death of a mountain - harper's magazine

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DEATH OFA MOUNTAIN

Radical strip mining and the leveling of AppalachiaBy Erik Reece

September 13, zo03, Lost Mountain

Lookhard and you can find LostMountain ingrid 71, coordinate B-10 of the Kentucky At-las & Gazetteer. According to thar topolog-

ical map, the summit rises 1,847 feet above LostCreek, whose head-

.waters come to life onthe mountain's northface. This morning Ileft the bluegrass re-gion of central Ken-tucky,where I live,anddrove east along theMountain Parkway,where the last of therollinggrasslands,dot-ted with black tobaccobarns,finallygiveswayto the CumberlandPlateau, the foothillsof which may be the oldest mountain range in theworld, the Appalachians. From there, a narrowtwo-lane road follows the meanderings of LostCreek, so named because hunters frequently losttheir bearingswhen they ventured too far from thestream itself. When the blacktop ends, I navigatean old loggingroad that winds up and around LostMountain, ending at its peak. I set the parkingbrakeon my truckand get out to take a lookaround.

1notice that a fire tower standing here a yearago has been blown or torn from its foundation

and sent crashing down the ridge side. But evenwithout the tower's perspective, looking off tothe north I can see thousands of acres-formersummits-that have been flattened by moun-taintop mining. Where once there were jagged,forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of

plateaus, staggeredgray shelves wheregrassstruggles to growin crushed rock andshale. When visitorsto eastern Kentuckyfirst see the effects ofthis kind of mining,they often say thelandscape looks likethe Southwest-aharsh tableland inter-rupted by steep mesas.I, too, have traveledthrough Arizona and

New Mexico in the late spring when ocotillo andIndian paintbrush are in bloom, and I under-stand the allure of that harsh landscape. But thisis not the desert Southwest; it is an easternbroadleaf forest. At least it should be.

There was a time in this region when unionminers would have extracted the coal that liesbe-neath Lost Mountain with hand picks and shov-els in deep underground shafts. But twenty-sixyears after Jimmy Carter signed into law theSurface Mining Control and Reclamation Act

Erik Reece teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is completing a book on strip mining in Appalachia.

Photograph © John J. Cox/Songdog Photography FOLIO 41

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(SMCRA), the coal industry has developedmuch more expedient and much more destruc-tive methods of mining. Instead of excavatingthe contour of a ridge side, as strip miners didthroughout the 1960s and '70s, now entiremountaintops are blasted off, and almost every-thing that isn't coal is pushed down into thevalleys below. As a result, the EnvironmentalProtection Agency.estimates that more than700 miles of healthy streams have been buried

Ihave come to Lost Mountain because lastmonth Leslie Resources, Inc. was granted

a state permit to mine this ridgeline

by mountaintop removal-some say the numberis twice that-and hundreds more have beendamaged. Blasting on the mine sites has crackedthe foundations of nearby homes and pollutedhundreds of family wells. Creeks run orangewith sulfuric acid and heavy metals. Wildlifepopulations have been summarily dispersed. Anentire ecosystem has been dismantled.

I have come to Lost Mountain because inFebruary Leslie Resources Inc. was granted astate permit to mine this ridgeline. I came hereto see what an eastern mountain looks like be-fore, during, and after its transformation into awestern desert.

October 25, 2003, Lost Mountain

Before mining starts on Lost Mountain, Ihike up the old logging road that winds tothe summit. At one muddy wheel rut, I

stop to sketch the tracks of a deer, a fox, a rac-coon, and a wild turkey. Then I drop down intothe forest proper, the watershed that feeds LostCreek. After extricating myself from a black-berry thicket, I climb noisily over a barricade offallen tree limbs. A crow warns a white-taileddeer of my approach, and the doe hoofs it upover the ridgetop. When she is gone; 1 find my-self standing beneath an austere canopy of tulippoplars. This is Kentucky's state tree, and it growsas straight as a flagpole. Daniel Boone once hol-lowed out a sixty-foot canoe from a single tulippoplar and packed his family down the OhioRiver in it. The tulip tree is also one of the firsthardwoods to establish dominance after a de-ciduous forest has been cleared by fire, a blow-down, or, in this case, the chain saws that chewedthrough here about forty years ago. These poplarshave already lost their leaves, and sunlight fillsthe understory of younger sassafrases, hickories,and sugar maples. The woods are quiet except fora pileated woodpecker; the songbirds are already

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2005

vacationing in Belize and other points south.Given time, one hundred years or so, oaks,

beeches, and hickories would come to dominatethis transitional forest. Three different commu-nities of highly diverse trees would eventuallyagree on a silent charter about how best to in-habit these elevations. But that's not going tohappen here.

I wander on down the ridge. Without thinking,I begin to follow the moist furrow of an inter-mittent stream. A lacework of tributaries feeds thelower creeks, but they flow only during wetterperiods. I step around moss-covered cobble andmaidenhair ferns that grow in the shape of deli-cate tiaras. Colonies of liverwort cover some of therocks like small, green scallops. These modest-looking organisms carryon pretty fascinating sexlives: The liverwort needs rain to spawn. Andits preferred habitat seems to be these rain-catching, intermittent streams. During a down-pour, the male liverwort extends a tiny, umbrel-la-shaped antenna. When a drop of rain hits it,sperm explodes inside that raindrop and bouncesa couple of feet, where with any luck a female liv-erwort has sent up a little umbrella of her own tocatch the sperm-laden droplets.

In this way the unassuming liverwort dramatizesone of the issues at the heart of mountaintop re-moval. In response to the charge that such min-ing methods bury hundreds of central Appalachianstreams, Bill Caylor, president of the KentuckyCoal Association, is quick to point out that an in-termittent stream, such as this one, is not reallya stream at all, because there are no fish in it. Ac-cording to this line of thought, if something likethe liverwort is of no immediate and obvious useto us, then it is of no use at all. That modest flo-ra like liverwort help hold rich soil in place, pu-rify water downstream, and provide habitat toother small animals such as salamanders-or thatthey even hold an intrinsic value beyond what wemight understand today-is a logic to whichHomo sapiens americanus seems curiously immune.

When I reach the mouth of the intermittentstream, I follow Lost Creek until I can ·see nosigns of human intervention, not even the in-evitable Bud Light can. I sit down on the bank, be-neath the yellow glow of beeches and maples.Dark water glistens in the shallows below. Squir-rels rustle through the leaves. Trees decay wherethey have fallen, providing shelter and food. ACarolina wren hops among the tangled branches.These days it is thought unfashionable, even back-ward, to talk about laws of nature or to read a phi-losophy, a morality, into the workings of the nat-ural world. For 4,000 years, theologians andphilosophers have debated whether an Intelli-gent Designer stands behind it all. I have nothingto contribute to that discussion. But this muchseems clear: this forest certainly demonstrates an

intelligence, one it has been honing for 290 millionyears. Its economy is a closed loop that transformswaste into food. In that alone it is superior to ourhuman economy, where the end of the line is notnutrients but rather toxic industrial waste. Is theredesign behind this natural intelligence? I have noidea. But I will venture this: Theforest knows what it's doing.

Compare the two economies:the forest's and ours. The sulfurdioxide that escapes from coal-burning power plants is responsi-ble for acid rain, smog, respira-tory infections, asthma, and lungdisease. Due to acid rain andmine runoff, there is so muchmercury in Kentucky streams thatany pregnant woman who eatsfish from them risks serious, life-long harm to the fetus she car-ries.And this year, thanks in largepart to coal burning, climatolo-gists found record-high levels ofclimate-altering carbon dioxidein the atmosphere. A forest, bycontrast, can store twenty timesmore carbon than croplands orpastures. Its leaf litter slows ero-sion and adds organic matter tothe soil. Its dense vegetation stopsflooding. Its headwater streamspurify creeks below it. A con-tiguous forest ensures species di-versity. A forest, in short, does all of the thingsthat the mining and burning ofcoal cannot-thatis its intelligence.

dozer, with its huge crescent blade, slowly push-es the other piles down into the fire. And al-though a sustainable, value-added timber indus-try is the region's most promising alternative tocoal, this coal company, and many others, don'teven bother to save the timber they do cut.

November 4, 2003, Lost Mountain

This morning I cast my vote for the Ken-tucky gubernatorial candidate who ac-cepted the fewest contributions from the

coal industry.Now, driving up the muddy switch-backs of Lost Mountain, I can see a thin columnof gray smoke rising over the next ridge. As Iround a bend near the summit, the forest fallsaway below my drivers-side window. I am notspeaking figuratively. The trees that lined theleft side of this road two weeks ago, and that heldin place the southern slope of Lost Mountain,are gone. Stumps line the road. Down below, allof the ground cover and topsoil has been churnedunder-"grubbed"-by D-9 bulldozers. Nothingbut mud, rock, and fallen trees remains.

I park my truck out of sight of the workers be-low and sit down on one of the stumps. Thismountainside has been scalped; the trees thatcovered it now lie in massive piles all down theslope.A burning pyre liesat the bottom, and a hazeof smoke fills this concave southern valley. One

Photograph © Mike Smith

On the next ridge over, another dozer is push-ing boulders out of the way to carve a haul roadfor the coal trucks. All around me there is noth-ing but rock, smoke, and ravaged soil. Then Isee standing a few feet away a single greenseedling, shooting out a dozen small branches.Somehow the dozer missed it, and now the entireemptiness of the slopegathers around this seedlinglike an unbearable presence, a ghost forest.

