Books: Lost Mountain by Erik Reece
by Kara DiCamillo, Newport, Rhode Island on 01.25.06
When we read about this book for the first time in Men’s Journal, we were intrigued by the reviewers words: “Reading Lost Mountain is like grabbing a hot electrical wire – it fills you with fire, and makes you want to scream like hell.” It was added to our must-read list. The coal mining industry has long been the economic backbone for families in a region that is hard-pressed for job opportunities. But a new type of mining has been introduced called “radical strip mining,” in which a team employing no more than ten men and some heavy machinery literally blast off the top of a mountain, dump it in the valley below, and scoop out the coal. Erik Reece, a first-time author, takes us through one year, from October 2003 through November 2004, of how strip miners sheared away the top of Kentucky’s Lost Mountain. Early American hunters would get lost in this great forest, among the songbirds, fox, deer and other wildlife. Now, Lost Mountain only exists on outdated maps because, well, it’s gone. The summit was blasted off and the coal was sucked out and Reece chronicles the year that he spent witnessing the death (or murder) of this mountain in Appalachia. “At least 700 miles of healthy streams have been buried,” Reece writes. “Creeks run orange with sulfuric acids and heavy metals and thousands more have been polluted.” This is one book you don’t want to miss. Available at ::Amazon.com Via ::Men’s Journal
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Thanks I'll look into it.
I think two other awesome books that should be mentioned (both by Bill Bryson) are "A Walk In The Woods" and "*A Short History Of Nearly Everything"
There's a chapter in "A Walk in the Woods" that talks about how park rangers, in an attempt to find out what types of fish lived in the park streams, pured poison in the streams. The discovered a fish thought to be extinct, and inadvertently became extinct do the process of it's discovery.
"*A short History Of Nearly Everything" has a lot of content on human stupidity from lead poisoning to the dumping of nuclear waste. The last chapter is on extinctions, and it made me cry.
I grew up in northern West Virginia and when I was about 7 years old the coal company did this to a mountain about 3 miles from where I lived. There was a creek that ran through our property that I would swim in, play in, catch crawdads in, skip rocks, build rafts, make songs and sing to it, fish, play tuna fish hockey on, ice skate, and just sit next to and watch it. One day the creek turned orange and everything died. I don’t even remember how my parents explained this all to me. My whole world was destroyed. My mom, a geologist, would take me up to the mined mountain to conduct research. You cannot imagine the impact this had on me. I cried for years and still do, as a matter of fact I’m crying right now. We sued the coal company and got the largest settlement to date in West Virginia. Doesn’t matter though, because everything was already dead. Today I’m studying ecological and environmental engineering and I hope that I can go back soon and help my old friend Sandy Creek. Sorry for the length, but I really enjoy treehugger and this just struck a sensitive area for me. I want everyone to just consume less and share more for the sake of all those Sandy Creeks and people like me.
If you would like to read more about the difficulties of living near mines in southern West Virginia, please look at www.wvcoalfield.com
In August 1997, I wrote the first national story on mountaintop removal for U.S. News & World Report. My book on the mining struggles will be out late this year.
I made the website in order to tell the stories of nearly 75 communities impacted by either mountaintop or deep mining.
Sections of the website cover how mining and logging contributed to the horrendous flooding in the southern coalfields 2001-2004.
Thankyou for listening and caring about the coalfields.
For anyone interested in coal surface mining in other countries, my study on the German lignite industry can be downloaded at www.heuersdorf.de/apc18.pdf that has been issued by the Swedish NGO Secretariat on Acid Rain (www.acidrain.org). A future publication in this series will treat lignite extraction in the Czech Republic and Poland. In Germany, over 300 communities have been destroyed by mining excavation since the 1920's. Our village, Heuersdorf (south of Leipzig), is to be evacuated by 2007. The US-owned MIBRAG mining corporation is also encroaching on the nearby village of Röcken, which is where Friedrich Nietzsche was born and is buried.