Interview with Dave Cooper, July 7, 2023

KOMARA : This is an interview with Dave Cooper for the Kentucky Climate Change Oral History Project on July 7th, 2023. This interview takes place in Dave’s home on Paris Avenue in Lexington, Kentucky. I, Zada Komara, the interviewer, am a faculty member at the University of Kentucky. So, Dave, how are you doing today?

COOPER : I’m doing really well. Thanks for doing this.

KOMARA : Yeah, no thanks for sitting with me. And your dog. Thank your dog too--

COOPER : (laughs) Sure.

KOMARA : --for being present. (laughs) So, just to get started, I’d like to establish a little biography. So, tell me a little bit about yourself.

COOPER : Well, I’m sixty-three. I’ve lived in Lexington since 1990. I grew up in Ohio, and so I’m kind of a transplant. I worked as an engineer for twenty years in various different industries. The last place I worked at was a company up in Cynthiana, Kentucky that makes the 00:01:00little yellow sticky notes. The post-it notes. And I turned forty when I was working at the post-it note factory. And every ten years or so, I think it’s a good idea to just sort of check in with how your life is going, and is this really what I want to do with my life? And I’m working at the post-it note factory, and when I was younger, I always sort of envisioned that I’d be doing something--(laughs)--important with my life. And I just walked into the factory one day and I quit and just sort of took a giant leap into the unknown. About that time, when I first moved to Lexington, I didn’t know anybody here and I was trying to meet other people and make friends. And so, I joined the Sierra Club and we go hiking and, you know, make friends through the Sierra Club, and that was great. And a few years after I joined, they said, “Dave, we really need somebody to be our program chair,” 00:02:00which is the person that finds the speakers for the monthly meetings. And I said, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I think I can do that.” And so, I--every month I had to find some interesting speaker and we’d get, you know, the most interesting person you could find to either talk about some environmental issue or maybe just talk about, you know, their trip to Alaska and so on. And one month I heard about this guy in West Virginia named Larry Gibson, who was going around and talking to anybody who would listen about this terrible thing that was going on his mountain in West Virginia, called Kayford Mountain. And I said, well, that sounds interesting. (laughs) Let’s get this guy to come to Lexington and maybe he will come and speak at the Sierra Club about mountaintop removal, and, you know, we’ll see what this crazy guy’s talking about. So, he came and we had about, probably eighty or a hundred 00:03:00people. It was a good audience that night. And we met over at the Shriners Hospital on Richmond Road and Larry was very heartfelt in his talk about his mountain. He said, “You know, I grew up on this mountain and I used to go roam and play in all these mountains that were around my mountain. And now these coal companies, they’re blowing up all the mountains where I used to play as a boy, and they’re trying to get my mountain too and I will never sell to the coal companies,” and so on. And it was a real good talk and I figured he was really exaggerating but we sort of established kind of a bond because he was a former General Motors employee--he worked up at the Lordstown plant in Ohio. And I was also a former GM person so we started talking about General Motors stuff, and we sort of made a connection. And I got him--his phone number and his address and I said, “Well, you know, maybe one of these days I’ll go to West Virginia and, you know, see this 00:04:00mountaintop removal for myself.” Because he made it sound really bad but, I--you know, I was sure that he was exaggerating and, you know, couldn’t possibly be as bad as what he was saying. And the person that brought him to Lexington was an organizer for--named Laura Foreman, and she was a community organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in Huntington, West Virginia. And so, I got on their mailing list and they started sending me their newsletters about mountaintop removal --(laughs)-- you know, every month. Just this incredible story about what was happening and what a tragedy was going on in West Virginia. So, I got kind of drawn into--(laughs)--this thing piece by piece. And I finally went to West Virginia. And you’re driving--you go through Charleston and then you go about another hour up into the mountains, and dirt roads. And you’re going up this mountain and you get to the top of Larry’s mountain, and oh my God! (laughs) It was even worse than I could have possibly imagined. And anybody 00:05:00who ever goes up to Larry’s mountain comes away really changed in how they look at America’s consumption of electricity. It really puts such a striking visual when you first see mountaintop removal. I can literally say it changed my life. And so, that was in ’98. And Larry and I started talking. (laughs) And Larry was a very persistent person, and he would call me frequently and just keep in touch with me. And later on, as--when I traveled with Larry, I found out he’s on the phone, like, all the time calling people --(laughs)-- and talking to them, trying to get them interested in saving his mountain. Then around October of 2000, there was this horrible disaster 00:06:00in Martin County, Kentucky. One of the furthest east counties in Kentucky. Where they had a massey coal slurry impoundment broke in the middle of the night, and it broke into old abandoned underground mines. And three hundred million gallons of this black sludge pours out into two creeks : Wolf Creek and Coldwater Creek. This is a very, very remote area. It’s really hard to get to. But I said, “Well, let’s go out and see this. You know, I’ve been to Kayford Mountain, let’s go see this coal disaster.” So, Patty and I--Patty’s my partner of twenty-five years. And we got in the car and drove out there. And there’s fields just covered with this black toxic stuff. And Patty took some video and I took some pictures and came back, and we started trying to 00:07:00tell other people, there’s been this horrible disaster--(laughs)--in eastern Kentucky and nobody knows about it. And that the Lexington paper was covering it fairly well, but this was before YouTube. It was before, you know, the internet was in really uncommon use and there just wasn’t a really good way to get the message out about this disaster. And it was kind of frustrating because it was a huge--it is like--we’re saying, this is, you know, worse than the Exxon Valdez--(laughs)--spill. It’s terrible and, you know, everybody should come and see it. And so, I was writing articles for the Kentucky Sierra Club newsletter and we got a group of ten or twelve UK students. And the famous environmental attorney Joe Childers came out. And we all took pictures and tried to just get more attention to this. And finally--I think it was on Christmas Day, about two months after this horrible disaster, 00:08:00the New York Times finally ran its first story about this coal waste spill in Martin County. And eventually 60 Minutes did a story and Jack Spadaro became famous for his being fired for trying to keep Mine Safety administration from covering up the spill. But that was, that was, about the time when I quit my job at 3M. I was like, you know, maybe I’ll do some of this kind of type work, because this is really, really interesting to me. And maybe I can be an environmental activist, you know, like Lois Gibbs or Erin Brockovich, or--(laughs)--you know, one of these, you know, famous--or Craig Williams or one of these famous environmental people. There’s this wonderful, wonderful person at the Ohio Valley Environmental 00:09:00Coalition named Laura Foreman, who was just--(sighs)--she was just such a great community organizer. She was warm, she was personable, she was beautiful. People just loved her. And she was raising all kinds of hell in West Virginia about mountaintop removal, and--with Larry and maybe a dozen people were working on this. And they would have these very in your face kind of demonstrations on the lawn of the governor’s house in West Virginia. And they did a funeral for the mountains, which was a big parade through the downtown streets of Charleston and brought a lot of attention to the issue. And Ken Ward of the West Virginia’s The Charleston Gazette was writing really good stories. So, the whole issue was starting to gain more traction, and in the middle of one of these demonstrations, in 00:10:00front of the Army Corps of Engineers office in Huntington, Laura Foreman dropped dead in the middle of the protest. Fell over, she--her heart went into arrhythmia, and she literally fell over dead during the protest. And this was (sharply exhales) one of many, many tragedies that was yet to come in my life, in the whole campaign against mountaintop removal. Is--this is really hard work and it’s very stressful and it’s--it takes a real toll on the people who are involved, fighting against mountaintop removal. About six months after Laura passed, I got up my gumption to 00:11:00call the director of OVEC [Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition]. It was a lady named Dianne Bady. And I said, “Are you all going to hire another organizer on the mountaintop removal campaign?” And she said, “Are you interested?” And I said yes. And so, they--we had a meeting. And I went out there. And a wonderful guy on the board of OVEC named Dan Kash--who’s also passed away--told Dianne, you should hire this guy right away. (laughs) He’s the only one in Kentucky that’s doing anything on mountaintop removal. Something like that. So, I got the job. And, you know, I’m an engineer and that’s part of my personality. And I tend to be kind of more technical and not have the--a 00:12:00good community organizer needs to have really good people skills, and be really good at listening and talking to people, and so on. Those are not really my strengths. (laughs) But I, but I really care about the issue and I really wanted to help. And I thought, well, I’ll just work really, really hard--(laughs)-- and I’ll, you know, put my everything into this job and just do the best I can. So, I got hired. And I think they paid me something like twenty-four thousand a year or something like that, which I was just, I was so excited. I was--this was like a job of a lifetime. A dream come true : to be a community organizer working on an environmental campaign. --(laughs)-- I was just like, wow! This is the sexiest, greatest, most wonderful job. And so, I sold my house in Lexington, and Patty was really sad, and I moved to Huntington. And for the next year, I just worked myself into the ground. 