And not just any forest. What heightens thetragedy of surface mining in central Appalachiais that the chain saws and dozers are strippingaway the oldest and most diverse forests in NorthAmerica. A million years ago, the Pleistoceneglaciersforced northern trees to migrate south. Butthe glaciers never reached this part of the Ap-palachians, and when the massive ice sheets fi-nally retreated, they left in their wake a land-scape that looked much like a modem strip mine.Consequently, over hundreds of thousands ofyears, the Appalachians were responsible for re-foresting North America. But no other forestever achieved its diversity of tree species. Theforests of Appalachia are called "mixed meso-phytic," because they inhabit a "middle" climateand because the canopy comprises an astonishingnumber of mature trees, with no one speciesdom-

FOLIO 43

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inating. They remain the continent's seedbed,its mother lode. Now the industrial equivalent ofan ice age glacier will soon scour Lost Mountain,and the hopes of any kind of forest will be gone.

Back at home three hours later, I turn on theelection results. My candidate has been soundlybeaten.

InApril 2000, the Martin County Coal Cor-poration asked the Army Corps of Engineersfor a permit to create twenty-seven valley fills

from surface mining near Inez, Kentucky. Al-though the fill would bury more than six miles ofstreams in the county, the Corps granted the per-mit request. The EPA immediatelystepped inand urged the Corps to reconsider authorization.The EPA argued that "the discharges of fill ma-terial authorized for this project present an im-minent danger of irreparable harm to wildlifeand recreational areas." The Corps, however, re-fused to suspend MCCC's permit, and by the endof summer 2001 the valley fills had begun.

Then in August, Kentuckians for the Com-monwealth fileda federal lawsuitagainst the ArmyCorps of Engineers,askingthe court to suspend thepermit. They argued that the Clean Water Act,which allows only for clean "fill," not "waste,"prevented debris from mountaintop mining to bedisposed of in U.S. waters. In May of 2002, witha decision in the lawsuit still pending, the Corpsissued a new regulation under the Clean WaterAct to define "fill" as any debris created by min-ing. U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden im-mediately rejected that change, countering that"only the United States Congress can rewrite theAct to,allow fills with no purpose or use but thedeposit ofwaste." Haden also ruled that spoil frommountaintop mining was clearly waste, whichcould not be deposited in streams. Judge Haden'sdecision had the potential to shut down massivestrip-mining operations throughout the coalfieldsof Appalachia, but by January 2003 the conser-vative U.S. Fourth Circuit Court had overturnedHaden's decsision, and in May of that year, theDraft Programmatic Environmental Impact State-ment (EIS) was released. Its findings and propos-als have occasioned the latest round of argumentsabout coal and conservation.

The S,OOO-page document admitted thatmountaintop removal isbad, and for the usual rea-sons: it buries headwater streams, causes erosionand flooding, degrades water quality downstream,kills aquatic life, shakes the walls and cracks thefoundations of nearby homes, and wipes awayhuge portions of an extremely diverse ecosystem.The solution? The Interior Department proposedstreamlining the mine-permit process and doingawaywith the rule that requires a lOa-foot bufferzone between streams and mine sites. No limita-tions on mountaintop removal were proposed.

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2005

Coal operators could still fill up to 2S0 acres of awatershed with the rubble that wasonce a moun-taintop. Mine sites could still leach toxic acids'into creeks where small valley communities onceperformed baptisms.

December 17, 2003, Lost Mountain

Over the years I've heard numerous storiesabout do-gooders and documentary film-makerswho set out to inspect a strip mine

only to find themselves confronted with the bladeof a D-9 dozer,raised to windshield level and bear-ing down fast upon them. I decided not to showmy wife the article in this morning's paper abouta state surface-mine inspector who died after be-ing found beaten and unconscious in his home, hisbody mutilated by human bite marks. But I alsocan't quite shake that image,so I've decided to fol-Iowa lessconspicuous road that leads around thebackside of Lost Mountain, through a small com-munity called Harvey town.

Christmas lights outline the trailers and smallclapboard houses that are clustered tightly at thecreek side, as if gravity itself had set them there.The western side of the mountain shows fewerscars from logging, 'and a series of sandstone out-crops stretches along the ridgeline, providing vi-tal shelter to smaller animals, including the en-dangered wood rat. This unfortunately namedrodent is actually quite handsome, with largeeyes and long whiskers. Americans particularlyshould feel an affinity for this rapacious collectorof baubles. If something shines-a. piece of glass,aluminum foil, a shotgun shell-the wood rattakes it home. He piles the loot just outside hisnest, which sits back in a narrow rock crevice. Noone knows why. Perhaps he just wants a biggermidden pile than the wood rat living next door.

All through Appalachia, wood rats are on thedecline. A parasitic roundworm has decimatedmuch of the population, and the forest fragmen-tation caused by strip mining-the creation ofsmaller woodlots with an increased circumfer-ence-has made it much easier for foxes and bob-cats to prey upon/them. Strip mining is also aleading cause of species extinction. This Cum-berland Plateau is one particular "hot spot" ofecological concern because two thirds of its birdpopulation is also in decline.

Earlier in the fall, I climbed along this sameridgeline, going from one rock formation to an-other, looking for evidence of wood rats. Now,three months later, I'm climbing this ridge again,this time to get a decent, discreet look at themining on the other side. I can already hearlarge equipment churning. At the ridgetop, Icircle north and crouch under a stand of youngtrees. Two enormous backhoes are clawing awayat the substrate directly beneath me. Slowly they

cut a vertical rock wall all along the inside ofthis hollow to lay the wide road that coal truckswill need to maneuver the mountainside. Alongwith bulldozers and graders, they have alreadycut a quarter-mile road stretching down to thehighway.Eventually the road will stretch up to thesummit, providing access to the top three coalseams that lie beneath Lost Mountain. But here,at mid-elevation, the work has gotten tougher.The dozers are no longer shoving aside topsoil;now they are strugglingwith boulders. They carveawayas much of an opening as they can while thebackhoes load the loosened rock onto haul trucks.When those huge beds are full, the trucks begincreeping up a makeshift path to a flat bench nearthe top of the mountain. I watch through binoc-ulars as they back to the edge of the bench. Slow-ly, a hydraulic lift raises the bed, sending eighty-five tons of brown sandstone and grayslate spillingdown the mountainside.

There isno better place to understand thesemiology of a strip mine than at GoosePond, a five-acre "reclamation" area that

sits in the middle of a massive mountaintop-removal project called the Starfire Mine, inBreathitt County. One might begin at the top,

with the term "overburden." What is burdened inthis case is the coal seam down below;overburdenis the oak-pine forest, the topsoil, and 200 feet ofsandstone that stand between the coal operator andthe coal seam. When miners dislodge the over-burden, it becomes "spoil." And according to theproposed rule change, the spoil that is dumpedinto the valleysbelow will not be "waste"but "fill."Streams are not buried; rather, valleys are filled.

"Reclamation," however, is the term that finallyputs us squarely in the realm of Orwellian slip-knots. Speaking plainly, to reclaim something isto get it back. The 1977 Surface Mining Controland Reclamation Act requires coal operators torestore the "approximate original contour"(AOC) of the land they have mined. Accordingto the Kentucky Department of Natural Re-sources, "The condition of the land after themining process must be equal to or better thanpre-mining conditions." Scanning the reclaimedportions of the Starfire mine site, I can see hun-dreds of acres of rolling savanna, planted withan exotic lespedeza,one of the fewgrassesthat willsurvive in this shale. But in what sense does a sa-vanna "approximate" a summit? In what sense isa grassland monoculture "equal to or better than"a mixed rnesophytic forest? The reality is that

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mountains pitched at a grade as steep as the Ap-palachians cannot be restored. Gravity and topog-raphy are working against you.

Perhaps sensing that the AOC stipulationwould be a hard sell, lawmakers added this pro-vision to SMCRA: coal operators could obtain an"AOC variance" if they could prove that thepost-mined land would be put to "higher or bet-ter uses." In the beginning that meant commer-cial or residential development. A few housingcomplexes and even a prison were built on thesesites (when the prison watchtowers started tolean due to subsidence, locals dubbed the facili-ty Sink Sink). But there weren't nearly enough

at a time. Down inside the pit sits an explosivestruck. Its tank reads: THE POWER TO MOVE MOUN-TAINS. Coal trucks rumble past on all sides of thepond. Highwalls frame the horizon. But none ofthat matters. A coal company has only to erect theflimsytrappingsof a tourist stop and they have con-verted a wasteland into an area of "public use."Who wouldn't want to fish for trout in the shad-ow of a dragline ?

