An anti-strip mining rally in Nashville organized by SOCM, Save Our Cumberland Mountains. The group attempts to meet with Governor Ray Blanton but is only granted a meeting with his aide, James Allen.
00:20Copy video clip URL SOCM members speaking to Tennessee’s Capitol staff about speaking to the Governor Ray Blanton. They want to talk to the governor directly but the staff member wants them to meet with one of his advisors. The SOCM members are insistent. The staff member refuses, “I”m sorry that’s all we can do.”
04:03Copy video clip URL The staff members leave and the SOCM group waits around in the offices.
05:12Copy video clip URL A staffer encourages SOCM to speak to him and to Jim Allen, advisors to the governor, to see if they can offer answers. The SOCM representative expresses his frustrations. “It’s just hard to relate through somebody else the issue that’s this size and been going on this long at the point that it is now. There’s violence taking place.” He discusses the coal companies efforts to petition the federal government to “demand the right to rape and rob the land of its natural resources without any federal regulations, and of course the state regulations, as poor as they are they’re not being enforced.”
08:23Copy video clip URL The staff member encourages SOCM to meet with him and Jim Allen and then to arrange an appointment with Governor Blanton. That is difficult for SOCM because they’re all working people and can’t travel across the state without losing money. The staff member says that the governor has appointments all day long but that he and Jim Allen are ready to meet with them right now.
12:58Copy video clip URL Small talk. The staffer leads the SOCM group to a meeting room.
17:02Copy video clip URL The SOCM representative tells aide Jim Allen about the destruction caused by strip mining, quoting Governor Blanton’s statements of support for strip mining because there might not be anything else of value in the rural hills. Land being destroyed and plants, and people, being poisoned.
18:33Copy video clip URL Lack of enforcement of existing laws.
19:37Copy video clip URL An attendee points out that there are laws regulating water quality but that only one or two people are working to enforce those standards throughout the state.
21:11Copy video clip URL Another attendee talks about the floods caused by strip mining.
22:12Copy video clip URL “What we’d like to see is the phase out of strip mining because there’s a breakdown in law enforcement in all these agencies.” Allen shares that he’s never been to a strip mine himself but that he hopes to visit one one of these days. An attendee asserts that he needs to see one in person to understand “the deplorable state that we live in” thanks to strip mining.
24:43Copy video clip URL SOCM’s efforts since 1972 to get their senator to meet with them.
26:38Copy video clip URL Allen assures the attendees that the governor “feels like he’s your number one lobbyist.. and he strongly feels this position, but he also has a mandate to operate within the bounds of the law and laws are not easy to change…. It takes time to do what you want to do.”
27:44Copy video clip URL A SOCM member points out that all studies support their position that strip mining needs to be phased out for many reasons, including economic reasons. Allen tells an anecdote about the diesel engine, which people who worked on trains didn’t like.
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