Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

(Photos by Frank Carlson)
Wildflowers grow along state route TN-90 in the Cumberland Mountains near the community of Eagan, Tenn.

By Frank Carlson, Medill

So we’re halfway through our week of reporting on the history and impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility and arguably the original “green collar” developer. And one theme that recurs in our conversations with East Tennesseans is the role religion plays in influencing residents’ perception of the world and of their place in it. In other words, the environment and how best to be stewards of God’s creation.

Much is made of how the religious vote—particularly the evangelical vote—will play in this election cycle. Further, there is debate if the dissatisfaction many social conservatives have with U.S. Sen. John McCain, the Republican hopeful who has had a strained relationship with many evangelical voters in the past, will cause low turnout among the conservative base of the GOP. Whether this is true, and how much U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic bidder, can win over the religious voters from the Republican Party, remains to be seen.

Marie Cirillo, 78, came to rural Appalachia as a nun but left the sisterhood to help develop communities in East Tennessee over 40 years ago.
What is known is that when examining the religious vote, many boil it down to a few controversial issues—abortion rights, gay marriage, the role of the church in the affairs of the state—and tend to view religious voters as one bloc to be appeased with a few key speeches or legislative signals.

But when discussing questions of religion and the environment with residents, politicians, professors and community leaders here in East Tennessee, the issues of justice, poverty and stewardship—perhaps the original hot button issues for world religions—are frequently cited as reasons for doing more to protect the area’s resources.

As an example, yesterday we traveled up I-75 to the coal region of northeastern Tennessee to the unincorporated town of Eagan, in Claiborne County, one of the poorest counties in the area.

After winding our way through the mist-covered Cumberland Mountains, past trailer parks, crumbling, abandoned homes and beautiful scenic vistas, we came across the Clearfork Community Institute. An old school building renovated with the help of volunteers and donations, the CCI is run by Marie Cirillo, 78, who, even though she left the convent more than 30 years ago, is still referred to as the Mother Teresa of rural Appalachia.

Cirillo came to Appalachia from Brooklyn in the 1960s as a Catholic nun but left the Church after 18 years in order to work as a rural developer. “One of the things when we left the convent, the group of us who left said, ‘We went down there to convert them, and it ended up that they converted us,’” she recalls, her Brooklyn accent still spiking each syllable.

In the Eagan area since the 1970s, Cirillo was on the forefront of the movement against strip mining in Appalachia, which in the early days was done without little or no land reclamation. These days, she says a major concern for the community is mountain top mining, which involves blasting mountains to get at coal seems just beneath the surface then replacing the land in the approximate contour in which it was found.

This area’s history—at least the past 100 years or so—cannot be separated from the coal industry. But in the last 50 years coal has been less of a friend to the community and more of a relative who’s always borrowing money and rarely, if ever, paying it back.

“We export coal, gas, oil and timber,” Cirillo says of the industries in the area.”None of it stays in the community. When we buy coal, we pay twice as much as what is sold to companies. When we buy gas, we buy bottled gas. When we buy oil, it has to come up and fill our tanks.”

“Even when we buy the wood from our houses, we have to go to the store and get it,” she adds. “It’s just terrible.”

In the 1960s, as deep mining began to fade, giving way to strip mining because of its lower cost and increased mechanization, the population in Eagan and other parts spiraled from 30,000 to 3,000, Cirillo recalls. And the communities, never wealthy by most Americans’ standards, have continued to struggle since.

“The only thing that held the community together was their shared poverty and struggle to survive,” Cirillo says, “which made for great strength—great strength in the people.”

She also says that while Americans are now more aware of the toll burning fossil fuels, including coal, takes on the global climate, they don’t consider as much the cost on local communities and ecologies that coal mining exacts.

“It’s a complicated world that we’re living in,” Cirillo concludes. “Anybody that does anything good for anybody, it probably has ripple effects to somebody else that isn’t quite so good.”

Cirillo’s comments speak to issues of environmental justice and poverty, two issues that are gaining ground as high energy prices, a foreign war in oil-rich Iraq and increased acceptance of climate change push more Americans to consider how (and from where) they produce and consume energy.

While coal will almost certainly be a hefty part of any energy consumption and production in America’s future, the effect extractive industries like coal have on rural America, both economically and ecologically, will be a shaping influence for decades to come.And Cirillo sees a shift in how Christians—those invaluable “values” voters—regard the environment.

“I think of the thousands of years since we have the religions that believe in a single God, it’s been a creator God. For thousands of years. Then, 2,000 years ago, Jesus appeared, right? And he was our teacher and our redeemer, and so many of us forgot God the creator,” she says.

“We began to concentrate more on Jesus the savior and redeemer and the teacher, and we began to believe that we were the gods, creating these cities and twin towers. And I think the more we live in cities and live in a man-made world, a people-made world, we forget that we live in a God-made world, a creation world.”