Transforming Places

Lessons from Appalachia

Stephen L. Fisher, Barbara Ellen Smith, Stephen L. Fisher, Barbara Ellen Smith

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780252093760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this era of globalization's ruthless deracination, place attachments have become increasingly salient in collective mobilizations across the spectrum of politics. Like place-based activists in other resource-rich yet impoverished regions across the globe, Appalachians are contesting economic injustice, environmental degradation, and the anti-democratic power of elites. This collection of seventeen original essays by scholars and activists from a variety of backgrounds explores this wide range of oppositional politics, querying its successes, limitations, and impacts. The editors' critical introduction and conclusion integrate theories of place and space with analyses of organizations and events discussed by contributors. Transforming Places illuminates widely relevant lessons about building coalitions and movements with sufficient strength to challenge corporate-driven globalization.   Contributors are Fran Ansley, Yaira Andrea Arias Soto, Dwight B. Billings, M. Kathryn Brown, Jeannette Butterworth, Paul Castelloe, Aviva Chomsky, Dave Cooper, Walter Davis, Meredith Dean, Elizabeth C. Fine, Jenrose Fitzgerald, Doug Gamble, Nina Gregg, Edna Gulley, Molly Hemstreet, Mary Hufford, Ralph Hutchison, Donna Jones, Ann Kingsolver, Sue Ella Kobak, Jill Kriesky, Michael E. Maloney, Lisa Markowitz, Linda McKinney, Ladelle McWhorter, Marta Maria Miranda, Chad Montrie, Maureen Mullinax, Phillip J. Obermiller, Rebecca O'Doherty, Cassie Robinson Pfleger, Randal Pfleger, Anita Puckett, Katie Richards-Schuster, June Rostan, Rees Shearer, Daniel Swan, Joe Szakos, Betsy Taylor, Thomas E. Wagner, Craig White, and Ryan Wishart.

PART I

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Go Tell It on the Mountains

Place, Identity, and Culture

CHAPTER 1

Stop the Bombs

Local Organizing with Global Reach

Ralph Hutchison

It could be a classic Appalachian organizing story: outsiders with a plan take over the land and its rich resources, locals line up for jobs in the company town. Local power is constrained by economic dependence on the absentee employer—big decisions that impact the lives of everyone in the valley are made hundreds of miles away by wealthy members of the ownership class. This is a company town: the company controls information in the local press, health care through the local medical center, and air and water because its size insulates it from meaningful oversight by state officials. Discouraging words are seldom heard—the wrong word uttered in the wrong place may cost you your job.

Here is the twist: this town’s public schools are among the best funded—through self-imposed tax increases—in the state.¹ The per capita Ph.D. ratio approaches that of the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Median income for those working for the company is well above the regional average and many jobs are in cutting-edge high tech. And though the population is below thirty thousand, there is a full-size chain bookstore, multiplex cinema, and science museum. The civic center hosts an indoor, Olympic-size public swimming pool. When it came time to clean up hundreds of thousands of pounds of mercury in local waterways, the community argued, successfully, to modify the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recommended standards to allow the toxin to remain in floodplains and streams.²

This is Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a city born in secrecy as part of the Manhattan Project in 1941. It has intentionally operated “under the radar” ever since, quietly going about its business—building thermonuclear bombs, encouraging nuclear power, and doing basic energy, scientific, and supercomputing research. In the process, the Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation has contaminated soil, air, and water—in 1989, the nine-hundred-square-mile reservation was placed on EPA’s Superfund List—and it has inhaled hundreds of billions of our tax dollars. In 1995, according to Newsweek magazine, Oak Ridge and Anderson County ranked in the top five U.S. congressional districts in federal largesse.³

Since 1988, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) has been the most prominent and often the lone public voice addressing the federal government’s activities in Oak Ridge. This is a story of how a local grassroots group is meeting a challenge that is both local and global in scope.

History: Theirs

The history of Oak Ridge starts in 1941 when the U.S. Army seized hundreds of acres of land, and citizens of several small communities were summarily removed from their property. That land became home to the Manhattan Project and three huge industrial sites producing radioactive material that would ultimately be fuel for the world’s first atomic bomb. They were successful. The Y12 Plant in Oak Ridge produced the highly enriched uranium that fueled Little Boy, which destroyed Hiroshima; the graphite reactor at the X10 Plant, the world’s first full-scale operating nuclear reactor, produced plutonium and served as a model for the larger reactors in Richland, Washington, which made plutonium for Fat Man, the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

The army’s General Leslie Groves selected the valleys in east Tennessee for the abundant, clean water in the Clinch River, the isolated terrain ideal for a secret program, a workforce that needed jobs, and, thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) dam building in the 1930s, abundant electrical power.

