Father John Rausch takes people to see firsthand the ravages of coal mining.
Patrick J. Kiger

ON TOUR : Father John Rausch (right) talks with a participant on one of his many Appalachian tours.

Father John Rausch looked past a large sign that warned “No Unauthorized Entry Past This Point” and at the approaching pickup truck whose burly, hard-hat-wearing occupants seemed to be staring in his direction. “I wonder if they’re coal company security,” he said, a bit uneasily. The truck passed, and Father John went back to surveying the barren, gouged-out plateau that had once been a tree-lined mountaintop.

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” he asked the four photo-snapping sightseers tagging along on his “Mountaintop Removal Tour,” a whirlwind two-day excursion to take in the ravages of coal mining in the hollows of southeastern Kentucky. “It’s even more disturbing to realize that, when you flip a switch and waste electricity, you may be contributing to taking down a mountain.”

In his calling as a tour guide, Father John hopes to lure well-meaning outsiders to see what happens when you blow off the tops of mountains to get at the coal inside. Father John’s aim is “to make people angry about what they see,” he explained. “That way, maybe they’ll go out and do something,” he says.

Everyone on his tour gets a pamphlet that he’s written on “care of creation” that includes quotes from Pope John Paul II on the sacred obligation to protect the environment. “It’s a part of the Church’s teachings that’s often overlooked,” Father John said.

As clouds of dust from mining sites swirled in the distance, Father John assembled his latest tour group in the Wal-Mart parking lot in the small mining town of Hazard. After a lunch of vegetable soup and homemade banana cream pudding in the rectory of Our Mother of Good Counsel Church, everyone headed off for a drive down battered country roads. As a succession of 60-ton coal trucks passed by, Jeff Combs, a 25-year-old Eastern Kentucky University student, gave a quick lecture on the history of coal mining in Appalachia. The group stopped to snap photos of the rusting remains of an abandoned coal-washing plant while Combs, whose family has lived in the area since the 19th century, explained that his ancestors once owned this land. “My great-grandfather is buried out there, past the slurry pond,” he said.

The tour group spent the night at a monastery, then headed back into the hollows to meet locals whose homes had been damaged by mining company blasting. “My husband thought it was an earthquake, it was so bad,” explained a woman in her 60s, who added that her driveway and even the seals on her windows had been cracked by the explosions. A Baptist minister recounted how his community had been flooded five times in an 18-month period, and how continuous exposure to dust from coal trucks had permanently damaged his health. “I only have 40 percent lung capacity now,” he said.

The last stop was Hazard’s small airport—built on a mountaintop removal site—where everyone took turns squeezing into a prop plane for an aerial tour of nearby mining sites. The sprawling expanse of rust-colored scars is precisely the sort of jaw-dropping sight that Father John hopes will motivate visitors to think beyond coal. “Why not turn southeastern Kentucky into a center for developing alternative energy?” he asked.

Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher has proposed spending $3 million on wildlife viewing stations to lure nature lovers to coal country’s denuded mountaintops. Father John is skeptical. But as he led his band of anti-ecotourists around another flattened peak virtually devoid of vegetation, he made a surprising discovery. “Elk turds!” he exclaimed. “Who says we don’t have economic development here?”

Reprinted, with permission from the July/August 2006 issue of Mother Jones magazine.