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Original Essays

Five Hundred Mountains Destroyed for a @*&%$! Allegory!

by Christopher Scotton, January 12, 2015 1:06 PM
I found a hole in the perimeter fence on a Sunday when the haul trucks were idle and I could work my way up the shoulder of mountain undetected. About 100 yards from the site rim, I came into a collar of dying trees — leaves dusted with grey mountain gilings, a forest floor of scattered flyrock.

I reached the brim of the place and looked out over a landscape of total devastation. Miles of raw, broken hardrock where a tract of mountains had once been. Flat buttes of exposed grey slag with black coal seams at the bottom. Cairns of rubble with haul truck tracks crosshatched between them. A black lake filled with some obsidian ooze. At the far end, on a remnant hill, was a last frieze of orphan trees, standing proud and defiant as the mountain around them had been blown up, hauled off, and pushed into a hollow to level the land.

It was my first look at a mountaintop removal mine and it made me want to throw up.

I was down in eastern Kentucky, researching my debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, and trying to free up a narrative log-jam in the story. I had heard about the practice of mountaintop removal, a dressed-up term for strip mining, and knew it was causing environmental havoc in Appalachia — but nothing I'd read or seen in photographs prepared me for the shock of witnessing it firsthand.

You see, I'd fallen in love with this region like a local on many backpacking trips in my teens and 20s. It's a simple, beautiful place of rolling hills, verdant forests, and wonderful people — place-proud folks whose love of the land is palpable.

In these parts, coal has always been king and at its peak, the industry employed nearly 30,000 miners, nearly all underground. Coal drove the economy and offered reasonably steady, well-paid — if not dangerous — work. Then the coal companies discovered that they could extract more coal with much fewer people if they just blew off the peaks and dug at the coal from the top. Lax regulations and old-fashioned greed prevailed, and mountaintop removal mining exploded... literally.

To date, Appalachia has lost more than 500 hills to mountaintop removal — the practice has obliterated 2,000 miles of streams and hundreds of hollows. But until you actually see the devastation firsthand, these are just numbers. Until you actually look over an ancient beautiful mountain range that has been reduced to rubble, you just can't know the true toll. Even the pictures I've included here are a pale telling of what's really happening in Appalachia. It's like the difference between reading about a terrible accident on the highway and actually walking among the fresh wreckage — there's just no comparison.

Mountaintop removal and its effect on a small eastern Kentucky coal town is one of the key plot points in The Secret Wisdom of the Earth. And until that trip and the broken-fence reconnoiter, I'd been struggling to connect the threads of the novel into something cohesive.

The story is narrated by a 40-something man looking back on the summer of his 14th year. Two months prior, he and his mother witness the death of his younger brother at home in the most horrific accident imaginable. Kevin and his mother go to live with her father, Pops, in the old peeled-paint coal town of Medgar, Kentucky, where they both hope to heal from the tragedy. And that's as far as I'd gotten — the rest of it hard set against a granite wall of writer's block.

And then I climbed through that fence.

As I stood on the rimrock of that once-proud, ancient hill, the disparate themes and opposing plot points began aligning inside me, all joined by the connective tissue of loss. Loss of loved ones, loss of innocence, loss of a way of life, and now, loss of these majestic mountains. And once the allegory of mountaintop removal revealed itself on that Sunday in December so many years ago, the rest of the story fell together.

But allegories won't feed families or take the sting out of joblessness. One thing that I learned on my trips to the region is that the issue of mountaintop removal isn't a simple good versus evil tale. It's a far more complex issue. The miners with whom I spoke were all, ironically, outdoorsmen with an obvious love for the region — they hunt, fish, hike, and camp these backwoods; have been all their lives. They aren't destroying these mountains because they want to, there simply aren't many other economic options.

But economic need doesn't make it right. And so, I've committed myself to helping stop the awful, irreversible practice of mountaintop removal mining, and I'm writing to ask you to join me. I know you're busy, but please take a moment to do three quick things:

  1. Educate — click here to view more aerial photos of the devastation that MTR has wrought in Appalachia. It's appalling and sad — but keep in mind, these photos only partially show the toll of devastation.
  2. Donate — Appalachian Voices is one of the best activist organizations I've come across. They live in the region, love the land, and are committed to ending this destructive practice. Please donate whatever you can to help their mission. They are good people. Click here to go to their website.
  3. Share — send this blog post to as many people as you can. Facebook it, tweet it, tumble it, post it. We are so much stronger as a collective voice against this kind of outrageous behavior.