00:13:00--(laughs)-- I worked so hard. When I got there, the first day I walked in my office--which was Laura Foreman’s old office--and there was a box of stuff, like, sitting on my desk and basically a note saying, we need to organize a busload of people to go to Washington DC to lobby on mountaintop removal. And you need to organize this --(laughs)-- in the next three weeks, or something crazy like that. And I didn’t know anybody in West Virginia except, you know, Larry, really. --(sighs)-- So, the whole process of being a community organizer is getting to know people and learning what they like and what they don’t like. And it’s a lot of talking and a lot of listening, and it’s very, very time consuming. You can’t just go into the coalfields and say, hi, blah, blah-- and get right to business. It doesn’t work that way. You have to see the pictures of their grandkids 00:14:00and get food from their garden. And, you know, it takes--you cannot possibly do a ‘get to know you’ thing in Appalachia in less than (exhales) three or four hours. It’s--you know? --(laughs)-- And that’s just--and if you don’t--if you’re brusque with them, they think you’re being rude. And I’m from the city. I grew up in Cincinnati and I tend to get right to the point. And so, I had to, like, completely rewire my brain to, like, really slow down--(laughs)--and do the coalfield organizing thing. And it was exhausting. Because I had all these people I had to get to know. And they were wonderful. Just some of the best people. And really, a lot of these coalfield activists in West Virginia and Kentucky are, 00:15:00you know, very well-known now and respected. Like Judy Bonds won the Goldman Prize. Maria Gunoe won the Goldman Prize. Larry Gibson. Guy just passed away about a month ago named Julian Martin, who was a former school teacher, was funny and wise. Just a great public speaker. All these people. So, I’m the--(sighs)--staff person at OVEC and I’m--like, we had these meetings of a coalition called The Friends of the Mountains, and that was in response to an industry--coal industry thing called the Friends of Coal. So, we were going to be the Friends of the Mountains. So, we had people from the Citizens Coal Council, Coal River Mountain Watch, Appalachian Voices, OVEC, Unitarian Church (pauses) a few other groups. Ann 00:16:00Pancake’s a well-respected writer. She used to come to the meetings. Judy Bonds was--would always come to the meetings. And there was this guy named Lenny Kohm, and his last name is spelled K-O-H-M. And he was on staff at Appalachian Voices in Boone, North Carolina--which is still a really good, strong organization that’s working on a lot of environmental issues in Appalachia. And Lenny Kohm’s fame was he did the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge roadshow--I don’t think that’s exactly the right title for it. But for ten or fifteen years, he traveled around the country with a slideshow and a member of the Inuit from the Arctic area where they were going to do--they wanted to do the oil drilling up there. And 00:17:00he went around with a slideshow talking to church groups and Rotary clubs, and Sierra Clubs and Audubon groups and anybody who would listen, with this slideshow presentation about why we shouldn’t drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And this was a famous presentation that he did. He did hundreds and hundreds--thousands of presentations all over the country. And he had funding--(laughs)--to do that. And they would fly down some representative from the native tribes to go with him. And it made for a very compelling, you know, come to the Audubon, you know, meeting in Bloomington, Indiana, and there’s going to be a guy from--(laughs)--you know, the Arctic National Wildlife--you know, to talk about this controversial issue. And so, it was this huge thing and it went on for years. So, Lenny would come to the Friends of the Mountains meetings and 00:18:00he would often say, we need to do something like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge roadshow for mountaintop removal. This is what we need to do. And we were like, --(laughs)-- great. Lenny, you’ve got all this experience. (laughs) You know, you’re the guy to do it. And he said, “I’m not going to do it.” He said, “I did it for fifteen years. Somebody else has got to do it. I can’t do it anymore.” So, that was--you know, nobody’s--(laughs)--putting their hand up to do it. So, that went on for about a year at OVEC. And I finally got fired--(laughs)--at OVEC as their community organizer, because I was just overworked, basically. And I was becoming irritable and had some, had some issues in the office with--I think I threw something one time. (laughs) And you can’t do that. (laughs) So, they let me go. Which was kind of a relief because it was just 00:19:00so, so, hard. I was working so hard. And I was also trying to take the place of Laura Foreman, the--you know, the wonderful, beloved--(laughs)--you know, community organizer. And nobody could ever take her place. And so, that was kind of a hard position to be in. But I can say, looking back on it, that it was a great experience in my life. I met and worked with wonderful people, and I gave it one hundred and ten percent the whole time I was there. I don’t think anybody that knew me would ever say that, Dave didn’t try awful, awful hard to be a good organizer. So, I remember the morning I was going in to get fired--(laughs)--I was in the shower and I started thinking, well, we keep talking about “Somebody needs to do this Mountaintop Removal Roadshow.” I was like, that sounds kind of fun, you know? (laughs) I can get in my car and drive around the country and--(laughs)—give 00:20:00a slideshow presentation. So, I pitched that idea to Dianne Bady, if you all could give me some seed money to get a slideshow together, I will go out on the road in the fall of 2003 and do this presentation, you know, for, you know, a year. And that way, you know, I’ll still be able to be involved in this movement that I really care about, but I won’t be an OVEC employee. I’ll just be, you know, on my own out there doing it. And they thought about it, and they said, “Oh yes. Okay.” And they gave me three thousand dollars as seed money to get the slideshow together. And that was my total funding to start with. And so, I was trying to go, how am I going to do this? (laughs) And at that time those digital projectors, it was a very new thing, and they were thousands of 00:21:00dollars. Plus, I didn’t own a laptop either. And I was--also, you couldn’t get a laptop for less than a thousand bucks. Then you had to buy PowerPoint and all that, so, that was just completely out of the question. So, I started looking on--(sighs)--whatever existed before Craigslist, and I found some guy in St. Louis who had a Kodak carousel slide projector. Those round things with the slides. (laughs) He had one of those for sale for, like, seventy-five bucks, and he’s going to throw in the screen too. (claps hands) So, I was like, great! So, I got in my car and I drove six hours to St. Louis to buy this thing. And I still have it. It’s out in the garage. (laughs) And I got a camera--I already owned a camera. And so, I went around--(laughs)--just started driving around Appalachia taking pictures. And you know, mountaintop removal is hidden. It’s not--they don’t put it where, you know, anybody can see it, 00:22:00so you have to be kind of sneaky. (laughs) You have to go--you have to really know where you’re going. But it was really easy to find photographs of things like acid mine drainage. And we had the photographs from the Martin County coal sludge spill and so on. And so, I was able to put this slideshow together. And I got a friend of mine named Judy Vogel-Essex to do a--I wrote a script and she did a voiceover. And Lenny told me, “If you want to speak to the Rotary clubs, you have to do it in twenty minutes, and that’s all they give you.” So, I said, “Okay, I’ll do my, I’ll do, the slideshow will be, you know, eighteen minutes, which will give me a little bit of time for Q&A.” So, I put the slideshow together--and I haven’t watched it in fifteen years, probably. I think it was good enough. It was--you know, it was very amateur. But it was--I explained, this is where your electricity--(laughs)--is 00:23:00coming from, and this is what mountaintop removal looks like. And here are the people in the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia who are paying the price for our addiction to burning coal. And you know, back then people--(sighs)--Author Jeff Goodell says, “I always thought, you know, coal was something that they used, you know, back in the 1800s for steam ships--(laughs)--and things like this. I didn’t even know we still used this stuff.” That’s where we were, you know, twenty-five years ago. So, my next task was to start getting gigs. And I was told by one of the people on the Friends of the Mountains group that I had to have somebody with me on the roadshow from the coalfields to go with me, so I could do my little slideshow and then they would talk about, you know, what it was like for them living near this mountaintop removal. 