“Change is so challenging. We restored the water in this creek so it is drinkable, swimmable, fishable.”

The night before we met, I dreamt of the color gold, feminine energy, and stewardship of the land. The next morning, at a retreat in the Laurel Highlands (as part of the Lead Now Pittsburgh Cohort), Ashley gave a land acknowledgement and told us her family had lived there for generations. Her golden brown hair and her dress the color of sun, fields, and leaves—I knew I wanted to paint her.

Ashley said I was the first to photograph her in a place that’s meaningful to her, rather than a mine or drilling site (preferred by reporters covering the watershed Ashley’s organization protects).

She took me through meadows where her beloved Mountain Laurel grows, to this place: Indian Creek. Her favorite time is morning when the sun’s warm rays meet the cool surface of the water, and mist rises and slowly dissipates. That image of vapor felt like an image for the indigenous people here. For many of us their presence and stewardship are invisible, forgotten. But like the sun’s light, Ashley showed me that these people, their ancestors, and their Spirit are still here, and we are guests in their home.

 

Jeffrey Dorsey

This creek, which was behind my home, used to run orange from abandoned mine drainage. The organization that I work with now as the director, we have been able to restore the water quality in 70% of this creek. So now it is drinkable, swimmable, fishable. I love this place. I’m the seventh generation of my family to live in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania. One reason it’s called the Laurel Highlands is because that plant is so abundant here. I think they’re just so beautiful.

I left for college, I was gone for about five years, and I thought that I would never come back because I grew up queer and poor, and I felt that this wasn’t the place for me at all to be, in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. But I quickly felt it in my bones that I had to be here. And I also felt like this is where my work would have the most impact. Because so many people leave and never come back.

And it makes it so challenging for change to happen. So that’s one thing that I’ve always felt committed to—it hasn’t wavered—is living here. And I think that having grown up in this place and having generationally been here for so long, it does feel really important for me to play a part in protecting this land and the water.

It feels really powerful to know that the work that I’m doing every day is making it possible for me to be in that water and to experience it. And not just for me, but for all of the critters and wildlife and thousands of people who depend on it as a drinking water source.

At this point I had become really grounded in my morals, in my politics, and I wanted to put that grounding in action. And I think when people met me at this point in my life, they would describe me as fiery. I’ve always been very committed, and that energy and that enthusiasm is really what I think was necessary to propel me to where I am now. And also to navigate the terrain through the pandemic, through so many shifts in my life and my work.

Back then I was trying to get my footing in my organizing work. Now we have this entire community and people who are really looking to me to guide a vision for how we respond and take action to authoritarianism. Not just within environmental justice work, but also social justice work at large. I have community relationships and a base built. Now it’s a matter of taking action while also trying to keep grounded myself, and to remind others to keep grounded so that we don’t fall into a place of despair. That feels particularly important.

One of the reasons our organization is unique is that we do active remediation work. So we clean up the water. It’s really important for this work to continue.

We have five abandoned mine treatment systems that we actively maintain. So the water quality stays healthy, but we also try to prevent new developments. in our area in particular, that looks like coal mining developments. We have thousands of acres of underground coal mines proposed for this watershed. We’ve been pushing back against the expansion of these coal mines for the past five years. It’s really daunting to come into this new administration where everything in terms of fossil fuel development is being given a green light. That does make our work a lot more challenging.

It’s wild that we actively see the impacts that coal mining has on our water—we know the impacts it has on our climate—and still thousands of acres of new coal mines are being permitted.