"The coal companies, knowing well what an abomination surface maining is, have gone to considerable trouble to hide it from public view. The 'media' have paid it far too little attention, even though it is a matter of the most urgent public interest. Another reason for so much ignorace is that the learning is painful. To know about strip mining or mountainp removal is like knowing about the nuclear bomb. It is to know beyond doubt that some human beings have, and are willing to use, the power of absolute destruction. This work is done in violation of all the best things that humans have learned in their long dwelling on earth: reverence, neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, love. A conservationist working to oppose this enormity must accept heartbreak as a working condition. People whose homes and homelands are under the dominance of the coal industry must accept heartbreak, poverty and varioius everyday lethal endangerments as a way of life ..." -- Wendell Berry, from the preface of Lost Mountain
27. Alone in a world of wounds: Review of Eric Reese's Lost Mountain
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia, By Eric Reese (Penguin, 2006).
Review by Bill Kovarik
To be educated in ecology is to “live alone is a world of wounds,” Aldo Leopold once said. For Eric Reese, ecological education is both ennobling and heart-rending as he comes to know the appropriately named Lost Mountain through the eyes of its inhabitants and its executioners.
Once every month, Reese visits the mountain as it dies. Usually he sneaks in, wary of collapsing walls and dodging “fly rock” from dynamite operations. Everything he sees is being blasted into oblivion, and the loneliness of his knowledge haunts him throughout the book, whether he is bidding farewell to the flying squirrels of Lost Mountain or attempting to communicate with the utterly indifferent mining inspectors who waddle through the gray muck after the mountain has been leveled. He knows that one of the most botanically and biologically diverse regions of the world is rapidly being consumed and discarded in a way that will horrify future generations.
This lonely knowledge propels an intense and personal style of literary journalism in which Reese accompanies his own journeys with short excursions into many of the historical episodes famed in coal country lore. These include the assassinations of union activists in the 1920s and 1930s, the war-on-poverty visits by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972, the Inez coal sludge disaster of 2000, and the Bush administration’s corrupt political infighting to protect patrons in the coal industry.
Reese weaves his story through some of the great literature of coal country – Night Comes to the Cumberlands, for example – and some of the great documentary films – Harlan County USA. He makes the past seem easily connected to the present, and it’s not much of a stretch. Appalachian people and land are as badly treated now as they were generations ago. There is something primitively abusive and absurdly gothic about coal operators building sludge dams above elementary schools, and doing this even though, for an extra dollar per ton of coal, there would be no need for sludge dams. And this is not some bizarre event from the dim benighted past, Reese reminds us. With hundreds of sludge dams hanging over inhabited valleys like swords of Damocles, life today is grotesquely cheap in Appalachia.
Amid the storms there are lightning flashes where remarkable human courage is illuminated. There is the story of Berea college, founded as an African American school after a Civil War tragedy in which 102 civilians were cruelly expelled from a black soldier’s camp and froze to death. Today Berea is proud of its Ecovillage and its work on developing sustainable alternatives to coal mining. There is also the story of Steve Peake, who was dismayed at the sudden upsurge of intense flooding after the forests in his community were clearcut and the valleys were filled up with rubble. Peake led the Prayer on the Mountain, asking that the coal operators hearts be softened by God. The coal operators replied angrily that that it was improper to drag the Bible into the “debate.” But there really is no discussion. There are operators who take advantage of loopholes in the law, and there are victims. The lines are clearly, cleanly, brutally drawn.
Reese holds up small candles of hope, but never lets us forget we are witnessing a howling ecological apocalypse with violence not only to the natural world but also to people. In one example, Debra Burke and her husband lived below a mountaintop removal site. The blasting ruined the house’s foundation, and the constant flooding ruined their garden, which had provided food to get through the winter. On Christmas morning, 2001, she took her own life. There is also the story of three year old Jeremy Davidson who was killed sleeping in his own bed when a boulder crashed down a mountainside from a Virginia coal mining operation in August, 2004.
It’s not just the mountains and the animals that are being lost. The people of Appalachia are being sacrificed, and our highly mechanized and artificial environment makes it possible for this to happen.
Reese draws a parallel to Jared Diamond’s essay, the Last Americans, in which wealth and conspicuous consumption are signs of impending collapse. Just before the end of the Mayan civilization, the Mayans stripped their forests and polluted their streams. Something similar is occurring in Appalachia, Reese argues.
The remedy is to understand our spiritual, ethical and aesthetic nature. “If we understood the natural world as a spiritual presence, we would also see that all living things are kin to us,” Reese writes. “If this realization led to a moral attitude toward the natural world, then our destructive behavior would change. We would change. We would become more fully human.”