00:24:00And it’s like, okay. yeah, that sounds great. You know, that’s how Lenny Khom did it. But Lenny Khom had, like, two hundred thousand dollars annual funding to do his roadshow, and I don’t have nothing--(laughs)--to do my roadshow. It’s like, how--you know, how am I going to do this? And it turns out that a lot of times, if you speak at a church or something like that, they’ll give you fifty bucks, or you can, you know, pass the hat or something --(laughs)-- like that. --(laughs)-- And this is how I survived for the next eight years, was just basically with very little funding. I was doing roughly a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five speaking gigs a year. I did colleges and churches and Audubon Clubs and Sierra Clubs. And I had a website and it was called--this whole thing was called the Mountaintop 00:25:00Removal Roadshow, a grandiose term for ‘me in a crappy little car--(laughs)--driving around with a slide projector’. And it soon became pretty evident that this was not going to be very sustainable for me to drive to West Virginia, pick somebody up, and then drive to Illinois --(laughs)--to do a speaking gig. It’s just like that is just--you know, it was just too much driving. And you know, my car got, like, forty miles to the gallon, but it had all these bumper stickers--anti-mountaintop removal --(laughs)-- bumper stickers on it. It was really, really hard. In--so, that was--2003 is when I got started on this thing, 2004, there was this terrible--another terrible tragedy in Virginia. 00:26:00Not West Virginia, but in the western part of Virginia, Wise County. There’s this surface mine kind of near Big Stone Gap. The town is called Inman. And there was a bulldozer working at night on top of a strip mine, and it accidentally knocked a boulder loose off the top of the strip mine. Well, the people live down below--they live in the hollows below the mountains. So, this boulder comes, like, rolling down the mountain and crashes through the back of this home, and lands on this old little boy named Jeremy Davidson who was sleeping in his bed. He was four years old, I believe. And there was tremendous amount of outrage after that. And a bunch of Earth First folks in Asheville and Knoxville and some other places decided they were going to have a big protest in the town of Appalachia, Virginia, which is right in that same area. So, they had a big march. And a bunch of people came in. And there was this wonderful woman from Virginia Tech named Sue Daniels. And she 00:27:00came up with this idea of--you know how they had the Mississippi Freedom Summer in the Sixties for civil rights, and then there was the Redwood Summer out west to protest the logging? She said, “Well, why don’t we have this Mountain Justice Summer? And we’ll bring in, you know, activists and students and protestors and everything. We’ll have these big summer long series of protests--(laughs)--and we will kick King Coal’s ass and kick him out of Appalachia forever.” And Sue was another person who was a magnetic personality, very warm, beloved, a very intelligent kind of person. And she came up with this idea of this Mountain Justice Summer. And within six months of this whole campaign getting started, she was murdered by a jealous ex-boyfriend. And that just--you know, these things happen but it tends to pull people together when these tragedies happen. And a lot of people from Virginia Tech joined the campaign. You know, people that were kind of on the fence before, like, said, I’m in for Mountain Justice Summer 2005. So, meanwhile, I’m out with my slideshow talking on college campuses saying, hey, we’re going to have this big Mountain Justice Summer. (laughs) It’s going to be great. You know, we will have housing for you, you know, and food. Come into, you know, Appalachia for the summer, we’re going to kick King Coal’s ass--(laughs)--in the summer of 2005. 00:28:00And they flooded in. And there was people from, like--(laughs)--Rainbow Gatherings, and you know. There was a lot of people that were between gigs in life. (laughs) But there were also some, you know, some really great students from top universities, you know, James Madison, Virginia, UVA, Virginia Tech. We got the smartest, brightest kids from those colleges. A bunch came from MTSU in Tennessee--Middle Tennessee State. And, you know, so, I mean, I was part of all this because I was recruiting on all these campuses and I was saying, you know, hey, come join y’all. This is going to be great, y’all. And that summer there was all these protests all over the place. We had these huge marches and protests against mountaintop removal. You know, people banging the bucket drums and all that. 00:29:00And it was crazy. (laughs) It was very loosely organized and there was a bunch of stuff that went wrong. But we raised a lot of consciousness about mountaintop removal. And there was a protest at the end of that summer that went really badly, where we had two groups of organizers really disagreeing over tactics and safety and things like that. And the group just fell apart. And I--we went a couple months without having any of our Mountain Justice meetings and I said, “Hey, can we get this thing back together again? Because I think, you know, we could sort of start over again with a new batch.” And I’m doing all these talks in college campuses and we started pulling in more people again. So, we revived it in summer of 2006--we had these big summer camps. We had one at Camp Blanton in Harlan County. We had a couple of them at Wiley’s Last Resort. On the 00:30:00flat at Wiley’s, there’s a big pavilion. We built it (??) --(laughs)-- And Wendell Berry came and spoke and Ken Hechler, the former congressman from West Virginia, and all these people. So, Mountain Justice continued on for--it finally sputtered out around 2013--(laughs)--so, we kept it going for a long time without--but, you know, the whole struggle with this kind of thing was--I’m going to make some kind of pointed comments here. (laughs) We didn’t have any money. And we were bringing in hordes of people from all over the country with just hardcore actions and activism. And you know, sexy kind of protests where people would, like, climb up the draglines--the giant cranes that move the--people would climb up on those things and, like, drop banners off of them. Like Greenpeace kind of style 00:31:00stuff. And it--so, a certain segment of society, you know, brings attention to the issue, but it also brings people in. And, you know, there are some really well-funded environmental organizations in Kentucky and nationally that just don’t know how to recruit, and we were kicking ass on recruiting and we were bringing people in. And those people are still involved today. And they--you know, we indoctrinated them--(laughs)--pretty successfully, I think. And a lot of those really smart people, they’re college professors now. There’s at least one at UK, there’s one at Berea, there’s one at the University at Buffalo. They’re working at the Hindman Settlement School, they’re working for Appalshop, they’re working for nonprofit groups throughout 00:32:00Kentucky and West Virginia, still. Those were the young people that came into Mountain Justice Summer. They are the ones that are now the staff for a lot of these nonprofit organizations that are working on climate change. It was super frustrating to me that--there’s a particular large statewide organization in Kentucky--would not have anything to do with Mountain Justice Summer. And that was really frustrating to me because--and actually, some of the Mountain Justice people ended up going on staff for KFTC. So, that was real frustrating. But we were a non-hierarchical anarchist organization and there’s a lot of organizations that are just not going to deal with somebody--(laughs)--with a group like that because it’s just too amorphous and too unpredictable. 00:33:00So--anyways, so, I did this roadshow for 2000--until 2011, I think was my last speaking gig. And somehow financially I managed to keep it going for eight years. And it’s something, honestly, I’m pretty proud of because I--when I do something, I go into it, like, full steam. And I worked really, really, really hard. And I can remember several nights where I would have a speaking gig in Pennsylvania at 9 o’clock and then—PM. And then--or 7 o’clock, you know, whatever. And then another speaking gig in Tennessee at 9:00 AM and you’re like, oh. I’m going to have to drive all night long. And I did. And I slept in my car--(laughs)--and--just 00:34:00trying, trying to keep it going all this year. I mean, I look back on it now and I just--I can’t believe that I did it. But in the end, I did about eight hundred speaking gigs, which--over eight years. And that’s something that I’m really proud of. It was a good effort. There was a guy--one of the students from Middle Tennessee State University, his name is Eric Blevins, and he ended up being my kind of main roadshow companion. And they had done a campaign on their campus where they had got the student fees to pay for clean energy. A certain percentage of their student activity fees was to make sure that all the campuses’, or a percentage of the campuses’ electricity came 00:35:00from wind and solar rather than coal. And that was a good campaign that they did on that campus. So, he came along with me on a lot. We did hundreds of roadshows together. And we’re still friends and we’re still buddies and we still hang out together. And we--(laughs)--we talked to a lot of people. That was the Mountaintop Removal Roadshow. And (pause) let’s take a break.

