Doris "Granny D" Haddock speaking at The American University, Washington, DC
Friday, April 19, 2002 an Earth Day event
Thank you.
This is a rather strange Earth Day, isn't it? A strange dream we find ourselves in, where danger is seen coming but we seem unable to do much about it. We are oddly distracted by the most bizarre sideshow of horrors in the Mideast and in our own cities.
Yes, it is quite an Earth Day. The poles of our earth are melting and our mad addiction to oil and coal are distorting our international politics, leading us to do great harm to other people around the world, and prompting the destruction of our own mountains, streams, air, jobs and communities. We come to a time now when our planet and its atmosphere and its oceans and rivers and its fragile web of living creatures are most at risk and yet our leaders are remarkably and nightmarishly unwilling to lead us with creativity or even with simple sanity.
It is an Earth Day of monumental distractions. The streets are filled with protesters who are alarmed at what is going on in the Middle East or at the School of the Americas, in Venezuela or Afghanistan or Cuba. How easily we are distracted by these trumped-up wars.
I am here to remind you to keep your eye on the ball--the beautiful blue-green ball that runs around the Sun in the company of Venus and Mars. This ball we live upon. This ball our children and grandchildren may or may not live upon.
Yes, we must fight for justice here and fairness there. But in these battles we must not be distracted from the larger war. We must not forget to fight at a high and strategic level for the defense of life itself, the earth itself, and for love itself.
There are, I believe, several strategic approaches you might consider--several heavy weapons of peace you might roll out.
The first one is democratic reform. As long as the people who are elected to serve as the stewards of our lives and of our environment are beholden to rich special interests who pay for their election campaigns, we will have a continuation of the present mind-boggling scandal that, in the past few years, has destroyed our nation's manufacturing base, flattened millions of acres of our once-beautiful mountains and rivers, pushed the limits of our atmosphere to the breaking point, nearly killed our oceans and created a life-style of pressure, expense and relentless exploitation for millions of Americans.
We have very modestly begun the work of dragging the criminally selfish fat cats out of the lobbies of our Congress and statehouses, and we will not stop until we have achieved the public funding of our public elections and the proper enforcement of bribery laws and the creation of systems of democratic representation that work for all of us. I don't much worry for the future of our country and our planet if everyday citizens are setting policies. I would trust you to care and to do a good job. But, friends, there is indeed a small and effective class of very selfish, very brutal and very shortsighted operators who have stolen much of our democracy away from us and, if we don't get it back from them, we will have neither a democracy nor a living planet.
Yes, fight here for justice. Fight there for fairness. But keep your eye on the big picture. Keep your eye on the blue-green ball. Insist on clean elections for a clean earth.
The trumped-up wars have us all split apart. We are worrying about whether the Israelis or the Palestinians are the good guys or the bad. How delightful it must be for the coal operators to see us out in the streets bickering about a fight on the other side of the world so that they can take apart the almost heavenly mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky while we are not looking.
Friends, they carve off the top of the mountains, fill in the valleys--covering hundreds of miles of fresh streams with toxic sludge and rubble for all time. The plants and wildlife and people are pushed out. Horrific floods soon follow, killing all nature. The coal itself is burned for a cheap energy fix, though it is the largest contributor to global warming and toxic air pollution.
Let's stop arguing among ourselves just long enough to make an agreement that will make the coal operators shit in their Brooks Brothers pants. Let's agree that the last lump of coal burned in the United States will be burned no later than fifteen years from this day. Let's insist upon solar energy and other sustainable energies. The Middle East and Venezuela and Afghanistan and the blue sky above us will all be friendly territory if we no longer are the mad addicts clawing the world over for another pound of coal, another barrel of oil. Keep your eye on the blue-green ball and make a personal promise to yourself and your children that you will do what you can in the next fifteen years to end this fossil fuel dark age.
There was an article in the New York Times yesterday that described current research funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund which predicts that the pollution from coal-based electric utilities east of the Mississippi River causes 6,000 early deaths a year. That is twice the toll of the World Trade Center attack and we have to stop it because we see this one coming, time after time.