Still, my favorite part of Goose Pond is a largesign that stands next to the observation deck. Itis covered with pictures of pink lady's slipper,large-leaved magnolia, ruffed grouse, painted tril-lium, spotted salamander, and a wood rat, and it

reads, "These are some of theother wildlife and plant speciesyou may encounter during yourvisit." The word "other" adds aparticular absurdity to what isalready an outrageous lie. All ofthe species pictured are inhabi-tants of a deciduous forest, thelikes of which this place won'tbe able to sustain for thousandsof years.

developers clamoring to fill these barren flatswith strip malls or apartment complexes. And itwas much cheaper to plant grass on an aban-doned mine site and call it a "pasture" or, betteryet, a "wildlife habitat. II

That is what has happened at Goose Pond,where rock islands dot the still water and hard-scrabble trees cling to the cobble. Above the pondstands a small wooden observation deck, repletewith two of those mounted viewing stations youfind at Niagara Falls. Looking only through thesebinoculars, one might indeed be fooled into think-ing that this was some kind of wildlife sanctuary.But back away two steps and you will see a behe-moth blue crane sitting in a deep pit behind thepond, swinging its massive arm back and forthlike the fin of a mechanical shark. Attached to thecrane is a dragline that rakes a house-sized mawacross the coal seam, scooping up 100 tons of rock


Coal operators are notan easily intimidatedbunch. But there is

probably no one in the state ofKentucky who rattles theircage like a forty-eight-year-oldgrandmother named Teri Blan-ton. A former chairperson ofKentuckians for the Common-wealth, the state's largest social-justice organization, Blanton hasspent the last two decades help-ing coalfield residents fight thecorporations that have turned somuch of eastern Kentucky into

what she calls a toxic dump.One can get a real education in environmen-

tal corruption and smash-mo~th class warfareby tracking the last twenty years of Blanton'slife. She grew up in a small town called Day-hoit, in Harlan County, where four generationsof her family had lived along White Star Hollow.It was the kind of community where neighborsshared their coal in the winter, and on a rarepiece of flatland, one man, Millard Sutton, grewenough vegetables to feed nearly everyone intown. Families took turns helping out in his gar-den. Blanton moved to Michigan in the seven-ties to start a family, then moved back to Day-hoit in 1981 as a single mother of two. Her careeras an activist started shortly afterward, when shephoned the highway department and asked forsomeone to clean up the large puddle of black wa-ter and coal sludge that stood in front of her


trailer where her children caught the school bus.The highway department called the coal com-pany that wasmining around White Star Hollow,and the company responded by sending a coaltruck to slowly circle Blanton's trailer all day."That really burnt my ass," Blanton recalled,"that they thought they could shut me up by in-timidation." That coal company, owned by twobrothers, James and Aubra Dean, never did cleanup the mess, and in the end, after Blanton's re-lentless badgering, the highway department builta new road up to her trailer.

Unfortunately, Blanton's problems were aboutto get much bigger than a slurry puddle. Sincemoving back to Dayhoit, Blanton's two childrenhad been constantly sick. Sometimes, afterbathing, they would break out in what their doc-tor called "a measle-like rash." But they didn'thave the measles.The groundwater that fed theirwell had been poisoned with vinyl chloride,trichloroethylene, and a dozen other "volatileorganic contaminants," or VOCs. On a three-acre plot a half-mile from Blanton's home, theMcGraw Edison Company was rebuilding miningequipment. In the process they sprayedtrichloroethylene-based degreasing solvents ontransformers and capacitors. They piped PCB-laden transformer oil directly into Millard Sutton'slarge garden. They even sprayed it on the dirtroads of the next-door trailer park to, as theysaid, "help keep the dust down." They were justbeing good neighbors.

In the late eighties and early nineties Blanton,along with two other Dayhoit women, Joan Robi-nett andMonetta Gross, began pushing state andfederal agencies to test their water. "In the mediawe were portrayed as these hysterical housewiveswho didn't know what we were talking about,"Blanton recalled. Finally, after many of the wellswere found to be contaminated by chemicals fromthe plant (which had since been sold and resold),the EPA declared Dayhoit a Superfund site in1992 and put it on the National Priorities List ofhot spots. "I moved back to Harlan County think-ing I was bringing my children home to a safeplace," Blanton said. "Instead I brought themback to a chemical wasteland."

The EPA excavated 5,000 tons of contami-nated soil from around the plant, then trucked itto Alabama, where it was stored next to a poor,African-American community. To extract thecontaminated groundwater, a pump-and-treatsystemwas installed on the site of the abandonedplant. This catalytic oxidation unit filtered outsome of the VOCs and released the remaining el-ements, including carcinogens, into the air to bequickly dispersed. At' least that was the plan.Blanton began researching pump-and-treat sys-tems and found that they had been tested at siteswhere winds were high. But White Star Hollow

was a different story. "It's like a bowl where thefog sits down on the river until the middle of theday," Blanton said. "And I lived right at the fogline, and as the crow flies not very far from theplant. In my mind, I knew they were going topoison me and my kids all over again."

Blanton loaded her trailer onto a flatbed, tookher children, and left White Star Hollow.

On a bright cold day in November, I drovewith Blanton back to Dayhoit. We passed thetrailer park that sat next to the McGraw Edisonplant, as well as the field that used to be MillardSutton's garden. Blanton pointed to the yellowhouse next to it. "Everyone in that house died ofcancer," she said. And she said it more than onceas we traveled up the hollow.

The road followed Ewing Creek, runningbrown from recent rains. And then, as we followedit farther upstream, the water turned orange.

"1grew up on this creek," Blanton said, "grewup walking these mountains, and I watchedthem crumble before my eyes"

Blanton pointed for me to pull offat a rusting cat-tle gate, where a sign read: MOUNTAIN SPUR COALCOMPANY. We got out and climbed the gravelroad that led to an abandoned strip mine. A nastyorange syrup called acid mine water was pouringout of a pipe that drained an open mine pit. Thesulfuricacid collected in a small pond, then spilledover into the creek below. Blanton lit a cigarette."I grew up on this creek," she said. "I grew upwalking these mountains, and I've watched themcrumble before my very eyes. It just makes me an-grier and angrier knowing that these people canoperate in such a manner and get by with it."

For years the Dean brothers, along with a thirdpartner, Carl McAfee, have been playing an elab-orate shell game that keeps them in business andfree from any responsibility to the land or locallandowners. It works like this: the three men ownseveral companies that remain in good standingwith state regulators. Then they set up smallercompanies with names like Limousine Coal, Mas-ter Blend, and Mountain Spur. These operationslease equipment from the "good" company andpost a small bond that will supposedly cover thecost of reclamation should the company declarebankruptcy, which is exactly what they do. Theshell company forfeits its bond, which is neverenough to complete the reclamation, and localcommunities are left with cracked foundations, acontaminated creek, poisoned wells, and steepslopes that pour mud down when it rains becausethere is no vegetation to hold soil in place.

In October 2002, Blanton tried to block a

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permit from being issued to one of these shellcompanies, Shamrock Fuel. Before a hearing of-ficer from the Office of Surface Mining, she laidout an extensive paper trail showing that at leastone of the men, or his wife, was named as an "in-corporator" or an officer in every one of the com-panies that had abandoned reclamation and de-clared bankruptcy. But, curiously, the OSM ruledthat it could find no clear link between the com-panies, And the fight to penalize violators ofSMCRA was made even harder by a puzzling1999 verdict in the U.S. Court of Appeals for theDistrict of Columbia. In National MiJ1ing Associ-ation v. Department of the Interior, the court ruledthat permits could not be denied to companiesfor violations at mines they no longer controlled.So all coal operators like the Deans have to dois declare bankruptcy, start a new company, andmove on to the next permit. I

Across the creek from where we stood, I couldsee the home of Blanton's childhood friend Deb-bie Williams. Before the mining started here, shespent $7,000 to have a new well dug. But as soonas the blasting began, her faucet was running asorange as the water now draining from this mine.The foundation of her house and her chimney

The dozers have erased almost all thelogging roads, shoving aside topsoil

and subsoil in search of the coal seam

have been cracked. But the Deans have not yetbeen forced to reimburse Williams, and it's like-ly they won't be. Just up the ridge, another oneof their companies, Sand lick Coal, continues tostrip away the trees and the coal.

Before leaving Dayhoit, Blanton and I stoppedat the White Star Cemetery, which sits in a smallclearing, Some of the headstones were so old Icould barely distinguish them from the large rocksthat had rolled down the mountainside. "Hey,this ispretty," Blanton said. "I don't think I've everbeen up here on a day I wasn't burying some-one." Many of the newer tombs were set above-ground in cement vaults. Blanton pulled backsome plastic flowers beside one of her cousin'smarkers. "She lived next to what we called thekiller well," Blanton said. "Everyone who livedaround that well died."

In the middle of the cemetery were buriedtwo of Garnett Howard's three sons, the twowho were born after he started working at theMcGraw Edison plant. "They both developednon-Hodgkins lymphoma before they were thir-

I The Deans did not respond to repeated requests forcomment on this article,


ty and died," Blanton said. We stared in silenceat the dates on the markers. "Almost nobody inDayhoit lives past fifty-five,"she went on. "At themeetings the people from the EPA would accuseus of being too emotional. I told them, 'Let allof your family members and friends die aroundyou and see if you don't get emotional." Sheknelt beside the grave of a high school friend. Onthe headstone was a depiction of a father and sonstanding beside a stream. "He was a real red-neck," Blanton said, breaking into a smile. "Iloved him."

February 23, 2004, Lost Mountain

Forty years ago Lyndon Johnson came toeastern Kentucky, the poorest place inAmerica, to declare his War on Poverty.

His limousine maneuvered the pocked roads ofMartin County, and, with Lady Bird at his side,the president stopped at some tar-papered shacksto assure a few families that he would bring theminto his Great Society. At that time, Appalachia'spoverty rate stood at 31 percent. Since then,nearly 2;300 miles of roads have been laid acrossthe region and more than 800,000 families havegotten indoor plumbing. And today eastern Ken-tucky's poverty rate hovers around, well, 30 per-cent. If you look at a map of central Ap-palachia-in Kentucky, West Virginia, andTennessee-the areas that the Appalachian Re-gional Commission deems "distressed" are al-most without exception the ones that have seenthe most strip mining.

