Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment

Tennessee is one of only seven states in the country that does not include a state income tax among sources of state revenue

SOCM has a long history of organizing around destruction caused by strip mining of coal. A more recent and virtually unregulated threat is large-scale surface mining for commercial rock harvesting, literally taking up fieldstone on the surface and just beneath the surface of the land to sell in large urban markets for landscaping and housing construction.

Acid mine drainage or AMD is the result of the chemical reaction that occurs when minerals containing iron and sulfur found in certain shales and coal seams combine with the oxygen in the air and water. 

Over the past 150 years of coal mining in Appalachia there have been dramatic shifts in the size of mines and the way coal is extracted. Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal mining in particular involves blasting mountains apart to extract an entire coal seam. This destructive practice forever changes the landscape, and has already disrupted many human lives and mountain watersheds in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and more recently in Tennessee. SOCM wants to prevent any more mountaintop removal in Tennessee and is working with allies throughout central Appalachia to stop MTR throughout the region.

Early in the morning of December 22nd, 2008, disruption of an earthen containment wall at a coal-fired power plant operated by TVA dumped 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge into the Emory River and neighboring communities in Roane County, Tennessee. The human and environmental consequences of this disaster have magnified the risks inherent at every point in the cycle of coal—from extraction to disposal of coal combustion waste—and brought the hazards of coal ash into the national energy conversation.

The Stream Buffer Zone rule had been in effect since 1983 to protect the nation’s headwater streams from being buried by valley fills from mountaintop removal coal mining and radical strip mining. The law required that the impacts of mining be kept at least 100 feet from a stream.

In partnership with The Alliance for Appalachia SOCM members have lobbied long and hard for passage of the Clean Water Protection Act (CWPA). SOCM members, along with fellow concerned citizens from Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and all across the country have brought the fight for clean water back to the halls of Congress.