Growing up in southeastern Kentucky, Tierra Curry ’97 was thrilled at splashing in Troublesome Creek, a natural wonderland fringed with trees. There, her mother taught her to hunt, fish and forage.
More than three decades later, memories are all that remain.
Surface mining polluted the creek and spoiled the family’s well. More than 25 percent of the Troublesome Creek watershed has been strip-mined for coal, bringing rampant pollution and deadly flooding.
Her childhood memories set Curry on a path to save animal species in wild spaces that are under siege in her childhood stomping grounds, including monarch butterflies and hellbender salamanders (the largest salamander in the U.S.).
Biodiversity buffers against climate change and disease outbreaks because balanced ecologies are resilient. Biodiversity also provides food, water and medicine essential to human life.
“Even as a kid, I knew what the coal companies were doing was wrong, and I wanted to do something about it,” said Curry, a senior scientist with the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization working to protect endangered species through legal action, media outreach and grassroots activism.
“I was absorbed in the environment,” she added. “I knew the name of every plant in the woods and the habits of the animals. I could tell you what turtles and frogs lived where, what time the birds did their thing and when the bats came out.”
Curry works for the Center from her home in Somerset, Kentucky. Since 2007, she’s led efforts to boost public awareness of the extinction crisis, including organizing the group’s Saving Life on Earth campaign, in which she urges organizations ranging from schools, government agencies, scouting troops and “anybody who will listen” to press the federal government to declare extinction threats to be a “national emergency.” The campaign also urges officials to crack down on air and water pollution, toxic chemicals and pesticides.
In the United States, 150 U.S. species are known to be extinct, and 500 more species are “missing in action” and could also be extinct.
Curry is joined in her efforts by former classmate Perrin de Jong ’99, an Asheville, North Carolina-based senior attorney who joined the organization in 2017, after taking part in grassroots environmental campaigns that included pushing for the U.S. military’s safe disposal of chemical weapons and stopping the sale of paper made from endangered forests around the world. Before joining the Center, de Jong operated a solo private practice law firm specializing in criminal defense, consumer protection and employee protection. He decided to become an environmental lawyer because litigation can have far-reaching impacts.
“It’s the attorneys who are able to finish fights and put an exclamation point on the defeat of a bad project,” said de Jong, who has embodied an activist spirit as long as he can remember. “At the Center, we have won a lot. There’s a gritty determination.”
In 2023, de Jong filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Center against the U.S. Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation and Enforcement and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect three species—the endangered Guyandotte River crayfish and candy darter and the threatened Big Sandy crayfish—from coal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. The case is pending.
It is one of 19 lawsuits involving de Jong, with the Center winning approximately 80 to 90 percent of its cases. Since 2019, Curry and de Jong have worked together to protect aquatic endangered species in the context of coal mining regulations.
The pair’s work is urgent. Scientists have determined, for example, that central Appalachian streams impacted by coal mining show a 32 percent decline in the number of species present and a 53 percent drop in the total number of invertebrates, fish and salamanders.
Curry and de Jong met at Berea when both were members of Students for Appalachia, a student-led community-service program, now under the umbrella of the Center for Excellence in Learning through Service (CELTS), that helped people in the city and the surrounding region with problems of daily life. At Berea, de Jong, a sociology major, was inculcated with strong writing skills that deepened his persuasive power.
“The writing was just relentless, they never let us stop,” he said. “Doing it over and over again for four years was such an important element of my development professionally. It unifies all of my jobs—as an attorney, a campaigner and as someone who has written grants.”
de Jong works at a time of “unprecedented opposition” to environmental advocacy.
“We’ve got a job to do, and we’ve got to get to it,” he says of his Center work. He says when we harm the hellbender salamander, we harm ourselves.
Curry says her heart is in Appalachia. She draws inspiration from her great uncle, a community organizer who worked with the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition in the 1980s. His efforts helped lead the passage of a state constitutional amendment protecting landowners from having their subsurface rights exploited by mining companies.
She forged her advocacy sensibilities at Berea, where, as an English and Spanish double-major, Curry learned the importance of community building, storytelling and compassion.
“I do have a front-row seat to the destruction because I track all of the studies, but I get to connect with people of all ages and all walks of life,” Curry says. “I get to hear their stories and see how many people actually care and are doing something. That is incredibly heartwarming.”