Up on Lost Mountain, the ground ismuddy andcovered by a light snow. The dozers have erasedalmost all the logging roads, shoving aside topsoiland subsoil in search of the number 11 coal seam.Leslie Resources has now blocked off every dirtroad leading up Lost Mountain with imposingiron gates. I don't take it personally. Eastern Ken-tuckians are as attached to their ATVs as urbanKentuckians are to their SUVs, and while bothdo their respective share of environmental dam-age, it's the former that Leslie is trying to keep offLost Mountain. NO TRESPASSING signs hang on allthe gates, but, since Leslie leasesonly the mineralrights to the property, I tell myself it has no ju-risdiction to keep me off property it doesn't own.I duck under one gate on the eastern side of themountain and start walking. Chain saws havemowed down most of the trees on this slope, andthey all lie where they fell. Only the dead treeshave been left standing, and woodpeckers moveback and forth between them as if they can't be-lieve their luck-nothing now stands betweenthem and the carpenter ants that colonize diseasedbeech trees.

Higher up, where the hardwood trees still stand,I pass a sign tacked to one that reads: DANGER

BLASTING. Almost on cue a siren sounds to signala coming blast. I am still too far from the site toactually see the explosion, but two minutes later,when the blast sounds out over the hollow, I feela slight trembling beneath my boots. After a fewmore minutes, a yellow plume moves through thetrees, carrying with it the sharp smell of sulfur.

I drop down the ridge side to a lower loggingroad that leads directly to the source of thesmoke. I can hear the constant beeping of haultrucks inching back to the edge of the hollowfill. A few months ago, I could follow this grav-el road up to the mountaintop. Now I find itblocked by a row of impregnable boulders.Peering over them, I can seeonly the top of a truck as it rais-es its bed and sends another loadof rubble down into the valley. Ican, however, tell that whatused to be a ridgeline leadingwest is now nowhere in sight.

I circle back around the moun-tain and begin climbing throughthe younger trees and wildroses that still cover the northernslope. The last obstacles are thecapstones that mark the summit.[ shimmy into a narrow crevice ofrock, find a foothold, and haulmyself up. At the crest, doubledover and gasping, I still see in thedirt the same traces of wild turkey,grouse, and raccoons that I sawmonths ago. The mountaintop isstill here, still as it was. Theseobdurate boulders attest to it. It'snot until I reach the other side ofthis summit and look down thatI see what has changed.

The lower ridgeline is nearlygone. What was, last month, agradual slope leading westward is now, right be-low me, a fifty-foot vertical drop that gives wayto dark pits and gray ledges.

Youcan think of this mountain, or any moun-tain in Appalachia, as a geological layer cakewith four- to eight-foot seams of coal separated bymuch thicker bands of sandstone, slate, and shale.The seams are numbered in descending order:the one nearest the summit is the Hazard 12seam, and about three hundred feet below liesHazard 9. The narrator of Merle Travis's famousfolk song "Sixteen Tons" begins his lament with,

but no deep miners are trying to dig it out. Whybother? Why send hundreds of miners burrowingunderground when a few men armed with explo-sives and bulldozers can blast right down to theseam?And whereas in the forties it took one min-er all day to load sixteen tons of coal out of adeep mine, today one man behind the wheel of aloader can in fiveminutes filla coal truck with six-ty tons of this bituminous rock. What makes stripmining so cost-efficient is precisely what makes itso devastating.

Here on Lost Mountain, the crew goes straightfor the highest three seams, where there is lessearth to move and a more ready supply of coal.

I was born one momin' when the sun didn't shinePicked up a shovel and I walked to the mineI hauled sixteen tons of number 9 coalAnd the straw-boss said, "Well, bless my soul."

That same number 9 coal seam lies beneath LostMountain, a few hundred feet below the summit,


The dozers have pushed much of the vegetationand topsoil to the edge of this man-made plateau,called an area mine. The twisted trees andmounded dirt form a berm around the darkercrater. Young maples and hickories stubbornlyhold on at the edge of the mining, where so muchof the topsoil has been upturned and compacted.What compounds the problems of mountaintopremoval is that when the bedrock is disturbed, it .increases in volume by 20 percent; that addi-tional matter is called "swell" and will eventual-ly be dumped down into the valley below.

Staying out of sight, I loop down to the edge ofthe mining and duck in behind three toppledpine trees. From here the whole scene is in frontof me. At the far edge of the mine site, a white"powder tower" now stands, filled with explosivematerial. In front of it, dozers have shaved downto the number 10 seam. A loader scrapes the coal

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/ into mounds, then shovels them into the firstcoaltrucks to climb Lost Mountain. Those trucks willtake their loads five miles up highway 80 to LeslieResource's coal tipple, which sits beside the northfork of the Kentucky River. There the coal will beprocessed and loaded onto railcars or barges.

The whistle blows at 4JO-quitting time. Theworkers grab their lunch coolers and jump downfrom the dozers, trucks, and loaders. I retracemy path down the backside of the mountain.My face and arms bear the scars of blackberrygauntlets, and my water bottle is empty. Mythoughts have turned from the ravages of stripmining to the shelves of cold beer at the BP sta-tion down below. I am not looking ahead, not

maple succumbs to the dozer'sblade. The dozer isgraceless and resolute. Each time the driver backsdown the hill to take a run at another tree, Iscramble about fiftyyardsfarther away.When I amfinally far enough down the mountain to escapethe driver's notice, I take a seat on a stump. It isalmost dusk, and the mountain has darkened toa silhouette. I can no longer see the dozer.But fromthe stump, I watch as one tree after another fallsagainst the violet light of the setting sun.

After the draft Environmental Impact State-ment on mountaintop removal was re-leased in 2003, several forums were held in

Kentucky and West Virginia to allow for publiccomment on the study. Thisstruck me as a rather cynical for-mality, but I drove down to thehearing at the Hal Rogers Cen-ter in Hazard, Kentucky, to hearwhat coalfieldcitizens had to say.There were about 150 people inthe auditorium, mostly men.They wore Carhartt jackets andwork boots; some still had ontheir hard hats. Up on stage thedrafters of the EIS document satat a long table. All the heavy hit-ters were there-the Environ-mental Protection Agency, theArmy Corps of Engineers, theDepartment of the Interior's Of-fice of Surface Mining, the Fish& Wildlife Service. They sat at-tentive, with pens poised, readyto take the public pulse.

Anyone who wished wouldhave five minutes to speak his orher piece. The first speaker, BillCaylor, president of the Ken-tucky Coal Association, beganby complaining for thirty sec-

onds that he had prepared a twelve-minute speechand why couldn't somebody do something aboutthe time limit. Then Caylor, a man with thickwhite hair and a neat white mustache, asked fora show of hands of those who had come to sup-port strip mining. If anyone besides me didn'traise a hand, it was hard to tell. Having sized uphis audience, Caylor launched into a barrage ofstatistics: 120 million tons of coal were minedin Kentucky last year, placing the state third inextraction behind West Virginia and Wyoming;.that coal fetches $3 billion annually; 80 percentof Kentucky coal is sold out of state; in the lastfifteenyears,coal-related employment has dropped61 percent; at 4.1 cents per kilowatt hour, Ken-tucky coal is the cheapest energy source around."We're like the Saudi Arabia of America," Cay-lor announced, meaning, I think, that Appalachia

looking at anything really, when the huge silvermaw of a bulldozer comes lunging over the ridgeabout twenty feet in front of me. The driverdoesn't see me; he is cocked at too steep an an-gle. I leap back over several fallen trees and takecover. Whatever else bulldozers do, they do notmove fast. This one backs down the hill, coughs

. another cloud of black smoke into the air, thenlurches back into view, shoving topsoil to theside. The driver pauses each time to get his bear-ings, and each time I get another look at thehuge, serrated blade. For the first time, I under-stand completely why Harry Caudill, author ofNight Comes to the Cumberlands, described it asa "monstrous scimitar."

Once the driver has cleared a space to work, hesets about the real task-knocking down trees.I'm startled to see how easily a twenty-year-old

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! APRIL zoos Photograph © Mike Sm ith

has a lot of fossil fuel, and not that the region'spoor have been greatly oppressedby a wealthy mi-nority that controls the fuel.

Still, I puzzled over his fact sheet. Coal jobshave dropped 61 percent precisely because stripmining requires fat fewer men to operate muchlarger machinery. It seemed hardly an argumentfor decreasing regulation on mountaintop removal.And in what sense was it a good thing that 80 per-cent of Kentucky's coal is sold out of state? Whyshould Dayton and Detroit-or China, for thatmatter-get the coal but be held accountable fornone of the environmental consequences of its ex-traction? And if everyone is doing so well, whyis eastern Kentucky the nation's capital for Oxy-contin abuse?

Caylor was followed by a long line of minersand mining engineers. One man read an ex-haustive list of every Hazard business that hadbeen built on flattened land. The crowd was gen-erous with its applause. Several speakers drew at-tention to the deer, elk, and turkey that had re-turned to the region after mountaintop removalbegan. The wife of a miner pleaded for her hus-band's job, then asked, "What use are the moun-tains to us other than coal?"

Then up stepped a gray-haired man in a bluesuit and a flamboyant purple tie. He said his namewas Paul David Taulbee. His grandfather hadhelped log the mountains back in 1912, and hadthen worked as a deep miner from 1915 to 1952.His father worked in the mines for twenty-eightyears. I suspect there were country preachers inthe family as well, because it quickly becameclear that Taulbee had come to deliver a sermon.He wasn't talking to the men and women up onstage; he was addressing the congregation.

He was tired-sick and tired-of outsiderscoming into eastern Kentucky and telling its peo-ple what they should do. He hinted at a conspir-acy afoot by the rest of the state to keep easternKentucky poor. He wanted the federal govern-ment and the Army Corps of Engineers and theEnvironmental Protection Agency to leave thisregion and its people alone to mine as they sawfit."We want to be unbound and left alone so we candevelop to the fullest extent," he stormed, one fin-ger held high. Were that to happen, all of thosenative people who had followed the outward mi-gration north for better jobs would come backhome. Eastern Kentucky would finally thrive.Because, Taulbee intoned, what the outsidersshould never forget is this: "The only way to stayin the mountains is.to mine the mountains!" Astanding ovation followed. The moderator calledfor a short break. Everyone went out to smoke.

