Sherry Chandler

Missing Mountains

from Margaret Ricketts’s review of Missing Mountains in the Lexington Herald-Leader and in the Charleston Gazette-Mail:

This is a book that ought to make you furious.

Missing Mountains is an anthology about the pointless destruction of the Appalachian mountains. Mountaintop removal is not a metaphor or analogy: It literally means scooping off the tops of mountains and dumping the remains into the valleys and streams below. This is not a process that can be repaired.

In spring 2005, a group of Kentucky writers including Wendell Berry, Gwyn Hyman Rubio and Bobbie Ann Mason went on a trip together, with two purposes: to witness the sheer physical destruction of mountaintop removal and to interview residents of the areas immediately affected by this practice. The residents tell stories of polluted water, cracked house foundations and collisions with overloaded coal trucks.

and from Moving Mountains by Erik Reece in Orion Magazine:

NOT SINCE THE GLACIERS PUSHED toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region. The problem, in many ways, is one of perspective. From interstates and lowlands, where most communities are clustered, one simply doesn’t see what is happening up there. Only from the air can you fully grasp the magnitude of the devastation. If you were to board, say, a small prop plane at Zeb Mountain, Tennessee, and follow the spine of the Appalachian Mountains up through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, you would be struck not by the beauty of a densely forested range older than the Himalayas, but rather by inescapable images of ecological violence. Near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, you’d see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia.

This article contains a number of striking photographs, including a sidebar, “Looking Cheap Electricity in the Face,” that features photographs of local residents by Antrim Caskey.

Possibly related posts:

Missing Mountains

Good news from West Viriginia

Mountain Top Removal, West Virginia

I Love the Mountains Day

The Cost of Coal

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