Collegiate Times

Before you head home for spring break, stay in Blacksburg an extra day to celebrate Mardi Gras early while helping a great cause.

BURG, which stands for Blacksburg United for Responsible Growth, along with the Coalition for Justice, is holding their annual Mardi Gras event this Saturday. For the past five years, BURG has organized a celebration fundraiser for Mardi Gras that benefits a certain non-profit organization.

This year, the group is holding the event to help out the Keeper of the Mountain foundation, based out of West Virginia, which led to this year’s event name — “Mardi Gras in the Mountains.”

BURG is a community based grass-roots group that was originally formed to fight the projected arrival of Wal-Mart in Blacksburg several years ago. Although Wal-Mart was part of the reason the group was formed, the main point was to ensure land use and development in Blacksburg was fair and beneficial to the community.

As a way to make funds, the group began its first Mardi Gras celebration. After its battle with Wal-Mart was settled, the group remained in tact and continued its yearly celebrations, as well as beginning to donate proceeds to other non-profit groups.

“It was always so much fun, and always drew a lot of people, because it’s the time when people are starting to come out of hibernation, looking for something to do,” said Margaret Breslau, a member of BURG and the owner of the sweatshop free store Homebody, located on Main Street.

Although BURG still works on local issues, they see helping out other non-profits as a way of looking “at the bigger picture issues.”

In the past, the proceeds from the Mardi Gras celebrations have gone to organizations that helped out Hurricane Katrina victims and victims of last year's earthquake in Haiti.

“This year we really wanted to do something with environmental impact issues,” Breslau said. “Since we live in the mountains, the mountains are important to us.”

Breslau is just one of many people who are strongly opposed to mountain top removal, a method of coal extraction, which Keeper of the Mountain strives to eliminate.

Larry Gibson, KOTM’s founder, has worked for over 20 years educating people about mountain top removal and its consequences in an attempt to save the mountains he loves so dearly. He has lived among the mountains throughout this time period, as well as the coalfields that many of the mountains have become. Impressed with his work, Breslau and other BURG members agreed that KOTM was the perfect organization to help out with this year’s Mardi Gras event.

Mountain top removal is the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to extract a large amount of coal from the earth, and is therefore a very common occurrence.

“Once you blow off the top of a mountain,” Breslau said, “nothing’s gonna grow there anymore. All the residual stuff and the sludge remains, and you’ve lost your mountain.”

According to Breslau, this practice “devastates communities.”

This devastation includes an economic impact, because after the loss of a mountain, many people leave their communities because they either don’t want to live in the devastated environment, or have lost their livelihoods. When enough people leave the community, so does most of its money.

That is why KOTM was such a fitting candidate for the fundraiser.

According to Patricia Feeney, board member secretary for KOTM, the non-profit organization has three pillars to combat mountain top removal.

“One, we travel the country talking about mountain top removal, inspiring and educating people to take action," she said. "Two, we are trying to pass the Clean Water Arotection Act, a federal law that will essentially end mountain top removal coal mining. We also bring thousands of people every year up to Kayford Mountain, as sort of the cornerstone of what we do.”

Kayford Mountain is a mountain in West Virginia that Larry Gibson was actually able to protect from mountain top removal. He has preserved the mountain’s fifty acres, which stands in stark contrast to the surrounding thousands of acres that have undergone mountain top removal.

Continue Reading: 12 Next » 

A version of this article appeared in the Mar 3 issue of the Collegiate Times.