It was gray and drizzling. I started up my fossil-fuel-burning truck and headed home. I replayedthe hearing in my head. It's true that the contourmining of the seventies cut out shelves in these

mountains and made room for the chain storesthat followed an expanded highway. But anyonewho has ever looked down on the strip jobs froma plane knows there is enough flatland in easternKentucky to plop down 10,000 Wal-Marts. Andmost of that land is completely inaccessible. Asfor the return of game animals, deer populationshave risen all over the eastern United States,not just around abandoned mines. The elk thatdo graze around the edges of reclaimed sites werereintroduced a few years ago from western states.Strip mining had nothing to do with it.

As for Paul David Taulbee, I could tell himthat surface mining accounts for only 5,000 jobsin all thirty counties of eastern Kentucky, aver-aging out to 167 jobs per county. I could tell himthat the old deep-mining jobs aren't coming back,and the people who left for Cincinnati and Cleve-land might not want to either, especially if they

TIepeople who left for Cincinnati andCleveland might not want to return to wastedmountains and dead streams .

were coming back to wasted mountains and deadstreams. I could tell him that if coal hadn'tbrought prosperity to the mountains in the lastninety years, it probably isn't likely to do so.

But Taulbee isn't going to listen to me. I'm anoutsider, as he had said, the worst kind of elitist,who thinks a mountain is more important thansomeone's job. The miner's wife had asked,"When are you going to start thinking about usinstead of the environment?" But perhaps theharder question is this: When in Appalachia arewe going to start thinking about both at once?

March 29, 2004, Lost Mountain

It'seighty degrees and sunny. I'm driving fastalongside Lost Creek, with the windowsdown and Neil Young wailing on an old cas-

sette. Redbud and white dogwood are bloomingalong the steep slopes and up pristine gorges.Down below, junked cars and hot-water heatersare rusting on some grassless patches of land infront of saggingtrailers. What is remarkable aboutthe ugliness of Appalachian poverty is its close-ness and contrast to the spectacular mountains ris-ing around it.

If the daywere not so nice, I might be chastenedby the number of wooden crosses, each of whichmarks a spot where someone met a violent death.Take one of the poorest parts of the country, addto it alcohol and pills, hard curves and coal trucks,and what you get are a lot of little white crossesstaggered along the roadside.

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I set my parking break at the usual spot belowLost Mountain and hike to the top. On the benchright below me, a white truck carrying a largetank pulls into view. To get a better look, I shuf-fleabout thirty feet down the ridge side and wedgemyselfbetween two boulders that I hope will pro-vide decent cover when the blasting starts. "Fly-rock" is the rather benign term for everythingthat scatters when the explosives are detonated.Regulators from the state Department of Natur-a~Resources tell me they have cracked down onblasting violations in the last few years. Peopleweregetting hurt, chimneys and house foundationswere cracking, dishes were shattering. I heardabout an older couple in Knox County who weresitting beside their small pool one afternoon whena boulder came flying at them from a strip job be-hind their house. It landed in the pool and crackedthe concrete bottom. This year eight off-site fly-rock violations were reported in Kentucky; in onecase, children were playing in their pool whendebris started falling around them.

Down below, the driver of a blast-hole drill isslowly working his way around the perimeter ofthis bench, boring a sixty-foot-deep hole aboutevery ten feet. With a long, vertical drill carriageattached to the chassis, the machine moves withthe slowunsteadiness of a man carryinga long lad-der. I can hear a low grinding sound as the hy-draulic motor builds torque and the long drill bittears away at the sandstone.

While the rock drill moves from hole to hole,two men step out of the truck that carries the ex-plosives. A long tube that stretches over the top

I climh up over the boulders and buriedtree limbs; it looks from here as if a

meteor has hit this side of the mountain

of the tank now swings to the side, where one ofthe men holds a narrow plastic bag up to themouthpiece. A brownish substance fills the bagwith a concoction known in the coal industry asAMFO. The acronym stands for ammonium ni-trate and fuel oil. Timothy McVeigh detonated4,000 pounds of it in Oklahoma City. The typi-cal blast on a Kentucky strip mine is ten times that.

AMFO is too volatile to transport, so the am-monium is mixed with diesel fuel at the minesite. The two men drop the mixture down intoone of the blast holes, then repeat the processaround the edge of the bench. Finally, they packblasting caps-c!etonators-into each hole andstring them together with a long orange fuse. Astheir truck and the rock drill pull away from thebench, the warning siren sounds. Each permittedmining operation must follow something called


the scaled distance equation, which calculatesthe amount of explosives that can be used rela-tive to the nearest residential or commercialstructure. Regulators make quarterly inspectionsof the mine sites and use seismographs to measureeach blast. But the problem, coalfield residents willtell you, is that all of the inspections are an-nounced, which makes it rather easy for a coalcompany to exceed the blasting limits as soon asthe inspectors are gone.

When this particular blast finally goes off, itlooks something like a Las Vegas fountain sud-denly coming to life. Except it is spewing rock in-stead of water. All at once white plumes of debrisshoot out of every hole, and then seem to hangfor a moment at about thirty feet. Two seconds af-ter the blast, the entire outer ledge falls away, asif it had been shaken by an earthquake, which ofcourse it has. I duck and cover as smaller debrisscatters in my direction. An acrid yellow smokehangs in the air, and a fine graypowder settles overthis section of the mine site. Slowly, the haultrucks and front-end loader move in to truckaway all of the loosened rock. From this per-spective it is easy to understand why Teri Blan-ton calls mountaintopping "bomb and bury.""Re-moval" is certainly too clinical, too surgical, aterm. All of this rubble will be dumped downinto the valley fill, and this same process will berepeated thousands of times across the mine site.

I climb back up to the crest, then drop downthe backside of Lost Mountain. Here the ridge-line forms another large bowl, and all sides bearthe crisscrossed scars of bulldozers that have lev-eled most of the trees. My T-shirt snagson the bri-ars of young black locust trees. I pull myself upover a series of bald escarpments, where the sunhas cast an almost lavender color over the sand-stone. Abruptly, I stumble into a clearing, an ar-tificial shelf carved out by a bulldozer. An up-rooted maple puts out, for the last time, its longscarlet stamens. Other trees lean away, half un-earthed. Above me rises a thirty-foot mound ofdebris. Loosened by blasting, then pushed aside,this rock-and-shale mound forms a rim around theentire mine site. I climb up over the bouldersand buried tree limbs until I am crouching at theedge of this cratered landscape. It looks from hereas if a meteor has hit this side of the mountain.

Ifirst met Damon Morgan at one of the pub-lic hearings in Hazard. Both sides were

.sounding off about the Bush Administra-tion's proposal to allow mining within 100 feet ofstreams, a practice prohibited by the SMCRA.Several engineers from TECO Energy had beenextolling the job growth that coal brought to theregion. Then Morgan stepped to the podium,wearing denim overalls, a red flannel shirt, and awhite straw cowboy hat. He looked to be in his

seventies. "These people who talk about coalbringing jobs," he began, "why you wouldn't haveno problem at all selling them a sky hook." 1wasn't sure what a sky hook was, but I was pret-ty sure this was the genuine article-a self-made,free-thinking mountaineer, stepping right out ofthe past.

The engineers from TECO also had claimedthat many headwater streams were actually dirt-ier before mining, when localpeople dumped their garbage inthe hollows. To that Morganreplied, "You're right, they're notas dirty now. Because they're notthere." He said the stream thatran beside his family's cabin isnow buried under sixty feet ofwhat used to be a mountaintopcalled Huckleberry Ridge. Andall around him, Leslie Resourcescontinues leveling mountains andburying streams. After the hear-ing, I asked if I could come downto take a look.

Sure enough, when I reachedMorgan's modest log cabin thatApril morning, he and his wifewere sitting on their porch, lis-tening to the incessant beeping ofhaul trucks creeping along theridgetops all around them.

Morgan was drafted right outof high school and sent to Oki-nawa and Iwo J ima. "When I wasin the service, I thought a lotabout this land," he says, "how Iused to hunt on it as a kid, and how I used tocome up here and sing. I decided to save up mymoney and buy this place when I got back." Andhe did. He payed $1,000 for 100 acres, which to-day is the only stretch along Bad Creek thathasn't been strip-mined.

We climbed on Morgan's ATV and followedgravel switchbacks up the mountain. Morganpointed out a rare white chestnut tree. Downthis ridge side, he has set out a row of chestnutsaplings, which he imported from Virginia andhopes will survive the blight that wiped out thenative chestnuts in the forties. Back then, as theoldest of twelve children, Morgan worked withhis father on the family's scratch farm. "We'dtake a hillside like this and grub it up and plantcorn and beans," he said. "That's the way wemade a living. We had forty or fifty head of hogs,and we turned them back up in here." Manyother families did the same. The hogs wouldfeast all summer on beechnuts.

It was a marginal economy even for margin-al land, but it sustained a family of fourteen.Soon, though, the railroads that had been laid

alongside the Cumberland and Kentuckyrivers would signal the end of such sustenanceliving. An extractive economy had arrived.Once the major timber barons were through,there were no beech' trees left and no beech-nuts for the hogs.

Morgan cranked up the ATV and we ven-tured higher. He pointed to an outcrop hiddenby taller trees. "The man I bought this land


from," Morgan shouted over the IS-horsepowerengine, "that's where he set his still. His wifehad a bell down at the house and she'd ring it ifany revenuers came around." \1Je rode across theridgeline that marked the boundary of Morgan'sproperty. Everything from there down to his cab-in belonged to him; everything over the ridge-at least the mineral rights-to one coal compa-ny or another.

