Healing Appalachia: Sustainable Living through Appropriate Technology

Introduction

A nation deprived of liberty may win it, a nation divided may reunite, but a nation whose natural resources are destroyed must inevitably pay the penalty of poverty, degradation and decay. Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, 1910 The Kentucky hills have enchanted me from my earliest youth.1 I had to help with farm chores, including milking, from age six. Often during these years I would look out of the cow parlor to the east and see the rising sun over the wooded Appalachians in Lewis and Fleming counties. That sight of the sunrise over the hills is deeply ingrained in my memory. I came to love the Appalachian highlands and felt a call to always regard the valleys and coves of this part of America as home. With time I saw the devastation of these mountains by unsustainable forest practices. I observed the very shapes of our hills melt before the giant earthmoving equipment skinning away forest cover, exposing coal seams, and hauling away the black gold. Through this travail the hills called out for renewal, and this cry of the poor Earth brought me back home to Kentucky in 1977. Several times I have visited the forested hills of Alsace (the Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord in northeastern France) and Schonau in the adjacent Pfalz region of Germany from where both my paternal and maternal ancestors came. My Introduction 1. In this introduction and throughout the book, all first-person singular references in the text are to Al Fritsch. ancestors saw the sun rise each morning over forest-covered hills surprisingly similar to those in Appalachia. In fact, my grandfather for a short period was a caretaker of some of those Alsatian oak forests. Perhaps the love of these lands was why forebears on both sides of my family gravitated to Appalachia with so many other Alsatians: the Appalachian hills and the Ohio valley looked so much like the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine valley. The love of land and people runs deep in our family history, and the impulse to enjoy, preserve, and renew these beautiful hills in both America and Europe is in my blood. Today in Europe coal mines are closing and forests are being properly managed. My relatives ’ villages are thriving principally by means of tourism throughout the year. Four bed-and-breakfast places exist in the tiny native Alsatian village of Obersteinbach next to our ancestral hamlet. The region has many motels, hiking trails, shrines, castles , historic sites, and beautiful roads. The success of Alsace is in part the inspiration for the book Ecotourism in Appalachia: Marketing the Mountains. The Appalachian region could welcome many visitors as well, and that is my dream; it could return to a condition similar to that of its European counterpart. This work on Appalachian appropriate technology (suitable ways to achieve a higher quality of life while using fewer resources) is a natural sequel to the ecotourism work. In that book we defined ecotourism as a practice that enhances the environment and the resident population as well as furnishes a worthwhile experience for the visitor. These components cannot coexist in a region where inappropriate technologies (all energy from nonrenewable resources, all food imported from outside the bioregion, impaired water quality, improper waste disposal, etc.) are dominant. Instead, the technology and lifestyle of our people must be appropriate or suitable to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Often the practices we advocate in this book are quite similar to traditional Appalachian ways. In many respects, this lifestyle is a return to our roots. We refer often in this book to “Appalachia” and “Appalachian .” A word of explanation is in order on this point. We have 2 ❖ Introduction always preferred to leave the boundaries of our region a little undefined, as in Ecotourism in Appalachia, with a focus on the five central Appalachian states (West Virginia, western North Carolina , western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee) along with southeastern Ohio. The federally defined region includes a northern tier covering parts of Maryland and New York and much of Pennsylvania. The southern end of the federally defined region includes parts of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. From a geological perspective, we would have to go all the way and include New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. We think our original focus in our environmental work on central...