Cecelia Mason, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Appalachian Pride Inspires Web Site and Podcast

The Appalachian region has long been the focus of fascination and study going back to the early 1900’s when historians and musicologists traveled through the region collecting stories and songs.

But folks from outside the region have not always promoted a flattering image. And that, along with a curiosity about his own family, inspired Dave Tabler to start his web site Appalachia History.

Tabler grew up in Washington D.C. but his father is originally from Martinsburg, in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, where Tabler spent a lot of time as a child in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Tabler has fond memories of staying with his grandparents

“I have memories for example in the spring time of, I must have been three or four years old at that time, of grabbing on to my grandfather’s trousers and walking behind him in his footsteps as he plowed the garden,” he said.

Tabler also remembers family members and their friends telling stories about the old days and sitting outside in the summer in a circle shucking corn and stringing beans.

Not so positive feedback

As a young man Tabler learned his positive feelings about Appalachian culture are not shared so much outside the region. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in art history and journalism, Tabler moved to New York City for a career marketing commercial illustrators. He also faced negative comments and jokes when people learned of his West Virginia roots.

“It just hurt me so much to hear all these ignorant comments,” he said.

When he was about 40 Tabler edited a book for his father, a memoir about growing up in West Virginia. That inspired Tabler to begin a blog about eight years ago that explored his Appalachian roots.

From blog to podcast

Initially Appalachian History was a traditional blog where Tabler discussed his own family history and his own thoughts on Appalachian culture. Eventually he expanded it to include guest writers and in 2008 he began a weekly podcast.

Technically retired, Tabler writes five blog posts and produces one podcast a week. He estimates each week about 25,000 people visit his web site, and about 15,000 subscribe to his podcast.

Tabler hopes the web site and podcast help instill a sense of pride in Appalachians about where they’re from. He doesn’t want them to feel a need to apologize for being from the region, for the way they speak, for the music that they listen to or for anything associated with Appalachian culture.

“Appalachian culture is American culture, that’s something we’ve forgotten over the years,” he said.

Catching Up With West Virginia's Teacher of the Year

It’s been a busy year for Berkeley County’s Erin Sponaugle, West Virginia’s 2014 Teacher of the Year. Aside from teaching fifth grade at Tomahawk Intermediate School near Hedgesville, West Virginia, Sponaugle has traveled across the state and country representing her profession.

“It’s been life changing and life defining," Sponaugle said.

“When this first happened back in October it appears to be an award and you assume that it is, but you soon come to the realization that it’s not just an award but it’s going to become a full time life,” she said.

That full time life has included attending and being recognized at the State of the State address in Charleston, West Virginia, a trip to Arizona to attend the National Teacher of the Year Conference and going to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where she met writer and West Virginia native Homer Hickam.

Meeting President Obama

In May Sponaugle, along with the teachers of the year from the other states, visited the White House. Sponaugle says the ceremony usually takes place in the Rose Garden but rainy weather forced everything indoors.

“Well they had to move the entire thing, bummer, into the White House,” Sponaugle said. “We had 20 to 30 minutes to roam around the green blue and red rooms and then they had the ceremony in the East room and we got to walk out the front doors of the white house which was amazing.”

Berkeley the Bear has traveled with 2014 West Virginia Teacher of the Year Erin Sponaugle across the country and state.

Sponaugle has not been traveling alone during all these trips. Her constant companion has been a stuffed bear puppet she calls Berkeley, after Berkeley County. Sponaugle takes photographs of Berkeley everywhere she goes.

“I’ve taken pictures of him and he writes a blog about all the experiences. It’s really me doing the writing,” Sponaugle confides, “bears aren’t that talented.”

“He talks about all the places he’s been for kids so they can see what this journey is about and learn more about their state,” she said.

Sponaugle took photos of Berkeley at Space Camp, the White House, and the Vice President’s house with Jill Biden, who is also a teacher. He’s also traveled throughout West Virginia with Sponaugle including a visit to the Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, West Virginia.