We rode past the last stands of chestnut oak andmountain laurel. Then we made a hard right andsuddenly were driving across the savanna land-scape so typical of a post-reclamation moun-taintop-removal job. Brown lespedezawaved likeprairie grass."This was reclaimed over thirty yearsago," Morgan said, but it had only a fewpines andscattered black locusts to show for it. When wereached the edge of this shelf, Morgan shut off thevehicle. Across the valley wasanother scene I wasbecoming used to. The same company that wasmining Lost Mountain had reduced one moreforested watershed to another dark wasteland.

"That used to be a big beautiful mountain,"Morgan said. "Now look at it."

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A black butte rose up from a series of staggeredblack plareaus that stretched out against the hori-zon. Narrow rivulets caused by erosion ran downthe sides of the benches. The characreristic grayhaul roads wound through it all. The ugly panora-ma dwarfed the line of dozers that sat below thenearest bench. And the only thing that waskeep-ing those dozers off Morgan's property was a pieceof legislation he had spent twenty years fightingto enact.

In the 1880s and '90s, a native Kentuckyschoolteacher named John c.c. Mayo began rid-ing through the eastern counties on horseback,offeringgold dollars to farmerswho would sell himtheir mineral rights. Since the farmers made theirliving off the surface of the land, selling whatwas underneath seemed like a good idea. Manysigned a contract called the "broad form deed," sonamed because it gave the deed holders broad

And when he bought these 100 acres back inthe forties, the company still had every right tostrip off every pound of topsoil to claim its coal.

This happened all over eastern Kentucky. Menwho had learned to drive tanks during WorldWar II had no problem climbing onto D-9 bull-dozers and cutting benches along the side of amountain. Then in 1961 the Tennessee ValleyAuthority, a major provider of hydroelectric pow-er, decided to get into the coal business. TheTVA signed contracts to buy 16.5 million tons ofstrip-mined coal.

Under the broad form deed, the mining wasruthless and the landowners were powerless. Mrs.Bige Ritchie, who lived on Sassafras Creek,.watched a bulldozer plow through a family grave-yard. It upended the coffin of her infant son andpushed it down the mountainside. "I like to lostmy mind over it," she told Ben A. Franklin of the

New York Times.The conflict finally came to

a head in 1965, when landown-ers took up their rifles and re-fused to let the bulldozers de-stroy their property. Citizengroups started forming to fightthe broad form deed. DamonMorgan joined just about all ofthem and served as chairman ofthe Citizens Coal Council. Fi-nally, in 1988, Kentuckians vot-ed for a state constitutionalamendment that required coaloperators to get a landowner'spermission before mining. Thatlaw saved Morgan's home andland, but he still has to look outevery day at the thousands ofacres that have been destroyedall around him.

"I belong to a lot of peacefulorganizations," he said as westared down at the lifeless minesite. "We believe in dialogue.Well, I believe in dialogue, too.But sometimes ... " His voice

trailed off. "We're fighting terrorism right now,"he said, and he wasn't talking about Islamic mil-itants. "If people are going to poison you to death,I think we should do whatever is necessary toput a stop to it. The state and federal govern-ment won't do nothing. I don't want to say takethe law into your own hands. That's a big step. But. .. I don't know."

Morgan turned around in his seat to take inan as-yet-unscathed range just to the left of thestrip mine. Color was coming back to the redmaples. Cherry and serviceberrytrees were bloom-ing. "See how that holler zigzags in and out ofthose mountains," he said. "That's where Main

rights to extract the coal by any means they de-sired. The farmers obviously imagined that min-ers would tunnel under their land using picksand shovels, then haul the coal out with ponies.At the turn of the century, no one who sold theirmineral rights could have imagined the industrialevolution that would lead to strip mining.

Mayo bought up thousands of mineral parcels,which he then sold or leased to coal companies.The companies themselves soon got into thegame of buying mineral rights under the broadform deed. Near the turn of the century, KentuckyRiver Land and Coal Co. paid as little as a quar-ter an acre for the coal under Morgan's property.

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2005 Photograph © Mike Smith

Creek runs down into Greasy Creek. SometimesI think I'll just take my gun and my dog, go walk-ing down through there, and just keep going."For several moments, we watched his other, imag-inary self disappear down into the valley, beyondthe strip job, back into the past.

April tz, 2004, Lost Mountain

FranzKafka's short story "Before the Law" be-gins like this: "Before the Law stands adoorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes

a man from the country and prays for admittanceto the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can-not grant admittance at the moment." And be-hind this doorkeeper are many others, all guard-ing the Law. 'These are difficulties the man fromthe country has not expected," writes Kafka; "theLaw, he thinks, should surely be accessible at alltimes and to everyone." The man waits for days,which turn into years. At times he tries to bribethe doorkeeper, who accepts the money with thisfateful remark: "I am only taking it to keep youfrom thinking you have omitted anything." Inthe end the man dies, and with finality the door-keeper shuts the door.

Now, "Kafkaesque" is not a term I throw aroundlightly. But if you go to enough public hearings onsurface-mining legislation, it soon becomes clearthat what you are watching is a drama of grandfutility straight out of Kafka's parables. And theactors know it. The officials from the Office of Sur-face Mining sit stoically, almost indifferently, ata table in the center of the stage. One after an-other coalfield citizens step to the podium tohave their say about the effects of weakeningregulations on strip mining, and one after an-other they announce to anyone naive enough tobelieve in participatory democracy that this isall a done deal anyway. Yet still they put them-selves through this compulsory charade. Thestenographer who sits at the side of the stage,taking it all down, is himself a character Kafkawould have particularly loved-the man end-lessly writing a report that no one will ever read.

Yet perhaps the most pitiful part of Kafka's al-legory is the bribe that the man from the countryoffers the doorkeeper. Compared with the hugesums of money that corporations are allowed to givepoliticians, this one man's bribe is laughable. Overthe last four years, the coal industry has contributed$8.5 million to Republicans; only 11 percent of itscontributions have gone to Democrats. And overthe last four years, the percentage of polluted wa-

. terways in Kentucky alone has risen by 12 per-cent; almost half of the state's streams are unfish-able and unswimmable. What is the connection?Consider the case of Steven Griles,

It has been well documented that Griles workedas a lobbyist for the coal and oil industries before

he was tapped to be George W. Bush's DeputySecretary of the Interior. During each year of histerm at Interior, Griles has received a $284,000deferred-compensation package from his formeremployer, National Environmental Strategies(NES). The Washington Post reported that Grilesmet at least three times with the National Min-ing Association (NMA), a former client ofNES,while NMA was seeking looser standards onmountaintop removal. Which is exactly whatNMA got. Since the 1977 Surface Mining Con-trol and Reclamation Act states in rather plain lan-guage that mining permits can be granted only if"no damage will be done to natural watercourses,"

I climb up the creek bed untill can see abackhoeprying loose boulders and subsoilup at the head of the hollow

the Department of the Interior under Griles pro-posed in January 2004 a rule "clarifying [my ital-ics] the circumstances in which mining activities. .. may be allowed within 100 feet of a perennialor intermittent stream." The "clarification" re-quires that "the mining operation has been de-signed, to the extent possible, to minimize im-pacts on hydrology, fish and wildlife ... prior toallowing mining within 100 feet of a perennial orintermittent stream." It's the phrase "to the extentpossible" and the word "prior" that could renderthe protection of SMCRA unenforceable.

With all this in mind, I decided it might bea good time to look for the headwaters of LostCreek. I pull off the road beside a small housethat sits closest to the mining on Lost Mountain.Chickens strut around a neat back yard, andbehind the chickens I can hear the low voice ofLost Creek. I follow it up a narrow gorge, step-ping over cobble and fallen tree limbs. Two daysof rain have brought the stream to life. Chick-weed and rue anemone bloom modestly alongthe creek side. Bent trillium is about to spreadits maroon petals.

Halfway up the gorge, the trickling streamemerges beneath a large beech tree surroundedby rhododendron. I take a seat on a fallen branchto contemplate Lost Creek's modest beginning.There is something intrinsically rewarding aboutfinding the source of any stream. What is not asrewarding is to hear machinery rumbling above itssource. I climb up the creek bed until I can see abackhoe prying loose boulders and subsoil up at thehead of the hollow. It is working in tandem witha dozer, slowly extending a bench along the backside of the mountain. The backhoe chips away atthe rockface with its long mechanical arm, and thedozer pushes the debris aside. According to the

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mining maps for this job, none of the spoil is sup-posed to be deposited in this creek bed. But thismonth, under the Freedom of Information Act, Ielicited fourteen single-spaced pages of violationsby Leslie Resources. Since 1985, Leslie has rackedup over 500 citations. Forty-seven of those viola-tions pertain to water quality, and twenty-fourare for illegal use of explosives. Leslie Resources,these documents show, is particularly lax aboutkeeping sediment out of strearns.?

To avoid the dozer and backhoe, I cut a widetack around the back side of the mountain. Near'the ridgetop, ground pine has begun to poke itsbright green fronds up through matted leaves.This coniferous-looking fern tops our at seveninches, but its distant ancestor, Lepidoderulron,grew to 150 feet as it breathed in vast amountsof carbon. That was more than 300 million yearsago. These trees that looked like giant fernsoften fell into oxygen-poor bogs, and so theynever decayed. Instead, molten heat and geolog-ical pressure hardened them into compressed

The mountain looks like a hideous weddingcake, a series of black and gray ledges lead

up to a summit, now only a rocky knob

layers of the black, carbon-rich rock that is dis-appearing fast from the other side of this ridge.

