Argh! - "Mountaintop Removal"

[eliskimo]

This makes me so angry.

from Throwaway People, Throwaway Land
The impact of "mountaintop removal."
by Norman Wirzba

In August 2004, a massive boulder loosened by mining blasts rolled down a Virginia hillside, crushing to death the sleeping three-year-old Jeremy Davidson. In the spring of 2000, soon-to-be college graduate Darlies Carter was

Comments

[forest_lady]

I'm with you - that's just awful, and as the writer says, completely unknown.

[eliskimo]

Yes, that's why I posted so much the article (these five paragraphs are really prelude to a review of three books about the situation) and didn't put it behind a cut. No one knows about it. The Appalachian peoples are stuck with the label of "hillbilly" and no one, it seems, really cares what happens to them or their unique environment.

[forest_lady]

There's an author, Sharon McCrumb(I think!:-)) who uses Appalachia as her settings. She's extremely sympatico.

[eliskimo]

This is a song by one of my favourite singer-songwriters that contained the lines:

Once I went to Appalachia, for my father he was born there
And I saw the mountains waking with the innocence of children

Somehow, thinking of mountains as children and then reading something like this article reminds me of Eowyn's line from The Two Towers (the movie), "Those without swords can still die by them."

Too ghastly for words

[culturalnomad]

In a later posting you sort of "complain" that no-one but forest_lady has commented on this one. I felt I wanted to say something, but then wasn't sure what to say. The article presents the problem so well, there doesn't seem to be much more to say. Some things really are too ghastly for words.