This Side of the Mountain

This Side of the Mountain George Brosi In April, I participated in the Kentucky Authors' Mountaintop Removal Tour. It was the brainstorm of Wendell Berry, Kentucky's foremost contemporary man of letters. Well over a dozen people participated in the entire tour, and at least a dozen more joined the trip at one point or another. The group included Silas House, Gwen Rubio, Loyal Jones, Ed McClanahan, Charles Bracelon Flood, Mary Ann Taylor Hall, Bob Sloan and a host of others, including Erik Reece whose article on mountaintop removal had just appeared in Harpers. At the last minute, Wendell Berry was forced to cancel for health reasons. In addition to the writers, two distinguished photographers, David Stephenson of the Lexington Herald-Leader and Warren Bruner, whose photos grace this issue ofAppalachian Heritage, joined the group. The trip was hosted by Kenruckians for the Commonwealth, a coalition of local citizens' groups which has been active for the last couple of decades. Our first stop was Daymon Morgan's land on Lower Bad Creek in Leslie County. We walked there, and Morgan showed us many different plants and told us of their uses. When we reached the top of the hill, the woods simply ended, and then there was a "high-wall," a sheerbare-rock drop-off of at least a hundred feet where the mountain had been gouged out to extract coal. Below was rough ground devoid of vegetation. The contrast couldn't have been greater: from luxuriant, useful woods to sheer devastation! Lunch at Morgan's home was rendered depressing by the sight, from the home's porch, of a huge beautiful mountain, already denuded oftrees and permitted for complete destructionbymountaintop removal mining. Then we drove up on Huckleberry Ridge, where Morgan was raised, to sites from which we could see miles of devastation, not completely leveled, but a mish-mash of abruptly jagged rocky surface with occasional little "islands" of undisturbed terrain. We also walked through "reclaimed land"—rock-strewn, uneven ground with slender green shoots of a non-native species of grass clinging to life every few inches. From there we went to the Hazard Airport and flew over nearby Perry County. Mountaintop removal looks terrible from big roads and much worse from the actual sites, but the view from the air is many times more dramatic. Flying over allows a person to see what a terribly high portion of the land has been laid waste and view with a single sweep of the eye the contrast between natural green and barren rock. That evening, at the Hindman Settlement School, the authors were joined by local people with stories that told the human side of environmental destruction. The writers were staggered by many heart-rending testimonials including those who told of three deaths along one mile of coal-hauling road attributed to careless coal trucks and of a daughter who had to be given a sippy cup of bottled water in thebathtub to preventher from drinkingthepollutedbath water. Carroll Smith, the County Judge Executive of Letcher County, reinforced the residents' claims that citizens could find no reprieve from government officials responsible for regulating the coal industry. The next morning, we drafted a statement which called for the abolition of mountaintop removal, available at: http://www.kentucky.com/ mld/kentucky/neips/state/11458756.htm. A press conference and public reading at Eastern Kentucky University completed the tour. Hopefully the authors' tour will be followed by veterans' tours, preachers' tours, media tours and toursby every conceivable group as well as other actions until this devastation is put to an end. In the 1970s I worked for Save Our Cumberland Mountains fighting the abuses ofstrip-mining. I stood in the Rose Garden ofthe White House and watched President Jimmy Carter sign a bill to regulate the industry. Everyone who attended that ceremony would surely be saddened and sickened by the way that the law of the land has now been subverted. In the 1970s, strip-miners cut into the sides of mountains like we saw at the edge of Daymon Morgan's land or, on fairly level ground, stripped off the ground above the coal seam, that precious, irreplaceable layer of top...