Anti-coal activist group Mountain Justice Summer (MJS) organised an event on June 17 at Triangle Park in Lexington to speak out against mountaintop removal mining. About 20 speakers took the podium for the 90-minute rally, including the mother of a car crash victim that lost her life after a collision with an overweight coal truck.

Meanwhile, more than 150 gathered outside the offices of the Kentucky Coal Association (KCA) to support mountaintop removal mining. The KCA maintains mountaintop removal stimulates the economy and provides jobs.

Paul Matney of TECO Coal was among those present to support the cause, representing his neighborhood of Corbin. Insisting those against the cause are taking away residents’ freedom, he said, “I resent people coming to tell me what I can and can’t do with my property.”

Both events, held peacefully, were watched over by 18 local police officers.

The day wasn’t without some bit of comedy, however. Four of the MJS protestors confronted KCA president Bill Caylor with goblets of coal slurry, asking him to make good a statement he made in April 2004 that slurry, simply dirt, was non-toxic and that he would eat the waste to prove it.

After his “slurry meal,” Caylor remarked on its blandness. “It’s no more than dirt. They allege its toxic, but it’s not.”

He then called the protestors who served him the goblet, who were primarily students, “very well meaning and spirited young kids, but they’re young and inexperienced”

The same weekend, a Pennsylvania protest was also underway, this one touting the ill-effects of longwall mining.

With the edge of a longwall mining operation slowly inching its way towards him, the owner of a 220-acre plot of farmland in Amwell Township, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, held the picnic on his property to circulate information on longwall mining and its effects.

Bill Lindley’s farm, which includes a more than century-old farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places, currently sits about a mile from Consol Energy’s Mine 84 operations. Lindley has established the grass-roots effort Ten Mile Protection Network organization out of his home, he says, to stand up for the rights of property owners who may be affected by mine subsidence.

“The whole point of Ten Mile Protection Network is that we want people to be aware of what options are available to them,” Lindley said. He invited everyone on the group’s mailing list to the picnic, but total attendance numbers were not available.

The group’s members are also currently working to reintroduce legislation that would shorten property owners’ wait for Act 54 relief, a law which mandates that coal companies replace lost water supplies and repair structures.