Thank you for reading this far and for taking some action, even if just a small one, to support the wonderful people and the beautiful place that I've learned to love so well.

Five hundred hauled-off mountains is an unacceptable price to pay — for cheap energy or a trenchant allegory. I would happily give them both up just to get a few mountains back.

Photos courtesy of iLoveMountains.org; flight by Southwings.




Books mentioned in this post

Secret Wisdom of the Earth

Chris Scotton
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3 Responses to "Five Hundred Mountains Destroyed for a @*&%$! Allegory!"

Mel in AZ January 26, 2015 at 10:54 AM
I've read the book; it is wonderful - and it hit the tender spot of my heart as well. I live in Arizona, in copper country, where mining is booming, and landscapes have been altered, streams and air polluted, the land desecrated. It's hard to witness. And as Chris mentions, it's not a simple good vs evil, when people's families depend on job security. But surely there are other answers. I contend that a shift in perspective in this country -- from one of "disposability" to one of "recyclability" -- could significantly alter the demand for copper, at least. Think of the gadgets (cell phones) disposed of daily as "newer and better" technology erupts at breakneck speed. What if we repurposed the copper, the other land-harvested materials in our technology? Would not the removal of our Arizona mountains slow? It's the same with Appalachia. Surely there are other ways/means of energy production that are less invasive and so horrifically devastating. I can relate to Chris's urge to retch. I have cried, literally, many times as I pass a mining area where saguaros once stood (500-years in the making, these disposable, wonderful plants of the desert that grow ONLY in this part of the USA, and no place else in the world. When they are annihilated, they will be gone forever). The mountains are now tiered and hollowed, their detritus and debris making new mountains that have scarred the landscape and polluted the waters. It's horrific to behold, while our state lawmakers laud its advances as "great progress and gain." It's so hard to bear. I hope more books like Chris's get the word out. We need to draw awareness.

Annie January 22, 2015 at 12:57 AM
I am so grateful whenever anyone writes or speaks about the horror that is mountaintop removal mining. Just consider for a moment that term, "mountaintop removal mining", one that we say as if it is normal, not insane at all. Humans are destroying a mountain range and all the waters that flow there, the wildlife, the lives of the humans who live there, the beauty. I have long wondered what kind of human does such things - who are these people who will eradicate a magnificent feature of the planet, who will wipe out streams and rivers, destroy a region? Who are the people who consider dumping oil into the Gulf of Mexico or the beautiful Kalamazoo River or Alaskan waters and fouling them forever just the exchange that has to be made for the money? Who are the people who transform beautiful landscapes, usually near wonderful rivers and the bluffs and banks that hug them, into moonscapes, cleared of all vegetation, making the air filthy, leaving repulsive, strangely colored "ponds" for waste water, running trucks and lights and noise and giving those who breath the air silicosis, all to "extract" the special silica sand needed for the rapidly expanding and demanding fracking? Who are such people and how do they live with themselves, these people whose "work" consists of fouling, poisoning, destroying, eradicating - all the good and the beautiful aspects of this country we are only living in by simple grace and blessing? I submit that they are sociopaths, without conscience, without heart, absent any goodness or decency, because only a sociopath could do the things they do. So, let's call them what they are and then we need to ask -and answer - the question: do we really, we American citizens, want sociopaths to have any role, power or permission at all anywhere to ruin our home, our nest, our planet? When and why did America cede such power to sociopaths? I will buy your book, Mr. Scotton, out of gratitude for your writing about mountaintop removal mining and about the

Jerry Horton January 21, 2015 at 06:36 PM
When I was a kid I was raised in east San Jose, California--the "Valley of Heart's Delight, now the "Silicon Valley. I would go with my dad south through Coyote, Morgan Hill and then Gilroy, to head east over the Tehacipie's, a hilly, sparce, beautiful landscape--with a projection of timelessness and rejection of human habitat. We were headed to the San Joaquin valley, Bethany and cat-fishing. Today that Tehachipi crossing is populated by huge windmills that now own the landscape, a defensible sign of "progress." "Nothing endures but change." (Hericlitus.) But I cherish my memory of a past, serene beauty that we traversed on the way to our fishing hole. Jerry--Founder and Director, Down Home Ranch, www.downhomeranch.org

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