dozen dedicated, skilled pilots who fly environmentalists, journalists and decision-makers over Appalachian industrial development gone awry. These mostly volunteer aviators have flown us over forests devastated by clear cuts, over chip mills, over power plants, and over the decapitated mountains of the coal fields. They also work along the East and Gulf Coasts of the Southeast from Louisiana to the Chesapeake Bay.

I met Southwings founder Hume Davenport in 1996, just before he moved from New Mexico back to his Tennessee hometown of Chattanooga. He had flown for several years for the famed environmental flying service LightHawk. He expressed to me his intent to establish his own flying service for the South. Since no such thing existed for us here in the Appalachians, I soon had three or four projects in mind for him, and the rest, so to speak, is history.

That history includes transporting about every environmental organization in the South to gain a better perspective on the many threats to our land and communities. Hume and his fellow pilots have flown about 1000 people (3-5 at a time) over the mountaintop removal areas of West Virginia and Kentucky. Their clients on the flights include journalists of many newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as well as magazines like National Geographic.

On one particular flight, I tagged along with Hume when he flew staff of US Congressman Frank Pallone over the coal fields to see the square miles of decapitated mountains. I remember hearing gasps of “I can’t believe this” as we circled the industrial moonscape below. These Congressional staff were already very familiar with mountaintop removal from readings and pictures. But the view of it from only 1000 feet up was enough to prompt a phone call to me a week later. The staff woman told me, “If I were not working for Mr. Pallone, I would be looking for a job in the coal fields to stop this abomination.” That’s the kind of support we need in the halls of Congress. Indeed, Mr. Pallone is a strong sponsor of the Clean Water Protection Act which would make mountaintop removal very difficult.

Over their almost ten years of service, Southwings has gone from one pilot, Hume, to the current dozen. They have gone from searching for clients among environmental groups to being the go-to flying service for environmental issues for all the major media in the East. They have gone from scouring the funding sources in the Southeast to keep their planes in the air to leveraging substantial funding for the environmental groups they serve. And because they have become the go-to air service for environmental groups in the region, they find themselves as the go-betweens between states and regions, transferring important environmental tools from one group to another. In summary, in many ways, Southwings is the glue that draws environmental groups in the South together.

FIGHTING THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR HOMELAND – Coalfield community groups such as Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coaltion protest Massey Energy’s destruction of their mountains and communities through mountaintop removal mining.

BREATHTAKING BEAUTY IN THE BANKHEAD – Alabama’s Bankhead National Forest hosts some of the most beautiful waterfalls and hiking trails in the South. Thanks to the efforts of groups such as WildSouth and Wildlaw, the Bankhead is now a model of a sustainably managed national forest.

CHIPPING THE SOUTHERN FORESTS – As wood production shifted from the national forests in the west to private southern forests during the 90’s, hundreds of satellite chip mills sprung up across the South.

The Appalachian Voice newspaper is celebrating ten years of providing a voice to the land and all its living things from across our Appalachian Mountain home. From a community in the coal fields of West Virginia threatened by mountaintop removal mining, to an endangered Indian site in the Bankhead National Forest of Alabama, to the disappearing vistas of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of Tennessee and North Carolina, the Appalachian Voice has attempted to alert residents and visitors alike to the threats to our communities and to our environment.

The middle 90’s were a time of a major awakening of environmental consciousness in the southern and central Appalachian Mountains. The major national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society had been in existence in the region for decades, but these groups were mostly focused on national environmental issues rather than regional ones. Sneaking in under the radar screen of these national groups were threats such as the invasion of the Southeast by wood chip mills that grind up hardwood trees for grocery bags and mountaintop removal coal mining that blows up mountains and fills in valleys in central Appalachia.

Fast forward to 2006. Groups such as the sponsoring organization of this newspaper, Appalachian Voices, the Dogwood Alliance, Southwings, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch, Wild South and numerous others are on the scene working to protect our Appalachian Mountains against these and other threats.

This is the story of the vital work these groups have been doing over this last decade to protect Appalachian communities and our air, water, and forests and. It’s also the story of the challenges we face in the future.

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in Appalachia

Strip mining coal in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia has been practiced in our mountains for over 50 years. But a coal mining method called mountaintop removal has only been with us to any extent for the last 20 or so years. It is done by blowing up mountains with high explosives to get at deeper and deeper seams of coal, and pushing the rest of the mountain off into nearby valleys. Entire mountains are destroyed and small valleys filled in, essentially leveling the once mountainous terrain. Mountaintop removal is frequently called “strip mining on steroids,” and is the cheapest and also the most destructive way to mine coal.

Not only are mountains leveled and the valleys filled in, but the Appalachian communities around these once mountainous regions are devastated. Now-treeless mounds of rock that were the mountains cause floods as they do nothing to stop rain water. These floods wash away homes and people as well. Dams holding back coal waste threaten schools and entire communities should they break like the Buffalo Creek disaster in Logan County, West Virginia, in 1973, which killed 125 people in a matter of minutes.

