Last week was apparently “End Mountaintop Removal Week Washington DC,” a piece of news that probably wouldn’t have made our media even in a week without the wall-to-wall royal sycophancy, and to be honest something that I would not normally have been aware of. Although strip mining in the UK is something I’ve written briefly about and photographed protests against in London, the environmental problems it causes in Appalachia are not a major issue here.
What brought them to my attention was a Facebook post from the The Shpilman Institute for Photography referring me to an LPV Digest post about the misuse by ‘Big Coal’ of child pornography allegations to prevent Maria Gunnoe, described by Rolling Stone in their feature about the incident as “one of the most effective and celebrated mountaintop removal activists in Appalachia” to prevent her using a picture by photographer Katie Falkenberg showing a young girl in a bath full of what Aaron Brady in The New Inquiry describes as “brown, poisonous water” caused by the mining. The photographer’s caption which he quotes states that the water has a high level of arsenic which the family say is a result of the blasting used in mining which has disrupted the water table and cracked the casing of the well which is their only normal source of water. Although the mining company haven’t admitted they caused the problem, the caption stated “they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking.”
Mother Jones gives more details of how Gunnoe, who had gone to Washington to testify to a committee of Congress, was told before she did so that she must remove the picture from her presentation and that after she had given her presentation was questioned for almost an hour by police over allegations that the image was child pornography.
The image had been taken and used with the permission of the child’s parents and Gunnoe also had their permission to use it, but since the police investigations started it and the caption have been removed from Falkenberg’s web site, replaced by the statement: “The family has declined media request to use this photo; it has therefore been removed from the photo essay to honor their wishes.”
