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Q&A: Using Art to Highlight Coal Ash Pollution in Appalachia [1]

['Janie Ekere', 'The Daily Yonder']

Date: 2023-12-22

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

I originally connected with Caroline Armijo, the director of The Lilies Project, through a mutual friend who is pushing a power plant at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to move from coal to clean energy. The Lilies Project was created around the idea of using art to address a public problem, in this case, coal ash. I was fascinated by the idea of reclaiming coal ash and converting it into art, so I decided to look for more information about the organization, which has been operating out of Walnut Cove in Stokes County, North Carolina since 2018.

Armijo, a mixed-media artist and environmental advocate who grew up in Stokes County, saw firsthand the effects of coal ash on her community. Through The Lilies Project, she has done incredible work not only in environmental justice, but in capturing the hidden history of Walnut Cove. Please enjoy our conversation about the evolution of the project, the effects of coal ash in Stokes County, and the need to incorporate joy and community into activism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Janie Ekere, The Daily Yonder: Let’s talk about the coal plant in Stokes County. It says on the website that the facility stores over 20 million tons of coal ash. Why do you think this location was chosen, and what effects has the coal production had on the community in and around Walnut Cove?

Caroline Armijo: It was selected in the sixties, and it’s on four corners of Guilford, Forsyth, Stokes and Rockingham counties. The facility itself is in Stokes County. And so I think that it was probably cheap land, it was predominantly African American, it was the site of the Hairston plantation. It was on a river, which is part of [the] public utilities model for coal ash. So I think that’s probably why it was selected. Also, Stokes County does not have a ton of different industry. So it was a big industry to come in to support them through taxes and stuff. Anyway, they came in the early seventies. And I think that the impact has been – there’s just been a lot of illness and a lot of death in the community.

Caroline Armijo is an artist and coal ash activist living in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Photo by Ana Sapp)

This week there have been people that have died or had serious strokes that are very close in age to me. And I think that just really disturbs me. It’s like people are still going to keep dying. Even though we did all this advocacy, even though we won, in theory, the pollution persists. And a lot of the harms have been done. I don’t know how many generations it’ll take to not feel that impact in that area. And even though we are getting the coal ash cleaned up, I don’t know. It’s just really sad. Very disturbing. It’s been a lot. [The Lilies Project’s community partner,] David Hairston, died this summer from a heart attack. One of my classmates’ brothers died this week, and another person from school had these strokes last week. I mean, it’s just a lot. It’s just a lot.

Janie Ekere, The Daily Yonder: Yeah, I think there’s a certain vulnerability that rural communities in particular have when it comes to energy companies coming and building these plants. And you mentioned that the site of the coal plant was kind of like cheap land, and also was predominantly African American. So there’s layers of environmental racism there potentially as well.

CA: Yeah, I think that [African Americans] inherited this land and then here comes a path to get some money for it. But everybody just moved up the hill. They didn’t know that it was going to be toxic, so they didn’t move far enough away, and people got to build nice houses out of it. And it was very exciting at first, but then pretty soon afterwards, there’s all this coal ash raining down on people, and it’s such a small community. I definitely felt the impacts of that. I mean, I was sick as a child.

And so when I first started in 2010, I really knew mainly about the white people, honestly, because the community is segregated enough that you don’t know – the prayer list in the Black church versus the prayer list in the white church. And so a lot of people that would go to Belews Lake to recreate had gotten sick. Brain tumors are very common in the community. And so once we became organized, and we were definitely [a] very integrated group. It was like the people who lived right there, right on the bank of the river or the water, the stories were so much worse. I just had chronic bronchitis. And it definitely shaped who I was, and I would have skin rashes and stuff like that, but it’s not cancer. I haven’t had a stroke, I haven’t had any deformed children.

DY: You started talking about the coal ash encapsulation process that you’ve been working on with scientists at North Carolina A&T State University. Can you talk more about that?

CA: Wade Brown is the encapsulation patent holder, and he was working with Dr. Kunigal Shivakumar at A&T. I saw an article in 2014 in the Greensboro News and Record about their project. It came out after the Dan River spill, and they had received funding from the state legislature to do some research on it. And so I thought that was great because I wasn’t living in Stokes County [at the time]. I’m not a frontline community member, so I wanted to come to it from a place of a solution space because we want the ash in a landfill, and that is very important. But those landfills are going to be there for eternity. They’re not going anywhere, and Duke [Energy] only has to monitor them for 35 years. So we need to come up with some solutions to go back to these landfills and access this resource.