Law suits over the last eight years have had some success at stopping mountaintop removal. Joe Lovett, an attorney in Charleston, West Virginia, and other attorneys have won several suits, all of which have been at least partially overturned by the conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, but several legal victories have been allowed to stand. The size of valley fills has now been reduced by one third to one half for mountaintop removal mines nationally. The proposed massive Spruce mine in Logan County has been rejected, the meaningless designation of the “reclaimed” mines known as fish and wildlife habitat is no longer accepted, and an expensive re-forestation of mined out sites has begun.

Joe Lovett, however, has found his job increasingly more difficult over the last several years. “The Bush Administration’s anti-regulatory policies have made litigation and enforcement actions much more difficult at the state as well as the federal levels,” Lovett explained. This anti-regulatory atmosphere in the coal fields no doubt played an important role in the recent underground mining deaths in West Virginia, as well as the deaths from floods induced by mountaintop removal and numerous fatal accidents at the mountaintop mines.

Groups that have been active in recent years in opposing mountaintop removal include Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Appalachian Voices, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains. One community group, Coal River Mountain Watch, has been successful in fighting the practice from inside the West Virginia coal fields. Based in Whitesville, West Virginia, Coal River has given a voice for the first time to many who are on the front lines of destruction.

Local citizens who never knew what to do in the past now protest the coal mining impacts to their state government, and have become players in the halls of Congress in Washington, DC, as well. They have succeeded in improving driving safety in the coal fields by gaining tighter enforcement of weight limits on huge coal trucks; caused Massey Coal to place a dome over a Sylvester, West Virginia, coal processing plant; and have stymied a coal processing plant expansion near Marsh Fork Elementary school in Sundial, West Virginia.

The Marsh Fork school is still impacted severely by the existing processing plant. But according to Bo Webb of Coal River Mountain Watch, “We are determined to get those kids a new school about three or four miles up the river.” He continues, “We are now organizing citizens at nearby Horse Creek and Dry Creek to oppose the new mountaintop removal mines right above their heads.”

Protecting Alabama’s National Forests

Forestry practices of the US Forest Service on the Bankhead and Talladega National Forests in Alabama have for decades been slanted toward maximizing the output of lumber. Harming other important functions of the forest such as providing recreation, wildlife habitat and a clean drinking water supply, massive clear cuts have been the rule in managing these forests. In many cases the native hardwoods have been replaced with fast-growing, non-native loblolly pines which are used to make paper products. These pine plantations have indeed become like any other crop such as corn or cotton.

In 1991, Lamar Marshall, an Alabama native, had had enough. He founded the Bankhead Monitor, a non-profit, educational corporation to stop the destruction of these public lands. The primary instrument for public involvement in decisions about the forests was a magazine called the Bankhead Monitor. In 1996, public demand for the magazine and the grassroots-based protection activities of Lamar and his associates led to an expansion of his work and a change in the publication’s name to Wild Alabama, and in 2004, regional work expanded the organization to a new name, the current Wild South.

Wild South with strong support from an environmental law firm, WildLaw, spent a decade of putting pressure on the US Forest Service to change their ways. Administrative appeals, law suits, and grassroots pressure from those citizens that spent time enjoying these National Forests finally succeeded.

According to Marshall, “In 2003, the federal managers of the Bankhead and Talladega National forests turned over a new leaf. For starters, they eliminated the emphasis on lumber production. Even more impressively, the Forest Service decided to stop converting native hardwoods to pine plantations, and in fact began a reforestation plan to convert thousands of acres of the plantations back to native hardwoods. Further, they established thousands of additional acres that would be managed as old growth forests where trees would not be cut down at all and trees could grow till they died of old age at 200-300 years.”

Protecting Private Forests

On the southern forests that are owned by private landholders, 80-90 percent of the forest total, massive clear cuts have also been the rule rather than the exception. Despite replanting of seedlings, in many cases replacing native hardwoods with pines, this clear cutting is not sustainable over the long haul. With removal of all the tree cover, massive erosion can occur and loss of critical topsoil is difficult to prevent, reducing the fertility and productivity of the land.

In the early 1980’s, about a decade prior to the dawn of regional environmental group beginnings, a new challenge to southern forests appeared. For decades the tree-to-pulp-to-paper industry had depended not only on massive pine plantations along the coasts of the South, but had been getting much of its natural resource in the forests of spruce and fir in the Northwest of Washington, Oregon, and nearby states and Canadian provinces. But by about 1980, those supplies had been exhausted, so the South became the national focus of logging for the country for the first time since the turn of the century, when 90 percent of the region’s forests were clear cut. Thus, by the 1980s, both the exhaustion of the Northwest forests and the recent re-growth of forests in the South combined to make southern hardwood forests ripe for the harvest.