When I reach the mountaintop, 1 discoverhow fast. The dirt road that led along the easternridge of Lost Mountain is gone, and so is the east-ern ridge. What was once an arching razorback isnow a sunken crater. An explosion goes off insidethe deep pit, but I see only the tops of the grayblast plumes. The source of Lost Creek lies rightbelow this pit, just over the ridge. What thisblasting will do to the groundwater might notbe fully understood for several years. What isknown is that when underground pirite is oxidizedthrough blasting, it releases sulfuric acid. And itis almost certain that the blasting on Lost Moun-tain will create underground fissures throughwhich mine acid will drain down into seeps thatwill leach out into this watershed.

The erosion caused by surface runoff also caus-es problems that can best be measured by drivingabout fifteen miles to the Falling Rock water-shed in Robinson Forest. That watershed feedsone of the cleanest streams in Kentucky, ClemonsFork. Its level of conductivity-that is, dissolvedions-is usually between 50 and 60. Its chlorides,magnesium, and sodium levels are all less than two

2 Leslie Resources ha.s since been bought by InternationalCoal Group, which did not respond to requests for com-ment on this article.


milligrams per liter of water. But one has only togo a half-mile downstream to the confluence ofClemons Fork and Buckhorn Creek, which sits di-rectly below a strip mine, to find that the con-ductivity has risen to 1,000, the magnesium andcalcium to 25, and the sulfates from less than 10to 300. Whereas Clemons Fork can sustain rough-ly 100 species, water conditions at BuckhornCreek have been so severely degraded that atmost 10 species can survive.

ALzy 6, 2004, Lost Mountain

The photos of American torture at AbuGhraib surfaced this week. I have ofte~felt despondent about decisions that Amer-

ican presidents have made in my name, but thisis the first time I have felt truly embarrassed to bean American. I am looking forward to seeing LostCreek; I am remembering my favorite line fromThoreau: "He who hears the rippling of rivers inthese degenerate days will not utterly despair."And when I pull off the main road north of Haz-ard, the creek is running clear and strong beneaththe mixed mesophytic forest, now in full leaf.Families have set out their creekside gardens.Neat rows of early greens are almost a foot high.

I park my truck on the east side of the mountainand start up toward the headwaters of the creek.Canopy leaves have now closed over this gorge,turning the air cool and moist. They have alsomuffled the sound of the large machines over thenext ridge. As I step deliberately over the slickstones, an unannounced explosion makes the en-tire ridge side tremble. But it is the mental shockmore than the physical tremor that knocks me offbalance, and I fall against a patch of ferns. I rightmyself and start climbing up the left bank, towarda clearing that affords a profile of the mining. Fromthat vantage point, at about 1,000 feet, the moun-tain looks like a hideous wedding cake, a series ofblack and gray ledges that lead up to the summit,now only a rocky knob. There, an abandonedcinder-block shack still stands like some ominouscake decoration, covered in graffiti that bears thispromising sentiment: MIKE LOVES ME BITCH.

I drop down into the watershed, where all ofthe leaves are covered with the chalky gray residueof blasting, then I follow my usual climb up theback side of Lost Mountain. Near the peak chest-nut oaks dominate the canopy. Sassafrases andredbuds &11in the understory, where a cool breezeis moving. I step around foamflowers and brightred catchflies, so called because their sticky stemslows down insects to guarantee a fair exchangeof nectar-for pollen.

Although this side of the forest is quiet, I no-tice a silent ovenbird eyeing me from a low twigabout thirty feet away. He has a handsome brownhead, similar to a wood thrush's, but his white

breast is streaked with black instead of spotted likethe thrush. This neotropical migrant has proba-bly just returned to its breeding ground. Themales reach the eastern forests about two weeksbefore the females to establish territory. He isusually an ardent suitor, his habits made famousby Robert Frost's poem ''The Oven Bird":

There is a singer everyone has heardLoud, a mid-summer and mid-wood bird,\Xlhomakes the solid tree trunks sound again.

Biologists speak of "indicator species," thosethat can tell us something important about anecosystem. In Frost's poem the ovenbird is in-dicative of lateness-lateness of season and late-ness of the human industrial age.

He says the early petal-fall is past,When pear and cherry bloom went down in showersOn sunny days a moment overcast;And comes that other fall we name

the fall.He says the highway dust is over all.

Frost slyly suggests that "that oth-er fall" is both the natural seasonof dying and the human separa-tion from a prelapsarian state ofnature. And then the machinesuddenly enters the garden, kick-ing up dust-in this particularcase, the dust from coal trucksand AMFO blasts. Finally, Frost'sovenbird becomes an indicatorin a final sense:

The bird would cease and be asother birds

But that he knows in singing not tosing.

The question that he frames in allbut words

Is what to make of a diminishedthing.

would be pleased with what has transpired hereon Lost Mountain, where a pilot could easilyland a small prop plane on the wide level shelf be-low. As it is, two front-end loaders are filling thebucket of a coal truck from both sides. Whenthey are finished, a long mechanical arm pulls ared, white, and blue tarp up over the coal. Thetruck pulls away and another takes its place. SinceI started coming to Lost Mountain, the price ofcoal per ton has jumped from $34 to $55-eoalprices usually follow oil prices-s-and the pace ofits extraction has quickened.

One of the permit maps drawn up for this par-ticular job shows the "pre-mining" contour of themountain as a dotted line-something almost hy-pothetical, arbitrary. The "post-mining" contouris designated by two dark lines, flat as a dead man'sEKG. When I first looked at that map, it seemed

Theoverbird's song is a eulogy.In singing he knows there is lessand less worth singing about. And so he posesthe crucial question: What to make of-a dimin-ished thing? The answer, of course, lies just overthis ridge.

From the summit, I ease down the southernslope around boulders and a stand of wild azaleascovered with nodding orange blooms. I take upa position behind the largest chestnut oak stillstanding on this side of the mountain. Two feetbeyond it, a highwall drops about seventy feetstraight down to the number 11 coal seam, whichis now a flat black plateau, stretching out like atarmac. At the EIS hearing, one man had steppedto the microphone and asked, "What are thesemountains good for? They're all up and down." He


impossible. More than 200 feet lay between thedotted outline of the mountaintop and the flat linethat indicated a reclaimed "pasture." Didn't the en-gineers know this was solid rock up here? Didn'tthey know this ridge line had been standing longerthan the Himalayas? Now, of course, I see theyknew that perfectly well, and they knew exactlywhat they were doing. I had made the mistake ofthinking in geological time. But as Rachel Carsonwrote in Silent Spring, "In the modem world thereis no time." It has been annihilated by explosivesand fossil fuel and hydraulic rock drills.

The pit that had been blasted out of the east-ern ridge last month is now a gigantic black gashthat opens like a canyon onto the southern side

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of the mountain. Around on the western side allthat's left is a pocked, deracinated landscape,strewn with boulders and absent of anything thatcould be mistaken for life. Off in the distance, Icount nine pickup trucks. Nine men-that is allit takes to bring this mountain low.

When the 4:30 whistle blows and those pick-ups have disappeared down the mountain, I cir-cle around to the nearest bench. From here, thehighwall reaches forty feet up to the summit,where a clutch of pine trees hangs over theprecipice. I climb over the rubble down on thewestern side, then follow the lower, longer high-wall that sits above the number 10 seam. Be-cause this landscape shifts so quickly beneath

more than 300 million gallons of black toxicsludge into the headwaters of Coldwater and WolfCreek in Inez, Kentucky-in the same countywhere Lyndon Johnson stood on a miner's porchand first announced his War on Poverty. Whencoal iscleaned, the resulting by-product is a gelati-nous mixture called coal slurry.That iswhat flood-ed through Inez-black waves that moved withthe speed and the consistency of volcanic lava,smothering everything in its path. Yardsand gar-dens were buried; bridges were swept away. Bas-ketball hoops looked like buoys in a black ocean.The only thing people on Coldwater Creek hadto be thankful for was their lives. Unlike the 1972BuffaloCreek pond break that killed 125 people,

no one died that day in MartinCounty. But although the slurryspill was thirty times the size ofthe Exxon-Valdez disaster, theNew Yark Times made no men-tion of it. One Martin Countyresident finally concluded,"We're just not quite as cute asthose otters." In other words, thePrince William Sound wasa pris-tine estuary; but the Appalachi-an mountains and itspeople werealready damaged goods.

In 1972 a West Virginia gov-ernor's commission asked atwenty-three-year-old miningengineer named Jack Spadaroto investigate the Buffalo Creekdisaster. That experience, alongwith Spadaro's feeling that theBuffalo Creek break could havebeen avoided, led him to spendthe next thirty years studyingimpoundment dams, and in1996 he joined the U.S. MineHealth and Safety Administra-tion (MSHA) to ensure better

regulation of existing slurry ponds and dams.Twodaysafter the Martin County spill, Spadaro

was named the number-two man on a team sentto investigate the causes of the pond break. Whatthe team found was disturbing. After a 1994 spill

. from that same impoundment pond had released100 million gallons of slurry,an MSHA engineermade nine recommendations that needed to beaddressed before the impoundment pond wasused again. Martin County Coal Corporation,which was responsible for the pond break, fol-lowed none of the recommendations. Then ScottBallard, a mining engineer who had worked as aconsultant for Martin County Coal, reported toMSHA that after his own investigation of thepond following the 1994 spill, Martin CountyCoal had only 15 feet of material instead of therequired 100 between the pond and the mine.

the force of the explosives and dozers, a sense ofvertigo sets in as I wander around these unnat-ural formations. Where last month I walked aridgeline, this month, in exactly the same place,I'm standing on a black plateau, and it's hard toeven remember what the original contour lookedlike. I know it was here, I know there were afew trees left. Now there's nothing. Everythingthat once stood here now lies a hundred feetaway, down in the massive hollow fill. I stretchout my arms and slowly tum full circle. My throattightens and my breath becomes suddenly short.I cannot see one living thing.