KOMARA : Sure. (pause) The dog’s worn out. Oh, he’s not. (laughs)

COOPER : This was--these were the--

KOMARA : --some of the slides? I was wondering.

COOPER : Ah, this was just like a display board that we put up. This thing--I haven’t had this thing out in ten years. It’s all covered with sawdust and stuff. But--

KOMARA : --it’s cool though. Teri has a bunch of stuff like this in her house.

COOPER : --(laughs)-- Yeah. This is the Martin County spill.

KOMARA : Yeah, 00:36:00I’ve seen the Appalshop Sludge documentary multiple times.

COOPER : Yeah, it’s a good one.

KOMARA : It’s just outrageous.

COOPER : It’s a good one. And what else have we got here? That’s the giant dragline. This was a handout. This is all pre-internet. That’s how you had to do it.

KOMARA : It’s a cool handout.

COOPER : Yeah.

KOMARA : It’s amazing.

COOPER : Yeah. We would sell stuff to try--and I put this DVD together and we would sell DVDs and sell [?? WORDS UNCLEAR] and stuff like that. Yeah. (laughs) The coal trucks.

KOMARA : Oh, geez. These pictures are just--

COOPER : That’s--yeah, that’s not the boulder that killed the boy, but that was another one.

KOMARA : Yeah. That’s another one.

COOPER : That’s the Martin County spill.

KOMARA : Yeah.

