Jenny Williams, a self-described "poor hillbilly/soccer mom/teacher," talks about life in coal country, and the love of the place that inspires people to stay.

I was born in Hazard, Kentucky, in 1965.  Except for brief stints away as a teenager and young adult, I’ve lived here all my life, as have my five siblings. This morning, I woke up early to grade papers, flipped on the radio, and heard the news about the mine disaster in West Virginia.  I listened in horror as the death toll mounted.  I thought about my brother, who works for a surface mine, and about how upset I knew he’d be.  I thought about all those people in West Virginia who have lost loved ones — and all the people throughout the coalfields who, over the decades, have lost people to coal.  I thought about the strip mine behind my house, and the blasting that’s driven us crazy, and the silt filling up the creek where my children like to play.  I thought about the ugliness of mountaintop removal, and how absurd it is to pretend that we need more flat land and not mountains.   I grew angry at the government agencies who didn’t do their jobs, who let Massey get away with yet another disaster so they could turn a dime.

People who aren’t from here don’t understand why we stay, why we don’t DO something to fight the coal industry.  They ask how we can be so complacent, how we can just ignore the wrongdoing.  And it’s hard to answer that.  It’s not so black and white as people who aren’t from here think.  They don’t know what it’s like to have your livelihood depend on the mining industry.  They don’t know what it’s like to have close, beloved, long-time family friends in the industry who would do anything for this community—who write big checks for the literacy projects with which I’m involved, who give us money for tee shirts for the soccer league. And those people who aren’t from here who ask why we don’t leave clearly don’t understand what it’s like to be tied to a place, to feel such a part of a landscape that to leave it would be like carving off a piece of your own flesh.  We stay here, and learn to reconcile and rationalize and turn first a blind eye and then the other cheek, because we love it here.  We love our jobs and our communities and our families.  We love our place.