Now what do those deaths really mean? It comes down to a young mother standing out in her lawn and tiny flakes of something fall from the sky and she knows she must do something to protect her family and her world. That's the way it was for Laura Forman as she stood in front of her little farm in Kenova, West Virginia.
Let me tell you something about Laura so you will never forget her. Let me put this little picture of her in your head. Here she is, a little redhead growing up in Upstate New York. Her father is mowing the yard, but it is taking him a very long time, as it always does. Why? Because little Laura crawls in front of him to save the little creatures, the tiny frogs and other fellows, who live in the lawn.
As a teenager, she would sometimes go down the road to clean up areas of the forest near her home, taking away the litter to make it beautiful again.
She loved the birds so much that she married the closest thing to one she could find--an air traffic controller and bird lover named Mike.
Mike and his small son--Laura's small son-- stood the other day in front of the Corps of Engineers office in Huntington, West Virginia to continue a protest where Laura had fallen dead last December. A young and healthy girl, beautiful and full of fun. She made her demand that the Army Corps of Engineers stop issuing permits for the obliteration of West Virginia and Kentucky. Then she slumped to the ground, dead. Later, her friends went to her little office over the antique shop and found the little puppy she had rescued from a roadway a few days before. She had fought so hard and worn herself out, trying to protect her mountains and this world from the ravages of King Coal. People told her to take some time off--to get away from the fight for awhile. She couldn't. And her heart gave out. She also had several cancers, it was later learned--probably from living in the ashfall of polluting industries and coal plants.
But in her short life she helped to stop some bad projects and she encouraged many a hero in the coal fields to stand up and do the right thing, and they are doing the right thing today, and they surely need your help.
Mike recently made a list of some of the things Laura loved. I am going to read it to you because it will help you know Laura and know how much Mike loved her. Here is what Mike said. I want you to listen to every word and hear a human being come through--a human being like you.
He said, "if you knew Laura then you must have known she loved these: Her family and her pets; Being a mommy--she took motherhood seriously; Her friends; Animals; Her work. And she loved chocolate, especially truffles; And travel--she dreamed of an African safari; A good book by Denise Giardina, Barbara Kingsolver, Rachael Carson, or Wendell Berry; She loved an honest-to-God liberal--bless you Ken Hechler; She loved being Home; The Simpsons; Cleveland Amory; Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia; A good bottle of Cabernet; Mahalia Jackson; Picking out clothes for Donald to wear in the morning; Old movies--the older and sappier the better--It's a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird; She loved bed & breakfasts; Mozart; Roller coasters; Poetry; Alice Walker, Walt Whitman; her sister Lynn's poetry; Jimmy Carter; A night out with the girls; Boston the city, not the band; Bob Dylan; Christmas; Reading to Donald before bed; Art--Laura was a member of the Huntington Museum of Art; Otters; Taking pictures--Laura was a published photographer; Outdoor markets; Mel Gibson; Chinese takeout; Martin Luther King; Scary movies; West Virginia's Blackwater Falls, Dolly Sods, Cranberry Glades; to be on top of a mountain in the southern coal fields; the New River; Brooks Mountain, Coolfont, the Greenbrier Valley, and Salt Rock; Doing stuff in bed--reading, shopping online with her laptop and snuggling; John Lennon; Dried Flowers; Jessye Norman; Buying gifts; The X-Files; Granny D; Antiques (I think she may have put me in that category); Breastfeeding Baby Donald; Food cooked on the grill; Sailing--we dreamed of touring the Galapagos Islands by sailboat; the song Any Day Now; Alaska; Redford; Going to the Symphony; California; Camping in a tent; Hanging plants; 60 minutes--the piece on mountaintop removal that she put together with Mike Wallace was one of her proudest moments; Japanese food; Pottery; Lois Gibbs; Looking good--I can't remember a time when she didn't; A big bowl of cereal; Scotland; Georgia O'Keefe; The power of e-mail and the Internet; Enya; Hiking in the woods; Yoga; meditation; Jane Goodall; Candlelight vigils.