In the years that followed, X10 became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the country’s leading research facility for nuclear power, which built and operated thirteen nuclear reactors; one still operates. Y12’s mission shifted from enriching uranium to producing the thermonuclear “secondary” for nuclear warheads; Y12 still builds bombs today. Across town, the K25 site enriched uranium through massive gaseous diffusion operations. Now the site is a waste processing facility and the giant buildings are being demolished.

Oak Ridge Operations provides jobs for more than fifteen thousand people, making it the largest single employer in Tennessee except for the state itself. Many jobs are white collar—researchers working on today’s projects and scientists cleaning up yesterday’s messes—but even machine operators make good wages.

It comes at a price. From the earliest days, secrecy was the watchword in Oak Ridge and dissent led to quick dismissal. The federal government operated with impunity, shielded from all oversight by the Atomic Energy Act of 1949. Standard workplace safety requirements are not enforced in Oak Ridge; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has no regulatory authority. For more than forty years, state regulators were barred from the nuclear reservation. The EPA was formed in 1970, but it would take congressional hearings and a citizenled lawsuit thirteen years later before the agency was granted access to the site. The price of lax oversight can also be measured in community and worker health. After fifty years of denying that workers at its nuclear weapons plants had been subjected to health risks, the federal government admitted that tens of thousands of workers were ill and their illnesses could be traced to workplace exposures. A program to provide compensation has been set up. Workers complain the process is slow and cumbersome, designed to discourage applicants, and payouts are insufficient to meet medical needs.⁴

History: Ours

OREPA arrived on the scene in 1988 when a small cadre of local residents formed a coalition to sponsor a demonstration against nuclear weapons on Hiroshima Day, August 6. The initial group included Quakers and other religious denominations, peace groups from North Carolina and Kentucky, antinuclear activists, the local anarchist chapter, and students from the University of Tennessee. The core organizers, who ultimately formed OREPA after the successful demonstration, were Steve Smith, veterinary student at the University of Tennessee; Stephen Clements, nuclear engineer with the TVA; and Judith Hallock, a nurse from western North Carolina. The August 6, 1988, Hiroshima Day peace demonstration included the first-ever civil disobedience in Oak Ridge; five activists crossed the “blue line” painted on the highway to demarcate the bomb plant’s perimeter. During the next year, OREPA did extensive research and published A Citizens’ Guide to Oak Ridge, and in 1990 disclosed extensive contamination of the Watts Bar Reservoir, a large recreational lake in east Tennessee. The disclosure generated national media coverage and established OREPA as a force the Department of Energy (DOE) could not ignore.

In 1992, the DOE announced (misleadingly, it turned out) that it was no longer producing nuclear weapons in Oak Ridge—the local headline trumpeted “Final Bomb Part Made at Y-12.”⁵ OREPA’s focus shifted almost exclusively to environmental, safety, and health concerns. We served on federal advisory boards, published newsletters, attended hearings, schooled ourselves in cleanup technologies and regulatory requirements, and worked to assure that cleanup funding would materialize. The technical nature of environmental work was daunting. Though dozens of people supported OREPA financially, only a handful of core activists trudged through detailed technical documents, wrote comments on cleanup proposals, and spoke at public hearings.

By 1997, two things had changed. OREPA’s advocacy of a “Site Specific Advisory Board” for Oak Ridge was successful, and a federal advisory committee was appointed that, for the first time, brought the local public into decision making in a meaningful role. And the Knoxville News-Sentinel disclosed that the Y12 Plant in Oak Ridge was, in fact, still making bomb components—not for new bombs, but to refurbish old bombs through the Life Extension Program.⁶ In response, OREPA reached out to individuals and organizations that had engaged nuclear issues in the past and launched the Stop the Bombs campaign in 1998. The campaign’s goals included educating, organizing, and mobilizing the public to oppose continued nuclear weapons production at Y12.

