Music Saves Mountains at Bonnaroo

There were a number of unforgettable moments this past weekend after our Music Saves Mountains team traveled to Manchester, Tenn. for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival to help stop mountaintop removal. As one can only imagine, I left Tennessee with an infinite number of stories, from the best shows (Eminem, hands down but seriously) to a little slice of heaven known as Hometown Diner (three words, unlimited sweet tea) to quite possibly the roughest porta-potties on earth (you  don’t really want to know).

But of all the stories I walked away with, the one that left the biggest impression was that of a thousand activists visiting our Music Saves Mountains table to lend their name to help stop mountaintop removal. Visitors to our table were so heavily invested in our cause that by the end of our Bonnaroo experience some members of our team could actually pick individuals out of the crowd of 80,000-plus festival goers and say, “I remember that person wanting to save mountains.”

After four long* days, we walked away with more than a thousand hand-written signatures to help stop mountaintop removal. If you need me to put that into perspective for you, that’s more than a thousand people who took five minutes of their Bonnaroo experience in 90-plus degree heat to step away from musical acts like Arcade Fire, The Black Keys and Lil Wayne and voluntarily signed our petition. More than just lending their name, these activists openly shared their reactions and stories with us.

Whether having grown up in Kentucky and seeing firsthand the devastation of mountaintop removal to just having learned about it in a college environmental course, everyone had something unique and personal to offer. They might have been learning the facts from us, but it’s safe to say we were learning much more from them. After years of living in the Washington, D.C. political bubble, I was surprised to hear nearly every time when we asked people to sign our petition, the usual response was “Of course, why after all that wouldn’t I write my name down on a piece of paper.” You’d think that with such an environmental and public health problem continuously destroying Appalachia, we’d encounter this response more often.

But it wasn’t a surprise to those volunteering with our team who are from Tennessee and face these encounters on a day-to-day basis. The impact weighs so heavily on them that several volunteers worked tirelessly, weeks before the event designing and constructing our homemade mountaintop theater. Festival goers were able to spend time inside the structure, built to look just like a mountain with its top removed, viewing The Last Mountain, a documentary about the fight to protect the last great mountain in America’s Appalachian heartland against mountaintop removal. It was truly inspiring to see the whole process from design, to construction, to a mulch-lined room full of people viewing the documentary in awe and silence.

So yes, I might be going out to buy the new Eminem album tomorrow but what more is I’ll be going into my advocacy work with a refreshed approach, one that I feel everyone needs to take part in on a regular basis. I know those thousand signatures mean something more than just dropping them off with the administration because I was there getting to know a little bit more about the person behind them.

If you want to be one of our activists but didn’t have a chance to attend Bonnaroo, there’s still an opportunity for you to make a difference and help stop mountaintop removal. Visit our web site Music Saves Mountains and take our action there. Then find us on Facebook or Twitter and tell us why saving mountains is important to you. I promise we’ll be there, interacting with these spaces so we can learn more about what it means to be a growing advocacy group.

*This would be the Bonnaroo definition of long. I’m pretty sure the festival site and camp grounds suck you up upon entrance and destroy your concept of time.

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