COOPER : That’s Larry with the mine cracks 00:37:00on his land. And here’s a big slurry of [?? WORDS UNCLEAR]. There’s Larry being pissed off.

KOMARA : Yeah. Like, I recognize him in stuff.

COOPER : He was something.

KOMARA : Yeah.

COOPER : They’re all gone. This guy was in a movie called Burning Our Future. That’s his--that’s his work(??).

KOMARA : Yeah. He does look familiar. Yeah. Amazing photos.

COOPER : And some people helped me out. This was a professor from U of L. We’ve got some real good aerial photos that were going to be used.

KOMARA : Yeah. Aerials are the way to do it.

COOPER : This was--again, this was before Google Map.

KOMARA : Means they can’t kick you out. (laughs)

COOPER : This is Daymon Morgan and he was a good KFTC member in Knott or Perry (??) or Leslie County. Somewhere--that’s--this is his beautiful home place right over the hill. 00:38:00He was a real good activist for KFTC for a long time.

KOMARA : Yeah. It’s a fantastic photo. Yeah. He-- you (??) talked about how they hide sites. I’ve almost been arrested on probably three of them.

COOPER : [?? WORDS UNCLEAR]

KOMARA : One time in Maryland I had to hide in a tree for literally two hours--

COOPER : --really?

KOMARA : --while security kept circling. I was like, oh! They knew I was there. I don’t know how--

COOPER : --(laughs)--

KOMARA : --and I was, like, not--you know, I was just taking photos. It’s not like I was going to--

COOPER : --they don’t like that. --(laughs)--

KOMARA : --publish it or anything. You know, I was just there. Like, I just wanted to photograph it and they don’t enjoy that.

COOPER : --[papers rustling]--This was one of the KFTCs. Okay. That’s Lucius Thompson.

KOMARA : Yeah. I have seen a photo of him before. The beard is memorable.

COOPER : Yeah. He lives in McRoberts and--

KOMARA : --yeah. [?? WORDS UNCLEAR]. Like, people 00:39:00have to see shit like this or it doesn’t mean anything, you know?

COOPER : That’s how we did it. It was a lot harder before YouTube.

KOMARA : Yeah. (laughs) Yeah.

COOPER : But on the other hand, you didn’t have as much competition too with--you know, with other--

KOMARA : --yeah.

COOPER : You could actually hold people’s attention a little bit more.

KOMARA : That’s very true. Attention spans have decreased. I think especially since the pandemic. I have noticed among students that attention spans have decreased.

COOPER : Do you know Erik Reece at all?

KOMARA : Yeah, I read his book. I’m going to ask to interview him, actually. I thought he’d be--

COOPER : --he’s great. He is great. This was the first--this was before his book came out and this was in, like, The Atlantic or something like that. Harper’s, 2005. So, this was before--I think this is basically his book before it came out. And 00:40:00that was a real good piece. This is just some of the stuff I pulled out.

KOMARA : Yeah. I’ve seen that, I think in an Appalshop documentary. This is good too.

COOPER : (laughs) Okay. What are we missing? I talked about the roadshow and the (pause)

KOMARA : Oh, you want to start it up again?

COOPER : Well, tell me where to go from here. I haven’t talked about climate change at all.

KOMARA : You haven’t, but we’ll get there.

COOPER : Okay. Are you going to ask me questions?

KOMARA : Yeah. Absolutely.

COOPER : Yeah. Why don’t you help me along here?

KOMARA : Sure. (pause) So, tell me a little bit about the Mountaintop Removal Roadshow itself. Like, what did you do in the presentation? How did you reach audiences? Would you show them, how, did they get it? Was it interactive? Like, just tell me about it. Tell me about the experience.

