Collaborating with Environmentalists

http://thepeoplesmusic.us/2010/05/fight-mountain-top-removal-with-good-music/

http://mountainkeeper.blogspot.com/

As the organizations linked above will show, the multitude of different strategies for achieving goals reflects the variety of goals themselves. Our topic of community health should be broadly interesting to environmentalist groups--improvements in mining practices that are meant to affect community health will inevitably promote environmentalist concerns as well.

However, coalition building can be very tricky! The political culture in West Virginia, especially in the legislature, can be very negative towards environmentalist initiatives, along with anything anti-coal and anything seen as anti-business. Therefore, in collaborating with such organizations, the movement aimed at securing healthy lives for those affected by industrial negligence must be careful in constructing its public image as PRO-PEOPLE and PRO-HEALTH and, surprisingly, PRO-COAL. The aim of the social movement is the improvement of mining practices to improve the lives of people living near the mines, not to stop coal mining itself.

The importance of collaborating with other organizations in this instance will be to learn from one another's successes and failures, to share contacts and resources, and to search for common ground--there is power in numbers.