King Uzziah is Buried in West Virginia (Isaiah 6)
by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership
The first time I toured the state of West Virginia in the eastern U.S. was in March of 2013. Allen Johnson of Christians for the Mountains was giving a small group of colleagues a tour of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining sites, ravaged scars across the beautiful Appalachian landscape. I drove to West Virginia through Kentucky--Harlan in particular—and entered the state through Matewan, site of one of the bloodiest battles in the 1920 labor wars. My whole visit seemed built around the theme that coal has NEVER been a friend to local populations or eco-systems, despite the well-funded and victorious PR campaigns around the black rock.
Two weeks ago I was scheduled to attend a climate change conference in North Carolina and thought, hey, I’m going to drive down and spend four days camping and hiking in West Virginia. This time I would focus on West Virginia’s natural beauty. (After all, singer John Denver has told us that it is “almost heaven.”) As I approached the border, this time from the North, I had a profound sense of loss that had nothing to do with the destruction of coal mining. I was grieving the loss of colleagues. From that group in 2013, Allen has pressed more deeply into his retirement, Susan is now working in industry as a sustainability officer, and the famed activist and dear friend Peter Illyn died of cancer in 2020. Back in 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr was a strong anti-MTR activist; now he’s an anti-vaxxer presidential candidate. A week before leaving on this latest trip, I was on a Zoom call to the U.K. Tearfund has closed its Global Advocacy program and many of my friends—whom I didn’t know in 2013, but would meet in 2015 and grow to love thereafter—had lost their jobs.
When the prophet Isaiah begins what is famously recorded in Isaiah chapter 6 with the words, “In the year that King Uzziah died. . .” he was certainly locating his vision historically. This is likely the year 740 BCE. Yet, Isaiah may also have been locating his vision emotionally. King Uzziah reigned in Jerusalem for 52 years. He was the only king that Isaiah had known. As Dr. Timothy Smith writes, “At his death the nation remembered Uzziah as their best and ablest ruler since King Solomon. Having King Uzziah on the throne meant peace and prosperity for the people. But Uzziah was dead, and it felt like it would be all downhill from there. Isaiah experienced a deep sense of loss and fear for his nation’s future. Add to that the new superpower, Assyria, threatening invasion, and Isaiah didn’t know what to do.”
I set up my tent at the Glade Creek campgrounds at the southern end of America’s most recently designated national park, the New River Gorge National Park. For four days I hiked the two trails that led out from the campsite, or just sat quietly on the riverbank. I was reading John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul. A couple deer wandered into view. I felt I was immersed in the emergence of Spring in Appalachia. Nonetheless, it didn’t take long to hear and notice that on the other side of the river in the gorge was a set of railroad tracks that were still being used to haul coal. On one afternoon, I sat and counted 120 cars of coal barrelling by me. Thirty minutes later, another locomotive came by hauling 60 cars. If the average train car carries 105 tons of coal, that would be 18,900 tons heading to market in less than an hour. Depending on the carbon-intensity of that particular type of coal, if burned, those carloads barrelling down New River Gorge could be responsible for 49 tonnes of CO2 released in the atmosphere—perhaps not a drastic contribution to climate change, but a relentless one, and a daily one since 2013, and since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and right in the middle of my meditations on the sacred earth and sacred soul of Appalachian beauty. The first time I ever saw the National Park Service acknowledge climate change was in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado in 2008 where tourists like me were apparently nagging rangers for an explanation of the pine beetle devastation on the western slope of the park. Yet at the Canyon Rim Visitors Center at New River Gorge National Park there is a whole exhibit dedicated to the glories of West Virginia coal. It makes sense. There is no way politically that the federal government could lay claim to parkland in West Virginia without giving a nod to the coal industry. The system rolls on.
In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Did I see the Lord at the Glade Creek campground? Actually, yes, in that I think I experienced him. My morning routine was to hike along the river until I came to a tumbled-down stone building. The roof was gone and one whole wall was missing. Trees had grown up where the inside of the building had been, and the trees were of sufficient height to indicate that this building had been abandoned probably before World War II. The ground was covered in a field of white wildflowers and was abuzz with bees and wasps collecting pollen. Birds flitted in and out. I set up my camping chair and declared, in John Muir-fashion, this is my chapel. There was even one old column of stone in the middle, covered in moss, and cut down to the size of an altar. On my last morning, I saw a rock near the trailhead that was the color and shape of a loaf of bread. I carried it in and placed it on the altar, as if it was poised to become the Real Presence. Isaiah said, in verse 4, that at the sound of the seraphim’s voices “the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke,” but the preceding verse isn’t so in-doors: “the whole earth is full of his glory,” the angels declared, which surely in 740 BCE as in 2024 would have included this river gorge in Appalachia.
When a local hiker came by, I asked him what this building would have been. He said it was likely a smelting shed. This whole side of the river would have been a coal camp. Nature was reclaiming it and God was offering it back to us in new ways.
Our reading of Isaiah 6 is also remembered by its famous commission. “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” I rolled up my sleeping bag on my final morning, gave a thought to Allen, Susan, Peter, and my Tearfund colleagues and drove away to at least one more climate change meeting.