Andrew McKnight

June 19, 2009
Now available at www.auroralights.orgnbsp; is Still Moving Mountains: The Journey Home, a second CD...

June 19, 2009
Now available at www.auroralights.orgnbsp; is Still Moving Mountains: The Journey Home, a second CD of songs produced by Jen Osha and Aurora Lights to raise public awareness of the heavy impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) on the people and environment of rural south-central Appalachia. Through 14 musical tracks and additional interviews with coalfield residents as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathy Mattea, the new CD mourns the devastation of landscapes and communities by MTR and celebrates the courage and legacy of coalfield resistance.

Andrew, current Beyond Borders bandmate and founding Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member Les Thompson, and past WV state Fiddle Champion Chance McCoy wrote and recorded "Made by Hand" (click to stream MP3) for the new CD, which also features tracks from Kathy Mattea, Del McCoury, Blue Highway, and Great American Taxi as well as Andrew's dear friends and labelmates at Falling Mountain Music, Keith & Joan Pitzer and Debra Cowan. 

The new CD is the followup to 2004's Moving Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, which opens with Andrew's track "Company Town" (click to stream MP3). As with the first CD, part of the proceeds from sales of Still Moving Mountains will directly benefit groups working to end MTR in southern West Virginia.

Beyond the collection of music, the project goes hand in hand with a multimedia website titled Journey Up Coal River. The website features links to interviews with residents and activists in the Valley, as well as additional photographs and songs particularly related to the local area. "The multimedia website also serves as a classroom educational tool, providing lesson plans layered in six themes," says the website's designer and copy-editor, Charles Suggs. "Professors from both within West Virginia and out of state have already started developing unique curricula based upon the CD and website."

Developed with financial support from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the website adds to community efforts by mapping the Coal River Valley through the eyes of the community itself. Listeners can use the map to pinpoint the setting of a song or issue, and find photographs, videos, interviews, and stories to deepen their understanding of the issue, and even get involved themselves.

MTR has devastated huge swaths of West Virginia and Kentucky, as the mountains are explosively leveled to get easy access to the thin coal seams below, and the debris is pushed into the stream valleys. Over 1,200 miles of streams have been buried in West Virginia alone. MTR is hugely controversial, but remains largely unseen by the public as it is usually done out of sight of major highways and roads. Much of the catastrophic flooding that has been in the news in recent years is in areas of West Virginia that have been heavily mountaintop mined, and have not historically been prone to flooding.

One of the flash points in the MTR controversy is the Marsh Fork elementary school complex sitting at the foot one of the largest earthen dams in North America. The dam holds back a huge reservoir of coal slurry from a nearby mountaintop mining site. The state of WV claims it can't afford to move the school, so the children spend five days a week in the shadow of a ticking time bomb. For more about the environmental impacts, legal battles, and the people who've been impacted by MTR, please visit AppalachianVoices.org or read recent articles from The Washington Post.

Still Moving Mountains and Journey Up Coal River are both produced by Aurora Lights, and you purchase the CD at their website, www.auroralights.org