Local Bo Makes Good

Congratulations to anti-mountaintop removal activist Bo Webb, who's been named a winner of a $50,000 "Purpose Prize" by the organization Civic Ventures. Webb, you may recall, featured in our May/June story, "Close to Home" by Jeff Biggers; he singlehandedly shut down illegal mountaintop-removal coal operations near his home in Peachtree, West Virginia, but didn't stop there. "What about the hundreds of thousands of acres of active mountaintop-removal sites that are poisoning our streams and communities right now?" he asked.

In its writeup of Webb, Civic Ventures notes the his path to activism began when his granddaughter was born prematurely in 1990. “I made a promise to my God that if she could make it, I would watch over her and try to make the world a better place,” he recalls. “I’m just fulfilling my promise.”

 For more on Webb, see Ken Ward Jr.'s excellent blog for the West Virginia Charleston Gazette, Coal Tattoo.

--Paul Rauber