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| Photo: Eric Loftis |
Pedestrians walking around downtown on Sunday were met with the songs and rhythms of an activist parade targeted at the coal industry and
Tennessee Valley Authority. Organizers with environmental groups Mountain Justice, United Mountain Defense, and Three Rivers Earth First!
paraded through the streets of downtown Knoxville, with a headcount of nearly 100 participants. The musical parade marched around the TVA
headquarters and the John J. Duncan Federal Building, which houses the Office of Surface Mining environmental regulator.
Organizers held the march to communicate TVA's role in the extraction and combustion of coal for electric power generation. In December 2008,
a coal-fired power plant maintained by TVA in Kingston, Tennessee, released a billion gallons of coal waste into surrounding streams and homes
when the fly-ash retention pond burst in the night.
"We're here today because Central Appalachia deserves better than mountaintop-removal, Roane County deserves better than coal fly-ash, and East
Tennessee deserves better than the worst air quality in the country," Tanya Turner, Mountain Justice organizer, said.
In addition to the coal ash and air pollution from the plants, organizers also pointed out the environmental hazards of mountaintop-removal (MTR)
surface-mining in coal extraction. MTR hazards include floods in deforested communities, dust and debris pollution from trucks leaving the
mines, and slurry impoundments of byproduct left over once the coal has been washed and shipped off to the power plants.
"TVA should be serving Tennessee with clean, renewable energy instead of poisoning us with coal and pollution," said Turner. The march featured
larger-than-life street puppets of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Kakalak Thunder drum corps, banjo and fiddle players, and a vegetarian lunch
provided by Knoxville Food Not Bombs. Dr. John Nolt, environmental ethics professor at the University of Tennessee, spoke at the event, as well
as Carol Judy, an ancestral native of the Appalachian mountains. For more information, contact mountainjustice.org
and unitedmountaindefense.org.
