Activists Disrupt Arch Coal Corporate HQ In St. Louis

  22nd Jan.  CREVE COEUR, MO —  Sev­en pro­test­ers affil­i­at­ed with the RAMPS cam­paign (Rad­i­cal Action for Moun­tain Peo­ples’ Sur­vival), MORE (Mis­souri­ans Orga­nizi

  22nd Jan.  CREVE COEUR, MO —  Sev­en pro­test­ers affil­i­at­ed with the RAMPS cam­paign (Rad­i­cal Action for Moun­tain Peo­ples’ Sur­vival), MORE (Mis­souri­ans Orga­niz­ing for Reform and Empow­er­ment) and Moun­tain Jus­tice are locked down to a 500-pound small pot­ted tree in Arch Coal’s third-floor head­quar­ters while a larg­er group is in the lob­by per­form­ing a song and dance.  Addi­tion­al­ly, a heli­um bal­loon ban­ner with the mes­sage “John Eaves Your Coal Com­pa­ny Kills”, direct­ed at the Arch Coal CEO was released in the Arch Coal head­quar­ters.

“We’re here to halt Arch’s oper­a­tions for as long as we can. These coal cor­po­ra­tions do not answer to com­mu­ni­ties, they only con­sume them.  We’re here to resist their unchecked pow­er,” explained Mar­garet Fet­zer, one of the pro­tes­tors.

Arch Coal, the sec­ond largest coal com­pa­ny in the U.S., oper­ates strip mines in Appalachia and in oth­er U.S. coal basins. Strip min­ing is an acute­ly destruc­tive and tox­ic method of min­ing coal, and resource extrac­tion dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly impacts mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties.

“From the Bat­tle of Blair Moun­tain to the cur­rent fight with the Patri­ot pen­sions, the peo­ple of cen­tral Appalachia have been fight­ing against the coal com­pa­nies for the past 125 years. The strug­gle con­tin­ues today as we take action to hold Arch Coal and oth­er coal com­pa­nies account­able for the dam­age that they do to peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties in Appalachia and around the world. Coal min­ing dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly impacts indige­nous peo­ples, and we stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty with dis­en­fran­chised peo­ple every­where,”  Dustin Steele of Min­go Coun­ty, W.Va. said.  Steele was one of the peo­ple locked in Arch’s office.

Min­go Coun­ty is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pub­lic health cri­sis faced by com­mu­ni­ties over­bur­dened by strip min­ing.  A recent study of life expectan­cies placed Min­go Coun­ty in the bot­tom 1 per­cent out of 3,147 coun­ties nationwide.(1)

Arch’s strip mines not only poi­son com­mu­ni­ties, but also seek to erase the lega­cy of resis­tance to the coal com­pa­nies in Appalachia. Arch’s Adkins Fork Sur­face Mine is threat­en­ing to blast away Blair Mountain—the site of the sec­ond largest upris­ing in U.S. his­to­ry and a mile­stone in the long-stand­ing strug­gle between Appalachi­ans and the coal companies.(2)

The dev­as­ta­tion of Arch’s strip mines plague regions beyond Appalachia.  Arch’s oper­a­tion in the Pow­der Riv­er Basin is the “sin­gle largest coal min­ing com­plex in the world.(3)”  Pro­duc­ing 15 per­cent of the U.S. coal sup­ply, Arch is a major cul­prit of the cli­mate cri­sis.

NASA sci­en­tist James Hansen describes the burn­ing of coal as a lead­ing cause glob­al cli­mate change.(4)  The Mid­west region faces seri­ous pub­lic health impacts from cli­mate change due to “increased heat wave inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy, degrad­ed air qual­i­ty, and reduced water quality(5),” accord­ing to recent­ly pub­lished data from the Nation­al Cli­mate Assess­ment.