InOctober 2000 the largest environmentaldisaster east of the Mississippioccurred whena coal slurry impoundment pond broke

through an underground mine shaft and spilled

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I i\PRIL 2005 Photograph © Mike Smith

"It was never intended to prevent a breakthroughin any form or fashion," Ballard told MSHA. "Infact, the question was asked during the reviewprocess, Will this prevent it? and the answer wasemphatically, 'No.' There's no guarantees. There'snothing here that will prevent a breakthrough."

Who asked that question? Spadaro found thatat least five Martin County Coal executives wereaware of Ballard's findings, and the risk of an-other slurry flood, but did nothing. By the end of2000, Spadaro and the other investigators thoughtthey had collected enough evidence to chargeMasseyEnergy of Richmond, Virginia, the parentcompany of Martin County Coal, with willfuland criminal negligence.'

And then George W. Bush was elected to hisfirst term as president.

It isno secret, and no surprise, that Bush, alongwith Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, re-ceivedmillionsofdollarsin campaigncontributionsfrom the coal industry. Massey Energy alone do-nated $100,000 to a Republican Senate campaigncommittee headed by McConnell. I mention theKentucky senator because, aside from being theSenate's leadopponent of campaignfinance reform,he is also the husband of Labor Secretary ElaineChao-to whom MSHA answers.

Within days of Bush's inauguration, a newteam leader, Tim Thompson, was named to theMartin County investigation. Thompson toldSpadaro and the other investigators to wrap uptheir work immediately. The investigators want-ed to cite Martin County Coal for eight violations,including willfulnegligence. Thompson and DaveLauriski, MSHA's new assistant secretary, whit-tled that down to two menial charges. Spadaro re-fused to sign the report and resigned from theinvestigation team.

On June 4, 2003, Spadaro was placed on ad-ministrative leave. That day he was called toWashington, D.C., supposedly on MSHA busi-ness.While he wasgone, federal officialssearchedhis Beckley,West Virginia, officeand changed thelocks. As justification, Dave Lauriski and JohnCaylor, the agency's deputy assistant secretary,scraped together bogus charges that Spadaro hadabused his authority while superintendent of theMine Health Safety Academy.

MSHA's retaliatory treatment of Spadaro alongwith Scott Ballard's testimony about MartinCounty Coal's negligence after the 1994 pondbreak suggesta clear attempt on the part of some-one in the BushAdministration to protect MasseyEnergy from criminal prosecution, at the expenseof hundreds of people who live below that im-poundment pond in Inez, Kentucky. It's a neatpattern of corruption. Everyone has everyone

3 Massey Energy did not respond to requests for com-ment on this article.

else's back, and the one whistle-blower who triedto speak out for the public's interest is left spin-ning in the wind.

In October, Jack Spadaro left MSHA quietlyrather than accept a demotion and a transfer farfrom his home in Hamlin, West Virginia. WhenI talked to him earlier in the year, he joked thatas a regulator in the Bush Administration, "the

TIe sharp contrast between the two landscapesgives me the strange sensation that I'm walkingon the edge of creation

most dangerous thing you can do is do yourjob." He also told me he believed flash floods,mudslides, and rockslides caused by valley fillswere as potentially dangerous as impoundmentponds. In August 2004 a boulder rolled downoff a strip mine in Inman, Virginia, just acrossthe Kentucky border, and crushed to death asleeping three-year-old, Jeremy Davidson.

September 26, 2004, Lost Mountain

Itwas one year ago this month that I firstcame to Lost Mountain. When I look backat the pictures I took then, I see dense

stands of trees and rolling ridgetops paintedorange and yellow by autumn coolness. Now Isee a long gray plateau piled with mounds ofwasted rock and soil. It's drizzling as I start upthe eastern slope. Today is a Sunday, as it was ayear ago, and the rain has kept even the small-er weekend crews away. At about 1,400 feet, Ibegin walking along the top edge of a longhighwall that marks the eastern boundary ofthe land permitted for mining. This cliff linedrops about 100 feet down to the number 10coal seam, where several pyramids of coal standready to be loaded away.

I'm walking along a thin strip of soil here atthe edge of the highwall that divides the stripmine from the forest. The oaks and maplesdescend down into the watershed on my right,and the highwall drops away abruptly to my left.The sharp contrast between these two land-scapes, heightened by the fall color and the graymine site, gives me the strange sensation that Iam walking on the edge of Creation, on a thinmembrane between the world and the not-world. Everything past this point is an abyss, alifeless canvas, a preternatural void.

At the end ofthe highwall, I climb downonto the mine site. The wet coal crunches softlyunder my boots. I walk toward the former moun-taintop, where I had parked my truck a year ago.Because all of this earth has been churned over

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many times, my boots sink easily into the orangishmud. It's slow going. I drop down into the woods,as a shortcut, cross a narrow ravine, then climbback up through the inevitable blackberry bram-bles arid young sassafrastrees.

Stepping over a final berm of spoil, I find my-self standing where the capstones once sat. Nowall of the vegetation has been shaved away. Along yellow fuse winds up to what once was themountaintop but isnow only an awfulblack knob.I follow the fuse to the edge of that small plateau,leveled offat the number 11 coal seam. The wast-ed summit is now a series of tall gray mounds ofrock piled to my right. To my left, the entire east-ern ridgelinehas been carved up and hollowed out;now it is only one wide black crater. And downin front of me, a gray bench has been turned toconcrete by the heavy trucks that, over and over,have backed to its edge, then methodicallydumped this mountaintop down its side. I'm stand-ing in the middle of a wasteland, a dead zone.

It won't always look this bad up here. Eventu-ally all of this hardened spoil will be graded andhvdroseeded with an exotic grass.This man-madedesert will be "reclaimed" as a "pasture." But fromnow on, Lost Mountain will only exist as a iconon a map; the real thing is gone,

From here, I take in the entire panorama ofthis churned-under ridgeline, this eviscerated for-est. I think for a moment that I might write ashort poem, a eulogy to Lost Mountain. Nothingcomes to mind. There is nothing here that seemsthe proper subject of poetry.

Not that I came to Lost Mountain for inspira-tion. Although I have been inspired by its song-birds, its watersheds, its wildflowers, I knew itsfate a year ago when I started wandering theflanks that no longer exist. I climbed to its sum-mit again and again to see what can't beobserved from below-the systematic destruc-tion of an entire biological community. Inessence, I came to Lost Mountain looking forwhat Aida Leopold called an ecological educa-tion. "One of the penalties of an ecological edu-cation," wrote Leopold, "is that one lives alonein a world of wounds." It's hard to find a betterdescription for the situation of those, like TeriBlanton and Damon Morgan, who face the chal-lenge of living in the desperate, poisoned worldof the Appalachian coal country.

There is a stock metaphor among conser-vationists when the talk turns to loggingor strip mining. It is the analogy of a for-

est as library: the rain forests and the mixed mes-ophvtic forests of North America are like thegreat library of Alexandria. Bum off such a for-est and you might as well have destroyed the lastsurviving copies of Aristotle and Maimonides.Consider that one in every ten plant species


contains anticancer compounds. In a purely self-ish sense, humans who care about the survival oftheir species should find the current rate ofextinction (about one species every hour) ratheralarming. I may think-I do think-that pre-serving species diversity enriches the very con-cept of life, but it also holds the secrets to theperpetuation of human life. In the end the nat-ural world does not need conserving. The plan-et has survived five great extinctions; it can sur-vive the one we are bringing on. And giventime, it will grow back. No, it is we who needconserving. And if we are to survive, we mustdevelop what Leopold called a "land ethic,"which, if successful, would "change the role ofHomo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it."

Standing on this sterile ledge, I am surround-ed by the work of conquerors. No one who felta responsibility to other citizens within a com-munity would destroy its water, homes, wildlife,and woodlands. The difference between con-querors and community is the differencebetween the words "economy" and "ecology,"both of which come from the same Greek root:oikos, or "home." But only ecology hasremained true to its roots. A true case of homeeconomics would, as Leopold said, make surethat the place called home maintains its healthand stability. To create an environment wheremudslides, flooding, and slurry spills are com-mon will not ensure a community's health. Tobulldoze and bum a renewable resource-trees-will not ensure its stability. To tear anonrenewable resource from the ground to pro-vide short-term economic gain for the few andlong-term environmental destruction and dis-ease for the many is undemocratic, unsustain-able, and stupid.

We are, unfortunately, a nation that valuestechnology and wealth much more than wevalue community, and the result is the wastedland that lies all around me. If our species is tomake it through this century, the forces of sci-ence and technology must be tempered by twoother forces-ethics and aesthetics. All ethicalphilosophies, from Aristotle on down, arebased on this ecological principle as stated byLeopold: "The individual is a member of acommunity of interdependent parts." And asthe cave art at Lascaux makes brilliantly clear,we are a species that has evolved to find beau-ty in the natural world. This trait serves-orshould serve-an evolutionary purpose: welove what we find beautiful, and we do notdestroy what we love. A strip job is more thana moral failure; it is a failure of the imagina-tion. It is time we stopped thinking like thosewho conquer a mountain and started thinkinglike the mountain itself. •

death of a mountain - harper's magazine

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