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How does this region, which is home to one of the richest and most biologically diverse forests in the world, come to be reduced to rubble, debris, choked and poisoned streams, and failed reclamation projects? As writers from Missing Mountains make plain, we have lost the ability to see clearly and concretely, and with an eye to what is valuable and enduring. For the sake of our own convenience and comfort we have supported and made extremely wealthy the many companies that have turned Appalachia into a colony to be abused for its natural resources. We don't sense the contradiction—the moral failure—evident in our professed love for scenic places and our simultaneous destruction of them. We have, as Bob Sloan says, become "moral midgets," unable to appreciate the equivalence between MTR and the man who professes to love his wife as he beats her to death.
Erik Reece's Lost Mountain does a masterful job holding the many contradictions and failures of our economic life up for consideration. He takes us on a year-long tour that chronicles the destruction of Lost Mountain in Perry County, Kentucky. Along the way, we are given lessons in the natural and cultural histories of the region, and so begin to appreciate the extent of what is being lost in the whirl of bulldozers, explosions, draglines, and trucks. Even more important, we are given intimate glimpses into the lives of residents who bear directly and daily the effects of this ecological and social catastrophe. We see the courage and determination of people like Daymon Morgan, Teri Blanton, Steve Peake, and Mickey McCoy, who are trying to protect this region and its people from ruthless coal operators and the local, state, and national regulating bodies that all seem to be in their pockets.
The courage they need is tremendous, particularly as government policy surrounding mining practices and reclamation efforts has moved steadily to give coal executives everything they want: maximum profit and zero responsibility. Reece observes that we live in a Kafkaesque world in which residents can go to a public hearing where officials from the Office of Surface Mining indifferently take notes on the catastrophic effects of weakened regulations or lack of enforcement, knowing all the while that nothing will change. After all, in this strange world the very people who have spent their lives protecting and profiting from the coal industry are now regulating it. McCoy says it simply: "The watchdogs have become the guard dogs of the industry."
There are those who say that coal is going to save Appalachia by providing jobs and making flat land available for industrial and recreational development. But as one resident said in my hearing, "It's a big lie that coal's gonna save Kentucky; coal hasn't saved us in a hundred damned years!" Coal can't save Kentucky or West Virginia (coal counties are still among the poorest in the nation) because the current means of its extraction destroys forests, watersheds, valleys, mountains, farms, gardens, and the families and communities they support. What we need, contends Reece, are economic ventures that take a real interest in protecting and sustaining the life that is already there, rather than a continuing history in which outside coal corporations hire a few workers, extract the mineral wealth, and then leave poisoned streams and water wells, flood and mudslide-prone valley "fill," and ruined roads. This can be done with the right kind of investment in and concern for a region that has yet to gain national respect. The point is not to tell Appalachian people what to do. Instead we need to help free them from the yoke of absentee coal moguls so they can create a future for themselves, a future that honors the region and its peoples.
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