A Global Issue and Local Challenge

Nuclear weapons are a global issue. Many of the crucial decisions, which have a direct impact on activities in Oak Ridge, are made by arms control negotiators as they craft international treaties. Policy decisions by the president of the United States drive funding decisions by the U.S. Congress that determine, finally, what projects get done. Some of the work is profoundly important—the development of new insulators, creation of new radioactive materials for medical purposes, cutting-edge supercomputing, energy research to combat global climate change, and manufacture of thermonuclear components for weapons of mass destruction. In positive and negative ways, the work in Oak Ridge impacts the entire planet.

Organizing grassroots opposition to the production of thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction is complicated by the distance—geographical, political, and psychological—between the work on the ground and the decisions that drive it. In meetings with workers and plant officials, questions about responsibility for producing weapons of mass destruction are deferred. “We don’t set policy; we just carry it out,” is a typical mantra used by workers to avoid moral reflection, deflect criticism, and absolve themselves of responsibility.

Even those who feel their health has been compromised by operations at the federal facilities have a powerful social incentive to suppress questions. The long-held prohibition against public discussion of activities at the plant, stemming from the days of World War II, has been reinforced across the decades by a public campaign to maintain tight security. Billboards on site and throughout the county carry security warnings. When whistleblowers call attention to questionable activities, the company’s chilling response serves notice that rocking the boat will result in unfortunate consequences. The economic dependence of the community on the federal facilities for jobs requires that everyone be a “team player.” Whether one works directly for DOE or one of its contractors, having and maintaining security clearance is essential for high-paying jobs. The Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation is responsible for pumping at least $2 billion into the local economy each year. That is a lot of money anywhere, but the depth of need in southern Appalachia exaggerates the impact of federal dollars. The money not only provides jobs with higher than average wages, it buys consent, or at least silence, from the community.

Add to this enormous vested economic interest the inertia behind a government program that has existed for almost seventy years and you have Goliath, a seemingly unassailable giant that threatens peace and security. The challenge of confronting Goliath is daunting, but not impossible. It requires an adjustment of perspective. As Sister Mary Dennis Lentsch put it: “I just feel like David, who when he went out and saw Goliath, must have thought, ‘He’s so big. How can I possibly miss?’”⁷

Organizing an Opposition

In Oak Ridge, the prevailing mythology is that weapons production is the reason the community exists. To speak out publicly against bomb production, most people believe, is to advocate community suicide.

Organizing an effective opposition, then, requires a structure, strategy, and program that are unconventional, at least in terms of traditional community organizing in Appalachia. And even this is problematic, because most funders committed to organizing in Appalachia do not recognize OREPA as doing community-based organizing.

In the earliest days, OREPA operated as a collective. The first—and only—objective of the nascent alliance was to stage a large peace demonstration in Oak Ridge that included nonviolent direct action. The collective was self-selecting and open to all who came to participate; the only funding available was what participants contributed from their own pockets; decisions were made by consensus; there was no hierarchy or power derived from seniority because everyone was, by definition, a newcomer. Following the first successful action in 1988, three leaders emerged and committed to focused organizing for the purpose of staging a larger peace demonstration the following August. Members of the collective traveled throughout the Southeast to tell people about Oak Ridge and encourage them to attend the August gathering. In the process, OREPA connected with groups and individuals who would form the enduring core of the organization’s constituency—people of faith who, even as the nuclear freeze movement waned, remained committed to a world free of nuclear weapons, and members of the broader social justice community who recognized that nuclear weapons reflect a fundamental problem: inequities of power, racism, and inappropriate distribution of our common treasury that sacrifice true security (education, housing, health care) for a false sense of invulnerability.

The highly technical and time-intensive work during OREPA’s “environmental years” limited the organization’s ability to involve members. Monthly meetings of the Decision-Making Council (DMC) were open to anyone and advertised in local alternative papers, but attending one, for the uninitiated, was like being dropped midstream into whitewater, with a cascade of technical terms like “in-situ vitrification” substituting for water and dozens of acronyms bubbling up unannounced to swamp the raft. OREPA evolv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Invocation/Invocación
• Introduction: Placing Appalachia
• I. Go Tell It on the Mountains: Place, Identity, and Culture
• II. Where No One Stands Alone: Bridging Divides
• III. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: Scaling Up
• Conclusion: Transformations in Place
• List of Contributors
• Index