By RONNIE ELLIS
FRANKFORT — Since leaving Ashland for the University of Kentucky, Ashley Judd has reached unforeseen heights as an actress, celebrity and activist.
In September of last year, she went to the mountaintop but the mountaintop wasn’t there.
So on Tuesday Judd came to Frankfort to urge several hundred opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining to keep working and move Kentucky away from a “19th century fuel in the 21st century.”
“I have been to see mountaintop coal mining removal sites,” Judd said in a subsequent interview with a couple of invited reporters. She said “nothing could have prepared me” for what she saw there. She has agreed to a request by the Kentucky Coal Association to go again, this time guided by Kentucky Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo, a proponent of the practice, to get the coal companies’ perspective.
“I will go with an open mind,” she said, but she concedes she doesn’t expect her view of what she termed the “atrocious” method of extracting coal to change.
Judd said she spent Monday evening discussing coal mining and the need to develop a green collar energy with Gov. Steve Beshear and while she didn’t describe his position as the same as hers, she said there is a “significant gap” between Beshear’s and Mongiardo’s position on mountaintop removal. Beshear has tried to sidestep the controversy at times, saying during his campaign there is a need for flat land in eastern Kentucky created by mountaintop removal and a need for the coal jobs. But he also opposed a change in federal regulations governing the dumping of refuse into mountain streams from such sites.
During the interview Beshear himself popped into the room to say hello and was asked if Judd had persuaded him that mountaintop removal should be halted in Kentucky’s mountains.
“I think we all share a love for Kentucky and the beauty of our mountains and we’re all going to work to preserve that beauty and to employ our people,” Beshear said. “And to diversify our economy. But it’s a lot easier to talk about than it is to do.”
He said he had not seen last week’s 20/20 program on ABC News by native Kentuckian Diane Sawyer, which toured eastern Kentucky coal fields, highlighting the poverty and desperation of the area and its children. But he hoped to get a copy to watch.
Earlier Judd spoke to nearly 800 gathered on the steps of the capitol for “I Love Mountains Day,” and said the 20/20 program was “the same darn show that’s been talking about Appalachia for decades.” She said the answer is for regular people “to run for office. That’s where the change will come.”
When Kentucky and its people realize “it’s truly in our interest to let go of coal and move forward with renewable energy and a green collar economy, then it will happen.”
Judd spoke proudly of her eastern Kentucky heritage, but she said coal companies use “smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand” to persuade coal miners and their families “that this is somehow good for them and breaking away from their past is somehow rejecting their heritage and that’s simply false.” It’s no different, she said, than her grandmother giving up washing dishes by hand when she got a dishwasher.
Judd said the perception that coal mining is the only avenue for eastern Kentuckians to remain in the place they love is wrong and if mountaintop removal isn’t halted, “there will be nothing left that they love.”
Judd was asked what image of Kentucky she encounters outside her native state.
“People think of race horses and they think of basketball and they think of the kind of stories that were on 20/20 last Friday night,” she said.
But education, community effort through groups like the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the citizens group that organizes the annual “I Love Mountains Day” demonstration, and a green economy like that proposed by President Barack Obama can change Kentucky, she said.
Education and those green jobs, she said, can provide jobs and incentives to stay in their communities “to do the good work” to the people of eastern Kentucky. But not a continued reliance on coal, she said.
RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com.