“That’s something we don’t have in the Eastern Panhandle and that our students know very little about,” she said. “They don’t realize coal is a huge industry in this state and supports many people and many families.”

The Sugar Maple Friends

Berkeley is not Sponaugle’s only stuffed animal companion. She has a whole collection of puppets she calls the Sugar Maple Friends that represent all the state symbols, including a butterfly she named Morgan the Monarch, a cardinal called Clay, a trout names Brook and a honey bee named Harrison.

“All of their names are after the counties in West Virginia,” she said. “The entire thing that I do is very educational and it’s a way to make them feel good about where they live.”

When Sponaugle’s duties as Teacher of the Year end in October, she plans to write and illustrate a children’s book featuring Berkeley the Bear and his friends that she hopes will be exciting for students to read and will draw them into the beauty of West Virginia and the country.

In the meantime, she looks forward to getting back to the classroom when school starts in Berkeley County in mid-August, and to fulfilling the last couple of months as teacher of the year.

Shepherdstown Bakery Makes Treats For U.S. Capitol Event

Those attending the screening at the United States Capitol Tuesday evening will not only learn more about West Virginia, but will be able to sample some of its culinary treats. On Monday the Shepherdstown Sweet Shop Bakery was assembling this edible mosaic of the West Virginia state seal for the event. Owner Pam Berry said each square in the design was attached to the top of a chocolate brownie piece, making about 370 petit fours, or bite size treats.

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin is hosting a screening of Hollow, the Peabody Award winning documentary, followed by a discussion with Director Elaine McMillion Sheldon at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center from 6-8 p.m. The event is open to the public but a RSVP is requested at HollowEvent@manchin.senate.gov

How Will Brook Trout Respond To Climate Change?

As the climate changes, scientists around the world are trying to figure out how plants, animals and even people will be affected. One scientist in West Virginia is conducting an experiment to find out how well a fish native to Appalachian streams might survive.

Biologist Than Hitt works at the U.S. Geological Survey Leetown Science Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia, where scientists explore everything from declining fish and mussel populations to the increasing presence of intersex fish in the nation’s waterways. Hitt has just started a new research project: trying to determine how climate change might affect the brook trout.

“These trout were here over the course of multiple glaciation events,” Hitt said. “They’ve adapted to cold water streams that quite frankly are jeopardized by the change in climate that we expect over the next 30 to 50 years.”

“So the southern Appalachian brook trout can be a canary in the coal mine for us to understand how streams are responding to climate change,” he added.

There are 12 large round blue tanks in the lab: four sets of three connected tanks so the fish can travel from one to another. It’s basically a room full of giant aquariums set up so Hitt can control things like temperature, water chemistry, flow rate, food supply during the two month study.

“We want to understand what the relative importance of thermal stress is and interactions with other stressors like changes in invasive species showing up or changes in prey availability or other factors that we can control.”

The first invasive species these brook trout will encounter is the brown trout, which is native to Germany.

“Brown trout are a prized game fish in some places and they also are known for displacing native brook trout,” Hitt said. “It’s not clear though how that displacement effect interacts with the temperature effect. In warming streams maybe that’s where brown trout are able to displace brook trout fully whereas in the colder streams perhaps they’re able to coexist and persist in the same stream reach.”

Aside from conducting controlled experiments in these tanks at the lab in Leetown, West Virginia, Hitt will do field work in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Delaware Gap National Recreation Area. Partners in the project include the USGS Chesapeake Bay Program, the National Park Service and several state divisions of natural resources.

Contemporary Plays Take the Stage in Shepherdstown, W.Va.

Starting this weekend in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, theater lovers will be able to explore such topics of the day as: how the country treats its veterans, artificial intelligence and the ethics of assisted suicide.

The line up for the 24^th season of the Contemporary American Theater Festival at
Shepherd University features a play by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Charles Fuller that focuses on sexual assault in the U.S. military.