COOPER : It was not interactive. It was me standing up before an audience that didn’t know anything 00:41:00about coal mining or--you know, I did about twenty-two states. So, I might be in Florida or Wisconsin, or people that had no connection to Appalachia. They have nothing but stereotypical, you know, ideas about Appalachia. They have no idea where their electricity is coming from. They never thought about it. They just, you know, turn the light switch on, and that’s it. (laughs) Electricity just comes from the wall. If people really--the whole--Al Gore was talking about climate change, you know, before 2000, obviously. Before the--before he tried to run for president, but it just was not part of the popular conversation at all. And I think back then a lot of people thought that climate change was a hoax and--or they got it mixed up with 00:42:00the ozone hole, which was being caused by aerosols and CFCs and things like that. And they got those two things mixed up. So, you were trying to--basically, the roadshow was trying to educate America --(laughs)-- about where your electricity comes from, and that it’s not some clean thing that just comes out of the wall. There’s a price that has to be paid for extracting this resource, and there’s people that live there. And it’s not some clean coal, you know, bullshit that--(laughs)--you know, the coal industry and Mitch McConnell and everybody else would--you know, they tried to tell everybody, oh, you know, clean coal. Nothing to worry about. (laughs) And so, we’re small grassroots groups, for the most part, fighting to educate 00:43:00America with--(laughs)--a slideshow and with handouts. (laughs) They would hand out at, you know, street protests and things like that. And people had no idea what we were talking about. (laughs) So, it’s a big thing to try and educate. And I guess you can maybe make some comparisons now to the trans community trying to educate America about what it means to be transgender and what is--what at all is involved with that. People--there’s just so many misunderstandings about it. And you’re trying to change the public dialogue and the public’s understanding of a kind of complicated issue that can’t really be reduced to soundbites. And with my roadshow, I had roughly—so, 00:44:00I would do Rotary clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and the Lions Clubs and those kind of organizations, which are great. They’re civic organizations. They’re the leaders in the community. They’re people that are involved in the community and they’re important people in the community. But you’ve only got, I think, twenty minutes to do your talk. And so, you have to get right to the point. And you’re condensing--you’re trying to condense a kind of complicated issue down--(laughs)--to fifteen or twenty minutes. But I think I was pretty well able to do that with my slideshow. And at some point, I was able to scratch together the time and the resources to put a DVD together. And what I did was, I got some of the Appalshop videos I had permission to use and there’s a wonderful filmmaker in West Virginia named B. J. Gudmundsson 00:45:00and she did a film called Rise Up! West Virginia. And there’s a terrific interview in that movie with a guy named Jim Foster, and I said, “Can I please use that for my roadshow DVD?” And she let me use it. And Jim--this is the Jim Foster interview on this DVD--which I’m going to give you. --(laughs)-- And it’s great. And it’s just--it really puts the heart in the issue of mountaintop removal. About how people who live in Appalachia feel about the mountains and seeing the places where they used to go as a boy, or a young woman, being destroyed by mountaintop removal. And so--and I was able to sell these DVDs for ten bucks or something, and that was really helpful in keeping me on the road and paying for gas. 00:46:00Today, as we’re doing this interview, the government has announced that two days ago was the hottest day on earth in recorded history. And something I read this morning said it was possibly the hottest day for the last a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. And we didn’t really focus too much on the climate change issue when we were doing mountaintop removal, because we’re trying to stay kind of focused on the issue that mountaintop removal is bad. And climate change is part of that whole discussion now, as it’s being made abundantly clear, that all this coal that we’ve been burning for the last hundred years is going up in the atmosphere and the planet is heating up. And it’s a terrifying thing to--I’m sixty-three now and we had very 00:47:00smoky skies here in the past month from wildfires that are burning in Canada--supposedly something like an area the size of the state of South Carolina has already burned. And the local TV weatherman here in Lexington is informing his viewers that it’s just nature. And, you know, Patty and I are sitting--(laughs)--there watching the TV and our heads are just (mimics sound of breaking). It’s so frustrating. What people don’t realize or don’t seem to realize is that, as those forests are burning, they’re putting more carbon into the atmosphere. It is a positive feedback loop. And as the glaciers shrink, and as sea ice melts, the ice that reflects the sunlight is being replaced by darker ocean, which 00:48:00absorbs more heat instead of reflecting it back. And these are all these positive feedback loops, and there’s a whole lot of them. And once it becomes--beyond a certain tipping point, there’s no turning back. And people are just not fully aware of this. This is not in the public consciousness in the United States. I think it is in other countries, but it’s not here. And I had a guy call me from Oregon a couple weeks ago, and he says, “Yeah, I got some friends of mine that want to move from Oregon to eastern Kentucky and they want to start an environmental education thing.” And they’ve been dealing, of course, with the forest fires in Oregon for a few years now, and, you know, the air is so unhealthy that people are leaving. And people in California are leaving, and people in Texas are--there’s a terrible 00:49:00heatwave right now in the summer of 2023, and people are leaving. And they’re looking around the country going, well, where’s a good place to move to--(laughs)--that’s not too expensive and has lots of water and has lots of forests, and you know, we don’t have to worry about this brutal summer heat?” And, you know, Kentucky looks pretty good to a lot of people. It’s cheap. Eastern Kentucky, you can buy a house for sixty thousand dollars, you know? (laughs) And if you’re from California, that’s almost laughable that you can still buy a house for that. And I think what maybe people in Eastern Kentucky that are looking at, how do we increase our population? Because they’ve had out-migration for all these years in Knott county and Perry County and Harlan County and all these Eastern Kentucky counties. What I don’t think many really realize yet is, they’re coming. They’re going to be coming. You’re going to get Californians and Texans and a whole lot of other people are going to be moving 00:50:00to Eastern Kentucky. And what would be--if that’s what you want. If you want, you know, wealthy people from California moving to Harlan County, maybe think about how our state is perceived by other parts of the country. And I know that some people might want to move to Kentucky because of the climate, but they also might be worried about some of the stereotypical ideas that they might have about Eastern Kentucky, and all the things that are talked about on the Appalachian studies, Listserv, on and on about Deliverance and J. D. Vance and so on. That’s all been beaten to death. But wouldn’t it be great if Kentucky could present the kind of an image that maybe Western North 00:51:00Carolina has around Asheville, where you have a progressive community that would be inviting to people from California, for example. Where people would come there and say, come to Harlan County. And say, oh, look, there’s a vegan restaurant! Or there’s, you know, mountain bike trails, or you know, something else that makes them feel like, this is a place where I would want to live. And what I’m a little bit concerned about is that they all are going to end up in Lexington--(laughs)--because we have this major university and that--you know, and that feels safe; to move to a university town. What we really--what I would like to see--I don’t want to speak--(laughs)--for people in eastern Kentucky. Oh, please God, no. (laughs) But if we do want to increase the population in some of the counties that have had a pretty substantial population decline, bookstores, bike trails, 00:52:00(laughs) vegan restaurants and coffee shops would be the kind of thing that I would hope that this--the leaders in organizations like SOAR--which is Shaping Our Appalachian Region--and the East Kentucky Leadership Council that’s trying to envision the future for eastern Kentucky. I think that we are going to have climate migrants coming in waves in the next few years. And let’s--if we want that, let’s think of ways that we can make these communities inviting to them. And maybe they’ll come in and build nice houses and be part of the community and contribute. And not try and change Harlan County into California, but contribute to the community and be active, good participants. I think it would be good, but that’s of course the discussion that people in 00:53:00Eastern Kentucky have to have. There’s a--so, one last thing about my DVD. The last chapter of this eight-part thing that I put on my DVD is about the positive feedback changes and positive feedback loops in climate change. And there was a film that was put together--and it’s been ten, fifteen years ago--by a guy at the London Art Academy, I believe. It has a title which I don’t really like. But the title of it is called Wake Up, Freak Out. And it’s an animated piece about the positive feedback mechanisms of climate change. And it--this piece really has a punch to it. So, I did include that, as part of my roadshow, on the DVD. But I tried to show it to an audience one time--(laughs)--and they just completely turned off. (laughs) This was in--this was 00:54:00back in the 2000s, and it was just way too much for them, too fast. And--(laughs)--the organizer of the event told me to turn it off. (laughs) So, it’s too much, too fast. But--

KOMARA : Yeah. Climate--obviously climate change is a really complicated issue. And as you said, there’s a lot of ignorance about climate change, a lot of misconceptions about climate change, a lot of misconceptions about environmentalism and Appalachia. And you know, as somebody who’s worked in Appalachian and Commonwealth a long time, like what kind--what do you think are the primary barriers to environmental literacy generally, climate change, and what can we do to address this?