Enter the wood chip mill industry. They needed trees to chop up to make pulp and paper, and we had it. It was not in the form of pines but mainly of hardwoods and it didn’t matter what size. By the time we realized it, dozens of these giant pencil sharpeners had set up in the Southeast, and our hardwood forests began disappearing much faster than when only lumber was being extracted.

Fortunately, in the early and middle 90s, groups like the Dogwood Alliance, Wild South, Appalachian Voices, and Western North Carolina Alliance appeared and blew the whistle on the chip mill invasion. We began educating southern landowners and others about the damage to our forests including reducing their future productive capacity of lumber wood. The chip mills were chipping up the so-called growing stock, the future lumber trees.

Within a couple of years, the stream of new chip mills had all but dried up, either because we had stopped them or because there were enough of them to handle the needs of the industry. Since about 2000, there have been virtually no new chip mills in the region.

At that point, the private lands forestry movement split into two different complementary campaigns. One was concerned with spreading the practice of truly sustainable forestry, not what the industry refers to as sustainable forestry which is simply a steady stream of pulp and lumber production. By this term, we mean forests that sustain clean water, good animal habitat, and that retain the qualities of an old growth forest.

To get an idea of how some of our southern forests could truly sustainably produce lumber products and limited pulpwood, as most landowners desire, many of us journeyed to Missouri, where the 150,000 acre Pioneer Forest is located. Pioneer Forest was purchased in the early 50s by a far-sighted individual who wanted to produce wood products sustainably while making a substantial profit. His foresters were up to the challenge. They found that the original 150,000 acres were heavily degraded by massive clear cuts. But by taking the worst trees out of the forest at first, and encouraging the better trees, they were able to slowly but constantly improve the timber supply. Now after 50 years of selecting single trees for cutting while leaving the other trees intact, the lowest grade trees they now harvest are much superior to the best in the 50s. Clint Trammel, chief forester of Pioneer Forest, has mentored many from the Southeast in sustainable forestry.

The other segment of the groups at first working to stop chip mills began an innovative, well-conceived campaign to convince the corporate consumers of wood products that they should not buy timber that is cut in a non-sustainable way. These corporate consumers included Lowes, Office Depot and Staples.

According to Scott Qaranda of the Dogwood Alliance, “Through a combination of concerted public consumer pressure and meetings with corporate managers by our Dogwood Alliance, these wood product consuming giants of the industry agreed to purchase no old growth trees or trees that were produced by the worst of the massive clear cutting of native forests. So the idea was to dry up the demand for irresponsibly produced wood.”

Both of the two prongs of the sustainable forestry movement have made further progress. Through landowner handbooks and on-the-ground demonstrations, groups such as Appalachian Voices are now training large numbers of individual private landowners to follow practices similar to those at Pioneer Forest.

The Dogwood Alliance has moved on to pressuring wood products producers to log sustainably. A recent success with timber giant Bowater according to Danna Smith, founder of Dogwood Alliance, “will not allow them to purchase wood from a landowner who would covert native forests into pine plantations.” While there is still work to be done, these activities are improving the quality of Southeastern forests. The best is yet to come.

Air Quality

The southern Appalachians have some of the worst air quality on the North American continent. According to a study by National Parks Conservation Association and Appalachian Voices, the three national parks in the region, Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, and Shenandoah National Parks are the three most air-polluted out of all 50 or so in the country. Our southern Appalachian cities represent the ten worst from across the country in terms of premature death rates from coal-fired power plant pollution. Trees in our mountains are declining and dying in many cases and many of the streams are acidified. Visibility in the parks is sometimes less than one mile due largely to power plant haze, and the toxic ozone readings in these parks at times rivals even that of big cities like Atlanta and even Los Angeles.

While automobiles play the largest role in air pollution in the West, coal-fired power plants, even sixteen years after the latest Clean Air Act, are the main source of the majority of the serious air pollutants in our region. Power plants in the nearby Ohio and Tennessee valleys supply most of the mountain’s pollution, but states such as North Carolina and Virginia have numerous such plants, and they do their share of the damage as well.

Solutions to southern Appalachian air pollution must therefore include cleanup of power plants across region. Tennessee Valley Authority and American Electric Power, but also Duke Power and Progress Energy must clean up their act. The latter two energy companies have made a bold move in North Carolina by supporting the passage of the 2002 Clean Smokestacks Act. All the major pollutants other than carbon dioxide are being slashed by 60 to almost 80 percent at both Duke and Progress coal plants across the state, making the law among the strongest in the country. Virginia is currently considering similar legislation for passage this year.

Under the current anti-regulatory environment in Washington, DC, many challenges remain. Several attempts have already been made to weaken the existing federal Clean Air Act. And perhaps even more ominously, states are now, with federal blessing, considering building not only more coal-fired plants, but also new nuclear power plants.

Fighting these battles will take the maximum combined efforts of both the national environmental groups and the new generation of regional groups. These groups must rally the general public of the region to stand up to the powerful energy corporations and insist on maximizing conservation and efficiency improvements as well as renewable energy producible in the region, including solar and wind power.