Sherry Chandler

Erik Reece in The Guardian

Not exactly a subtle title to the article: Add to Bush’s follies the rape of his own country . The despoilment of the Appalachians is typical of the President’s bankrupt environmental policies

In Britain, we are not exposed to the horrors of ‘mountaintop removal’, but owing to a new book by Erik Reece, Lost Mountain: A year in the Vanishing Wilderness, which I happened on in a New York bookshop, I learned that it has nothing to do with coal mining in the traditional sense. Mountaintop removal is just that.

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This is partly explained by a certain cultural entitlement to inconsistency which permits some Americans to complain about secondary smoke while climbing aboard their sports utility vehicles and, as Condoleezza Rice did last week, to list the human-rights violations in Iran while ignoring Guantanano. Yet this is not the whole story. A supreme right accorded by American individualism is to make a profit and, somewhere in the psyche of the quail-shooting conservative, decked out in his impeccable weekend hunting gear, is the idea that to assert dominion over the earth you must destroy.

It is all rather depressing, but let me make clear that there are good Americans out there, whose voices are only just being heard above the whir of the Republican money-counting machines - people such as Erik Reece and Robert Kennedy Jr and many unknown environmental campaigners. They deserve our support during this Appalachian spring, however distant.

Thanks to my far-flung correspondents, aka Gin, for the tip. Check out Caesar. Man! is he worthy of the name.

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