COOPER : The biggest issue that I see right now is the misinformation campaigns that are coming from 00:55:00--I mean, let’s just call it out: the Fox News and the Republican Party. And, you know, you would have--ten or fifteen years ago, you would have thought that--we’ve had the--like I said before, we’ve had the hottest day in record in maybe in the last a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. You would think that that would be enough to silence all doubt and alarm bells would be ringing throughout the country and in Congress, and that the legislators would say to themselves, oh my God! It’s happening! It’s happening much faster than we thought. This is absolutely terrifying. We must act now. You would think. But no. (laughs) And 00:56:00it’s--damn(??) these people that have--that perpetuate these lies. And I just don’t understand how they are able to live with themselves. I was at--a friend, Julian Martin, was with the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and he passed away about three weeks ago. And--just a great guy. And he was a teacher in the West Virginia public school systems and he was a progressive liberal. He was one--I think he was the first Peace Corps volunteer from the state of West Virginia. Just a great guy. And he told me, “Dave, you should be going to these science teacher conventions. They have them all over the country and all the science teachers come and they get all their lesson plans and things. And you can give your DVDs out to a bunch of science teachers and that way it’ll have like a multiplier effect, because then the teachers will hopefully show it to their kids.” So, 00:57:00I go, and I set up my little Mountaintop Removal Roadshow booth, and right next to me is the table of something called the Heartland Institute. They’re the global warming denier people. And they are, I think, the preeminent disinformation. But they’re all funded by oil and gas industry. And the lady was at the table right next to me. And I was trying to be cordial. (laughs) And you know, because it’s a science teachers’ convention, right? You’re not going to want to have an argument. But she just--they have--they have their-- what their goal is, is to create doubt. If they create doubt, they win. 00:58:00And if they’re able to say, well, the Earth’s temperature has always changed. You know, ten thousand years ago there was an ice age and so, therefore, you know--(taps hands)--and if they’re able to--just like the tobacco companies did, it’s the same playbook. Create doubt that, you know, cigarettes cause cancer. And if they can create doubt--they don’t have to win the argument, they just have to create doubt. And that’s what they do. And so, they say--they talk about things like sunspots, and they have another campaign called Unstoppable Global Warming, which is that, the planet is heating up and there’s nothing you can do about it and so, don’t worry about it. And these are people that are--my 00:59:00feeling as I see what’s happening right now is--and this is just me talking. I’m not speaking for anybody else. And I hate to do this. But I think we are screwed. I really don’t--I mean, these forest fires in Canada this summer has been so deeply distressing to me. You can’t even go outside. I can’t--I like to ride my bike. I can’t even ride my bike because the air is so bad. And it wasn’t--it was twice as bad in New York City and a lot of Philadelphia and a lot of these other places. The planet’s burning up. And this is--in our lifetimes, we’re watching this happen. And 01:00:00you know, I’ve kind of been sort of kind of in the middle of this issue for the last twenty years or so, and I--you know, I’ve--there’s been times where I’ve just felt crushing pressure. And, you know, maybe if I was a better public speaker, maybe if--(laughs)--you know, you think those kind of things and it’s like, maybe if I’d, you know, done this or done that and--but it’s just you’re up against well-funded, very slick, smart PR organizations that are able to create this doubt in the public mind, again, about climate change, and the planet is just hurdling towards this 01:01:00precipice right now. And it’s a point where there’s--you can’t turn back. Once the positive feedback mechanisms start feeding back on each other, the forests burn putting more carbon in the atmosphere, then you can’t just, like, say, oh, turn it around and we’ll just go back. You can’t. There’s too much momentum in the process. And (pause) there’s a cartoonist--an editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald Leader that’s pretty well-known named Joel Pett, and he’s done some great pieces on environmental issues and mountaintop removal. And I saw him give a talk at UK probably five years ago. And he said to the audience--he said, “Don’t have kids.” Uh (pause)--(laughs)--that 01:02:00was his assessment. It’s rough. It’s going to be rough. These--you know, as these--you know, what’s next?

KOMARA : Yeah.

COOPER : My friend Eric Blevins, that I traveled on the roadshow with, used to watch these videos from a guy named Derek Jensen. Are you familiar with him?

KOMARA : [?? WORDS UNCLEAR]

COOPER : It’s just all--it’s all--you know, like--(laughs)--one of his videos is called something like As the Planet Burns or something like that. (laughs) You know, it’s all the-- it’s the very deep, dark, depressing, you know, we’re doomed, kind of stuff. And I was just like, it’s like, Eric, I cannot watch that stuff. It was just too -- It’s too disturbing. But, you know, if you are--if you feel like you are a person that wants to create 01:03:00change in society--and that’s what I would consider myself. I’m an activist. I’ve tried to do what I can for the last twenty years on this issue. You sometimes really can feel a lot of--(laughs)--despair over this issue. So, what do you do? And I don’t know what to do. It’s sad.

KOMARA : Yeah. You are not the only person that has voiced that for this project, so, don’t feel like you went too dark. (laughs)

COOPER : Really?

KOMARA : Yeah. I interviewed a Lutheran minister and she straight up said, “We can’t save the planet, but here’s how we extend grace. Here’s how, you know, we embody joy and social equity in the meantime.” And I was like, damn! (laughs) So, yeah, I appreciate your perspective.

COOPER : And, you know, and not even--and 01:04:00for young people it’s like (pause) they’re going to be so--when the full realization hits of what’s happening, the young people are going to be so angry at my generation for doing this. And why didn’t they do more to stop this? How could they have done this to us? Didn’t they care? How could--you know, how could they have been so stupid? I used to--when I was doing the roadshow, that was kind of one of my punchlines towards the end of the presentation, was talking about how people--you know, when you flatten a mountain, it doesn’t grow back. (laughs) It’s going to be flat for millions of years. It’s not--you 01:05:00know, and if there’s people on this planet, you know, ten thousand years from now, they’re going to look back at these flattened mountains and ruined Appalachia and say, how could the people have been so stupid back then? And I sort of pause after that--(laughs)--to sort of let that sink in with the audience. I wasn’t--you know, I was never a really good public speaker. Larry could bring a room full of people to tears. He was amazing--when he was on. Sometimes he was absolutely off. (laughs) I saw that too. But he--when he was on, he was really, really good. And because he’s--nobody can speak about Appalachia like somebody who has been raised there. And I was just--you know, I’m just a transplant and I tried to do my best to educate people. And then I would generally--if I had Larry with me or Judy Bonds or somebody like that, they would put the heart on the subject, so.