One Night is about two Iraq War veterans who are staying in a seedy hotel trying to make sense of life after the military. Fuller began writing the play in 2008 and as he wrote he kept track of the defense department’s sexual assault reports.

“And they kept going up. I thought my goodness this is something that no one’s talking about,” Fuller said. And I started digging and I found out that lots of women and men as well had been sexually assaulted.”

Fuller injects a lot of realism into the play based on interviews he’s done with veterans who have been victims of sexual assault.

Fuller is an Army veteran- and this is not the first play he’s written that focuses on the military. In 1982 he won the Pulitzer for A Soldier’s Play, a story set in 1944 that deals with murder and race. The play was made into a movie called A Soldier’s Story.

Fuller said military and civilian life are very different and he hopes his work will help those who have not served gain a better understanding of those who have. And he hopes it helps push the public and policy makers to do more for veterans.

“There’s a line in the play that says ‘why am I hero if I die and a nuisance if I live?’ And that has been the history of veterans in this country since its beginning,” Fuller said. “While we really praise them while they’re dying, once they come home we tend to lose interest in them, and that’s the worst part of it.”

In addition to One Night the Theater Festival is offering four other plays this season: Uncanny Valley, North of the Boulevard, Dead and Breathing and The Ashes Under Gate City.

Each play focuses on a concern or ethical issue of our time. CATF Producing Director Ed Herendeen said he doesn’t choose plays with any particular theme in mind, but sometimes- as in the case of this season- themes emerge with questions about ethics, morality, betrayal and the complexities of relationships.

“These writers are responding to the stories that they’re hearing in America,” Herendeen said. “That’s one of the great things about contemporary is that these writers are responding to the present world that we’re living in.”

The Contemporary American Theater Festival runs through August 3, 2014

USGS Study: Mountaintop Removal Mining Impacts Fish Populations

Mountaintop removal mining does have an effect on fish populations downstream from the mining operations, according to a study just released by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The study title is a mouthful: Temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of fish assemblages downstream from mountaintop mining, which is the fancy way of saying USGS scientists looked at how well fish populations are doing in streams down river from mountaintop mining sites.

The co-authors are Doug Chambers, a biologist and water quality specialist in Charleston, West Virginia, and Than Hitt, a fish researcher at the Leetown Science Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia.

The study looked at changes with respect to:

The number of species found in streams below mountaintop removal sites
The number of fish
How the fish behave
Their feeding traits and the strategies they use to survive
Physical habitat and water quality

“And by looking at how those things change over time we can get some clues about what’s really happening in the system,” Hitt said.

Over a two year period of time, in 2010 and 2011, Chambers and Hitt collected samples from the Guyandotte River Basin in southern West Virginia. Streams that were studied include the Upper Mudd River, the Left Fork of the Mudd, Big Ugly Creek and Laurel Creek. All these streams are down river from mining sites. They were able to compare their samples to data collected in 1999 and 2001 for a water quality study done by Penn State University researchers.

Some study results:

The streams in the study contain 25 species that are generally found in an Appalachian stream, including creek chub, minnows, sunfish and darters.
There were fewer fish downstream from the mining sites and half the number of species.
A minority of species can do quite well in the conditions created by mine runoff including the creek chub and green sunfish.
Mountaintop mining creates many changes to the landscape, including the way water flows.
The process of breaking big rocks into smaller ones releases more minerals and chemicals so the water below valley fills contains higher concentrations of selenium
Selenium is an essential, non-toxic nutrient that can be harmful when too much is consumed because it reduces the fish’s ability to reproduce.
How well the fish survive changes in water quality depends on what they eat and fish with more diverse diets do better.

And Chambers said the results can help policy makers as they decide how to regulate the state’s water resources.
“West Virginia right now is blessed with abundant water,” he said. “If we’re going to continue to have readily available abundant water we need to understand the processes that affect its quality very broadly.”

Both scientists said the study also provides a framework for future research- both in the field and in a lab setting.