Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

“All of us, since we were very young, have felt a deep connection, a kind of spiritual connection, to the natural world. We love being embraced by the steep hillsides that run down to West Virginia's lifeblood, the streams below. West Virginia is truly almost heaven…The survival of the culture of the Appalachian people depends upon the survival of the mountains themselves.” - Dianne Bady, Laura Forman, Janet Fout, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

Leadership Talk March 29, 2002 Full Transcript

Join Leadership for a Changing World on Friday, March 29 at 1 pm EST for a live, online interview with Dianne Bady and Janet Fout of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), and 2001 Leadership for a Changing World awardees. They will discuss how they share leadership, how they have organized their community around a difficult environmental issue, and they will answer your questions live.

In West Virginia and Kentucky, where coal is king, mountain-leveling machines are lowering horizons. Mountaintop removal and valley-fill strip mining have decapitated 500 square miles of mountains, buried 1,000 miles of streams and destroyed communities. Coal companies maintain that such mining is essential to the local and national economy, but many West Virginians believe otherwise.

Dianne Bady, Janet Fout and the late Laura Forman* have built a strong movement of hundreds of people who fight the harsh coal-mining practice of mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Through OVEC, coalfield residents join environmentalists and attorneys who focus on the destruction of nature; they work with members of the medical community who focus on public health issues; they join forces with union representatives and public officials who want to diversify the economy.

Bady, Fout and Forman have worked together for eight years with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), which Bady and others founded in 1987 originally to fight industrial pollution, but which has focused during the past four years on saving mountains from destruction. West Virginia is a region of rivers and valleys, hills and mountains and one of the primary resting and breeding habitats for many migratory birds that populate the Northeast. “This is an awe-inspiring landscape that is embedded in the very soul of our people,” the three leaders wrote.

For more information, visit the OVEC awardee page or www.ohvec.org.

* - Last December 11, Laura Forman died suddenly of a heart attack during a mountaintop removal protest in Huntington, WV.

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