I’m not a scientist, so it’s a little tricky. You don’t want to advocate for something that could be potentially dangerous. But coal ash is used in gypsum board and cinder blocks and a lot of materials already. The difference between these products and the ash that’s currently being used in the market is that you don’t have to burn the ash, which is what you have to do to use it for the concrete industry – they’ve established three facilities that re-burn the ash. And so essentially that’s bypassing the safety standards that were put in place with the smoke stacks. They had put in new standards. The ash wasn’t the quality that the concrete industries needed. So that is the benefit of using the encapsulation process. You can basically just dry it out. And then also, they’ve developed these new bricks that use extraordinarily less energy to create.

A 2022 coal ash art exhibit featured by the Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art. (Photo from The Lilies Project)

DY: You have talked about some of the scientific process behind the encapsulation and its use in building materials and things like that. So how has that worked when it comes to creating the coal ash arts?

CA: For that process, I had to have partners in different areas for the grant. Wade Brown has been my technology partner and he is the [encapsulation process] patent holder. It took me a while to figure out what could we make with this process. I could do one mold. It was going to be very expensive, and so I wanted to make something that could be multiple different things. Originally I wanted to do these little mountains like the West Virginia Mountains, because essentially we’re burning the coal from West Virginia, kind of take it home to West Virginia.

But I went to Penland [School of Craft] and I took a class there – just kind of being away and having that opportunity to really think about it. They wanted me to do something that was related to railroads because that way we would have the mold and propose it to the railroad company. A lot of these agencies are just very hard to get to change. And I think [the] railroad industry is probably the hardest. It’s the same technology. It’s always been. And then I was in the studio and I was like, this looks exactly like this pole in this studio. We gotta do something more symbolic. And so that’s how I came up with a hexagon shape. I was just thinking about the symbol of hexagons and how they [are] part of a hive and a group and the community, and it’s a very strong shape.

And so that led me to the idea of you could do slices, you could do different configurations with it. And so that’s how I came up with the eight and a half foot hexagon shaped post. And so I wanted something that was both large but also could be used almost like a canvas. So it’s been good because we could really do anything that we wanted to do with the project, but it was very hard to pin down one location because I didn’t have a location and I just had to go and ask other people to do it. And this is my first experience being a public artist, and that’s hard. It’s very challenging.

So I ended up just doing a tour through the town and having different installations at multiple places. And I really liked having the pieces in the exhibit in Greensboro…I guess that’s more of my comfort zone as an artist. I just loved having that setup, that curated space, and to come in and have the interaction with people that would come and visit it.

DY: What do you think your advocacy could look like — for example your films, or more traditional organizing — as you decide to work with other communities?

CA: There was a decision that [Duke Energy] was going to clean up the six coal ash ponds. And so we had this big party at the middle school and people came in from all over the state. I think it could be maybe some more short films, but really emphasize the fun element that we had.

We did some line dancing and watched the films and it was very fun. And I think that that really helped people connect some dots that they hadn’t seen before about what was going on. So I think that what I would share with other communities is to trust the art, to celebrate what is special in your community. And it may not seem related at all, but it just opens up an invitation for different people to come in and remember that joy and that community, but then also to make those connections with what the problem is in your community. I just thought that was very magical. And it has a lot to do with having strong community leaders who are really guiding the ship of what you’re trying to do.

So I have heard from many that the ACT Against Coal Ash group, which was a statewide coalition, was very unique in that it was driven by community members. And I don’t know this because I haven’t experienced it, but I have heard that other environmental groups can be very territorial, and – I’m not sure the right word – but I want to say a “graspy” feeling of having control over situations. And like I said, that’s not been my experience, but that’s just been what I’ve sort of seen from afar. And I think that by using art in a very loose sense – I mean, we certainly would have markers and board[s] for people to use at those events. There was a very deliberate art opportunity, but there was also just the art of the experience of just bringing people together and using films or music or dance and just really pursuing fun as a way to come together. And so I think that’s really what was magical about The Lilies Project.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Get Path Finders By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

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