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  • To Break the Silence
  • Wendell Berry (bio)

Publication of the rightly titled book, The Embattled Wilderness, about the uncertain life and fate of the University of Kentucky’s Robinson Forest, is the latest of many occasions that require us to consider and reconsider the failure of the institutions that supposedly serve the land and the people of Kentucky. The story of Robinson Forest is not, so far, a story of failure, but this forest was once a part of a richly forested region. That great woodland, of unreckonable ecologic and economic value, was continuous and intact for thousands of square miles. Now, as Erik Reece and Jim Krupa tell us unforgettably, Robinson Forest is a small, fertile, fragile island in the midst of a devastation without form and void: thousands of acres desolated by the coal mining method known as “mountaintop removal.”

The story of this destroyed land, the destruction of which will remain fully measurable only by the survival of Robinson Forest, is a story most certainly of failure. A larger failure—the parent failure, you might say—happened a century ago when the state’s public institutions tacitly consigned the land and people of the mountains to the use and abuse of extractive industries.

By now this “national sacrifice area,” as it has come to be known, has yielded an immense wealth to its corporate freeholders, and with little or no benefit either to the region, now impoverished both ecologically and economically, or to the state. One can imagine the righteous fervor with which the coal companies will respond: They have paid taxes! They have “created jobs”! They have “reclaimed” the land! But the land remains impoverished, and the people poor. During the long suffering of the land and the people of the mountains—the cutting and export of virtually the whole original forest, the exploitation of communities and places by underground mining and then contour strip mining and then mountaintop removal, with untold “accidental” damage to the people—the state government, except for a few small gestures of concern, has been the private property of the corporations. (The administration of Edward Breathitt in the 1960s attempted without lasting effect to “control” strip mining.) The state’s universities have stood aside and watched, when they have not abetted the destruction. [End Page 79]

This indifference or connivance is particularly reprehensible on the part of the University of Kentucky, which has a mandated responsibility to the land and “the industrial classes” of the whole state. But that university—by now great at least in real estate, consumption of public money, and costs to students—does not think of itself as a land grant university, the meant-to-be servant and educational guardian especially of the rural areas of the state. On the contrary, it advertises itself as the state’s “flagship university,” which apparently means a highly industrialized organization devoted to technical or scientific research and courses of study that promise the most money to corporations. As for the humanities, the “liberal” part of the education required by the Morrill Act, they are sometimes useful for publicity but otherwise are merely tolerated, perhaps because they seem unthreatening and pleasantly useless.

By unspoken policy, and in practice, our people’s great institutions pursue eagerly the truths that pay directly in money, holding in contempt all truths of any other kind. As normal and generally accepted as this state of things now is, Kentucky’s official laissez faire to the coal industry cannot be a surprise. But to people of conscience, though unsurprised, it is still shocking that a region comprising more than a quarter of the state could be plundered and cut to pieces for a century without so much as “Wait a minute” from those who should have called it into question. This is a wonder exceeding even Mammoth Cave in its magnitude and its darkness.

I have spoken at such length of our state’s institutional failure because that failure is the context in which Reece and Krupa’s book was conceived and written, and in which it must be read and understood. The Embattled Wilderness is a competent, readable, greatly needed appraisal of the value and status...

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