The Beehive Design Collective

The Beehive Design Collective, a volunteer artist group out of Machias, Maine, made a stop at Yestermorrow to share their latest masterpiece: "The True Cost of Coal." The collective transforms hushed global issues into large-scale hand-drawn illustrations that depict the stories and the effects of major social and environmental catastrophes.

The group can spend between 6 months to several years collecting the stories, observing the issues, researching, and interpreting the information into black and white illustrations. They then spend the following months traveling the US to tell the stories embedded into their pieces.

The story they shared with us is the story of mountain top removal in Appalachia. "As a resource-extraction colony within the US, Appalachia is sacrificed and poisoned in the name of cheap electricity for consumers and consolidation of power and wealth for corporations and government." They are seeing their health decline, their landscape transformed, their money escaping, their children leaving, and their history being destroyed.
The monster machine, above, is a 22-story dragline used to excavate thin layers of coal. After mountain clear-cuts occur on mountain tops, some dynamite blows the top off, these behemoth's come in an dig out the layer of coal (imagine the coal layers being the middle layer of icing in a cake.)
Over consumption and perceived needs are depicted in this section called the Temple of Conspicuous Consumption. Consuming "green" products isn't making the situation better...we can't consume our way into a better environment. In the bottom left of the image above, a bulldozer is pushing a small building over a cliff. This is representing an elementary school in the valley that is at the base of a coal slurry damn (used to clean off the coal prior to burning.) If the damn breaks, it was warned to the school that everyone had 3 minutes to evacuate the area, or they wouldn't make it out of the valley (apparently, they always have their buses on hand, just in case.)

The frogs above depict the inescapable cycle of a coal miner: working long days in the mine and poor working conditions lead to increasing physical health issues, the workers and families then spend more money on health care, local gardens and food systems are being polluted and destroyed, the families are then becoming increasing dependent on pay and losing their own independence.
The illustrators for the Beehive spend massive amounts of time researching local native plant and animal species (current and extinct) to better portray the local environment and history. Every plant and animal is drawn so accurately that identification of species is able.
Community organization has begun at the grassroots level and stories are being shared. The above scene is the story telling and knowledge sharing regarding the issue of mountain top removal in communities (diverse members.)
When the Beehive asked local residents what would be an indication that reclamation of land was happening by citizens, they envisioned that their children would return back home and have a reason to stay. The above section is a representation of the Longest Walk, a cross-continental journey of homecoming.