KOMARA : Well, your work is really 01:06:00amazing. And I’m curious, you know, what are the biggest lessons that you’ve learned doing environmental activist work? (pause)

COOPER : Um, the role that the foundations and the funding plays is, is important. And I’m on a nonprofit board right now for a small organization called Kentucky Heartwood, and we--our issue is fighting logging and log--abusive, bad logging practices on public lands like Daniel Boone National Forest. And Kentucky Heartwood’s been around for about thirty years now. It’s a really small group. There’s three, three and a half (??) people on-staff. And in the beginning the organization’s annual budget was something 01:07:00like five thousand dollars and--but has been very effective at stopping the logging, just because the membership is so committed and so devoted to the issue. And it really burns me when I see--you know, and we could do a lot with--Kentucky Heartwood, we could do a lot with more funding. We could have more staff, for one thing. It really burns me when I see organizations that have millions of dollars in funding, and executive directors making a hundred thousand a year, and half of their staff is devoted to grant writing and writing reports to the foundations. And you know, that’s a tremendous amount of people power that’s just devoted to satisfying 01:08:00the requirements of these big foundations, like the Ford Foundation and so on. And they really make these nonprofit groups jump through all kinds of hoops and do all kinds of stuff. To the point where I think a third to a half of their staff is just doing grant reports. And that just really burns me up. I would so much rather see money being (pause) provided to the small outfits that are out there. You know, it was hard doing this roadshow without any funding. And you know, I try and talked to some of the foundations and they just wouldn’t--they were just like, nope, you’re not a nonprofit. 01:09:00And I was like, but I’ve--doing a hundred--you know, I’m doing a hundred speaking gigs a year. And they’re like, well, if you’re not a nonprofit, we can’t--we won’t even talk to you. And they would just--that hurt. I still haven’t really kind of gotten over that. But, if the big foundations really want to stop climate change and stop mountaintop removal, I think they need to be a little bit more willing to think creatively about how to approach the problem. And you know, the roadshow that Lenny Kohm did for the Arctic, I think is generally considered to be the most effective campaign 01:10:00that actually has stopped the drilling there. He was on the road for a decade and he educated America with his slideshow and his Native American. That kind of work should be funded. And so, that’s (pause) that’s kind of how I feel about it.

KOMARA : Yeah. What’s next for you? Do you intend to continue any kind of educational work or activist work? You said you’re with the Heartwoods Foundation now?

COOPER : Yeah.

KOMARA : Like what’s on the horizon for you?

COOPER : Um, I hit the wall--(laughs)--for doing the roadshow. Actually, when I was done with the 01:11:00roadshow and after Mountain Justice petered out, I launched a summer festival. It was called the Whippoorwill Festival. And it was--I founded that and 2011 was the first year. And this was supposed to be a celebration of Appalachian, like, old time skills and traditions. And what we would do is bring in young people to learn about the old ways that Appalachians would--people would do home canning. Some survival skill kind of type stuff. And then in the evening--we’d have workshops all day long. It was a four-day outdoor festival. It was family friendly, no alcohol. And we would have Appalachian music and dancing in the evenings, and we’d have speakers, and it was great the first few years. And I was really 01:12:00proud of that and the festival grew and grew, and I worked and worked and worked at it and finally hit the wall on that too around 2015. And that was--2016 was my last year. But they’re going to--the festival’s going to come back. It’s called the Whippoorwill Festival: Skills for Earth Friendly Living. And that was--after that was over, I just kind of said, “I think I’m done,” and really just kind of retired from activism pretty much. (laughs) It’s hard. Being an activist is rough. It is--there’s some great moments to it. There’s some--you know, it’s definitely the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I can look back on that work with--I feel proud of what I did, but 01:13:00it’s not really very sustainable. There’s a guy in Berea named Craig Williams whose mission has been to stop the US Army from incinerating nerve gas at the Bluegrass Army Depot. He’s been on that campaign for--since, like, ‘86--(laughs)--I think, when they first proposed to build a nerve gas incinerator. And I saw a thing in the paper today that they’re just getting ready to incinerate--or to dispose off safely the last remaining stockpile of nerve gas. So, that’s--so, 1986 to 2023, Craig Williams has been on this for forty years now, almost. It’s unbelievable. There are very, very few people like Craig Williams on this planet. 01:14:00And he got--he also got the Goldman Environmental Prize, which is the top prize for environmental activism. And he definitely deserved it. (laughs) But most average, normal people cannot do this intensive environmental activist work for more than about--ten years is about--I’d say is about the limit. There’s a few extraordinary people like Craig Williams, Larry Gibson and Judy Bonds, or Teri Blanton, and there’s others. But it’s rough. We need, we need some, we need some support--(laughs)--out there.

KOMARA : Yeah. That’s literally what Teri said. You and Teri are in great agreement about how hard it is.

COOPER : Do you have her--I haven’t talked to her in a long time. Do you have her number?

KOMARA : Yeah, I do. I’ll hook you up with Teri. (laughs) Gosh, you’ve talked about so many great things with such great 01:15:00analysis. I feel like I’m probably not asking you something that’s really relevant. Like, is there anything else you want us to know? You’re good? You’re done? This is a wonderful interview, Dave.

COOPER : That’s okay (??)

KOMARA : Thank you. This is really great. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me and do this.

COOPER : I have never--I’ve actually never done this before.

KOMARA : Really?

COOPER : About this.

KOMARA : Really?

COOPER : You’re the first one. (laughs)

KOMARA : Well, then good. I’m twice as glad--

COOPER : --yeah--

KOMARA : --that we recorded you for the project.

COOPER : I’m very, very pleased that this will be recorded and be part of the archives. Can I give a shout out here to a couple people who really got me started on this?

KOMARA : Yeah.

COOPER : When I first moved to Kentucky trying to understand this place, somebody said, well, you should read Night Comes to the Cumberlands, it explains a lot about Kentucky. (laughs) So, Harry Caudill, everyone should read that book.

KOMARA : Yeah.

COOPER : And are you familiar with this book?

KOMARA : I haven’t read it 01:16:00yet, but everybody loves that book. Chad Montrie. Yeah.

COOPER : This is To Save the Land and People by Chad Montrie, who’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, Massachusetts. And this is the opposition to strip-mining in the Seventies (??), with Uncle Dan Gibson and “Widow” Ollie Combs and all those stories. And it’s a, this was, I believe it was his PhD dissertation at U of L. That’s a great book. And there’s a really good Appalshop film called To Save the Land and People. The same--yeah, same title and covers the same--a lot of the same ground, the video. So, that’s a good one too. For any Appalachian scholars that are researching the history of opposition to strip-mining, Chad Montrie’s book is a must.

KOMARA : Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

COOPER : Thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you.

KOMARA : I’ll turn the recorder off. --(laughs)-- 01:17:00You said you’re not a good public speaker, Dave, but that’s not true. You’re great at--you’re really good at analysis. Like, you don’t just tell facts, you tell, like, what you think the importance of them are. Like, you’re like the perfect narrator. I kept thinking of the follow up questions and then you would just ask them of yourself and do an analysis about it. It’s, like, so good. So good.

[End of recording]