"For those of us who were engulfed by her loving spirit," Mike continued, "we'll always remember that she loved what she stood for. She walked the walk. Laura was 24-7 zealous and incorruptible. She didn't back down--she sent the bullies running for cover. She was a bad-ass, king of the jungle, scratch-your-eyes out-lioness. She was a pussycat.
"It was an honor to be loved by Laura," Mike concluded, "and I am so lucky to have been her man for 22 of her 39 years. I will continue to teach Donald Roy what Laura taught me: The Big Picture. The 3 R's--Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Protect Mother Earth. Think globally and act locally. Love animals and remember that all living things deserve respect and protection. Demand social justice. Stand up for the oppressed. Curse out the bad guys--to their faces, on their home turf. Tell it like it is. Give back more than you take. Make a difference. Love your friends. Let your hair down but not your guard. Walk the walk."
So wrote Mike Forman.
And so, to the extent that any person can make a dedication, I dedicate Earth Day 2002 to Laura Forman and to Mike and Donald and to their friends in West Virginia who are fighting the bad guys, the greedy, the corrupt, the powerful. God bless Laura Forman, for people like Laura provide the real homeland defense for all of us. They are not distracted. They have their eye on the blue-green ball.
Homeland defense starts with our air, our water, our mountains, our communities, our Bill of Rights. Homeland defense means we protect our children from rapacious polluters and the politicians they prop-up with their blood money. Homeland defense means we defend America the Beautiful and its highest values here and around the world.
Go to West Virginia and help them save the mountains and pass a clean elections law there, as they are now working on. If you can't send your body, send your money. And do what you can in the other strategic fights where you can make a difference. If you want to know more about some important fights where you are needed, look them up on GrannyD.com. You'll find the names and email addresses of reformers in every state.
Don't think any of these fights are little fights. West Virginia coal operators, for example, have a lot to do with your life. Not only because they are destroying your planet, but because their campaign cash was responsible for bringing George Bush the one more electoral vote he needed, so they could continue raping the mountains and burying the rivers with total impunity. So don't ever think that by going into the dark of a distant fight you are not going to the front lines of the battle for the world itself.
And in every fight, work happy. Work in love. Don't let the forces of darkness and dissent drain you or divide you. Whether your life is long or short, you will have loved it--every minute of it.
Don't become so angry at your friends who support Israel or your friends who support the Palestinians that you can't join forces with them to do the bigger things for the earth itself. Don't forget that many of the things people march against are but trumped-up horrors to keep everyone distracted. Yes, some people, especially the Great Distractor himself in the White House, just love the fact that you are not marching this weekend for the earth, or for the fact that the Bush White House is poised to legalize the worst abuses of mountaintop removal and valley fill mining. No, they have distracted you with a new horror here, and a new horror there, while they go about making their billions. Don't be distracted from the big issues: democracy, clean energy, colonial exploitation here and abroad, public health, justice, the preservation of our mountains, streams, air, oceans, wildlife and our human communities and local cultures.
Don't walk away because you are confused or because it is difficult. We have entered an amazing time, when each of us has an important role to play. That time is now. It is the best time ever to be alive on this earth, because everyone matters. Everyone is needed if we are to survive. Your creativity, your love, your courage--all of it. As the smoke of battle swirls around you, smile. It is a privilege to be alive in such a time.
Don't hide in self-effacing modesty--be a hero of this great planet. Be like Laura, full of love and energy. Follow great people, and lead great people and always, always keep your eye on the blue-green ball. Be like Laura, always letting your loving heart be your strength and your guide. Be like Laura, always remembering that we cannot do for the world what we cannot first do for our friends, our family and the sweet loves of our lives.
Thank you.
October 2001 Granny D in Charleston, WV. Back row, left to right: OVEC's Vivian Stockman and Laura Forman, Ken Hechler, George Daugherty, Regina Hendrix. Front row: Doris "Granny D" Haddock and Larry Gibson