My name is Danielle Eldridge, and I reside in an area of Perry County, Kentucky known as Sixteenmile. I am a nursing student at Hazard Community College and a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Like most of us who call Eastern Kentucky home, coal has impacted my family for generations. As in most cases, most of my experiences with the coal industry have been extremely negative. Time after time, I have seen the carelessness and blatant disregard of coal corporations destroy families and our environment. These companies view their workers, citizens, and our land as disposable resources. The workers can be replaced in an instant and everyday citizens mean nothing to them. Several of my family members have been injured to the point of complete disability due to mining accidents, and I saw first hand that they had absolutely no meaning or importance to the companies in which they had invested over twenty years of their lives.

I also know the feeling of wondering if my home and family is going to be swept away in the middle of the night. Our house sits in the middle of an abandoned deep mining site, and no more than fifty feet from our front door is a “reclaimed�? hill that could give way at any moment. Because there is very little grassy vegetation to hold the soil in place, the slide keeps inching closer and closer to our home. The area also traps water behind the soil, which poses an even greater threat to our safety and our home. So much water lies in the hill that we can fill a four feet by eighteen feet swimming pool in only two days. The site is inspected frequently by mining officials, but does not rank as a high enough priority to warrant their time or efforts. They informed us that they had much more important things to tend to, but if they had any money left over they would see what they could do. We finally had to repair the area and place rocks around it ourselves.

It is not only private land that is being destroyed, though. The companies are destroying anything and everything in their paths. I recently had the privilege of taking a fly over with the South Wings organization. We visited several areas of Perry County, and what I saw absolutely sickened me. The death and destruction can’t even be put into words. The trees, the grass, the mountain tops- everything was gone. You can not even begin to fathom the extent of the damage until you see it from the air, and the pilot informed us that the scene was nothing unusual for strip mining sites. These companies are utterly destroying our ecosystem, yet they show no remorse for their actions. They are not apologetic, they are not saddened by the scene- their actions are guided by the all mighty dollar, and they will do anything in their power to uncover even the slightest amount of profit.

I, for one, love these mountains and it breaks my heart each and every time I look in my own backyard or pass by a mining site. I ask myself every day, “When will it be enough?�? How many homes and lives must be destroyed before something gives? How many wells and streams have to be contaminated with hazardous chemicals before people finally start to take notice? In a perfect world, I would not have to ask myself these questions, but alas as we all know, the world we live in is far from perfect.

I am a college student here at Hazard Community College and am currently pursuing a degree in medicine. I am choosing to stay anonymous in this narrative because I have many relatives who work in coal, and I wish to not offend and cause myself family problems. This, I believe, illustrates the extent of the impact of the coal industry in Southeast Kentucky. The companies have the area so brainwashed that these poor individuals actually believe that we depend on coal and if it wasn’t for these knights in bloodied we would have nothing. This is my first qualm with these corrupt businesses. We and our land are nothing more than resources to exploit for the profit of businessmen who know nothing of the area and the people they wreck.

I recently was given the privilege to fly with Southwings, an environmental piloting agency. They took me into the air to show me the devastation being caused to the land, my land, your land, our land. It looked as if I was flying overtop the moon, the gray, barren, and cratered surface was reminiscent of the pictures taken by NASA when America made it’s first shot for the moon. This causes me to remember my great grandmother who swore to her grave that men never landed on the moon. She actually believed wholeheartedly that NASA was actually filming men in space suits out on some strip job. For some reason this little memory resonates and exemplifies the extent of mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

I also find it amazing that some of the world’s greatest wealth is extracted from these mountains and yet we are some of the poorest, least educated, and most abused people on the planet. I honestly believe the coal companies orchestrate a good deal of this so we don’t believe there is anything better and stay satisfied with the status quo. If you notice, a good majority of the educated leave this area in search of greener pastures instead of flat mountains (kind of an oxymoron, “flat mountain�?) and abusive, oppressive coal companies. If this area is to ever improve, we need a sustainable economy separate from coal, more educated jobs to prevent the brain drain plaguing the area, and stricter laws to protect our land and more importantly, our people.

Excerpt from Lost Mountain

By: Erik Reece

Sometimes when sitting idly at my computer, I’ll go to the Federal Office of Surface Mining website and click on “Statistics.�? A line at the top of that page announces, “The number of tons of coal mined under the Surface Mining Law (since October 1, 1977) is now …�? Right below, a ticker rolls constantly, tallying the twenty- five-plus billions of tons of coal that this country has produced and consumed in the last twenty-seven years. In the time it takes me to type this sentence, the number will jump from 25,366,669,740 to 25,366,669,940. That is to say, 100 tons of coal are extracted every two seconds in Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and a handful of other states. American coal companies extracted over one billion tons of coal in 2004, and 40 million tons more in 2004 than the previous year. Ninety percent of that fed coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to over 50 percent of American homes.

This ticker has quickened its count over the last two decades due to a particularly destructive form of strip mining that has earned the name mountaintop removal. Instead of excavating the contour of a ridgeside, as strip miners did throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, now entire mountaintops are blasted off, and almost everything that isn’t coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been buried by mountaintop removal—some say the number is twice that—and hundreds more have been damaged. Blasting on the mine sites has cracked the house foundations of valley dwellers and polluted thousands of family wells. Creeks run orange with sulfuric acids and heavy metals. Wildlife populations have been summarily dispersed. Entire ecosystems have been dismantled.

And those ecosystems are the most diverse on the continent. What compounds the tragedy of mountaintop removal in central Appalachia is that this disappearing forest, the mixed mesophytic, is home to nearly eighty different species of trees. It is the rain forest of North America, and it is falling fast. More…

One reason this kind of environmental devastation receives so little notice is that it happens out of sight, up on top of mountains where few people go. Unless you are flying over Perry County, Kentucky—half of whose mountains and forests have been literally blown away by explosives—you don’t often see the damage.

Over the course of one year, from September 2003 to September 2004, I watched at close range as one mountain was dismantled and destroyed so its coal could be extracted and sold to twenty-two other states and other countries. I visited the mountain at least once a month. I hiked over a hundred miles as I climbed to its summit over and over, then explored its flanks and descended along its headwater streams.

Today there is no summit. It may be too obvious an irony that this particular ridge was called Lost Mountain. But it is the truth, and now Lost Mountain exists only on topo maps of Perry County, Kentucky. The real thing is gone.

What follows is an account of events I witnessed over the course of that year. It is the story of how the richest ecosystem in North America is being destroyed and how some of the poorest people in the United States are being made poorer by a coal industry that operates with little conscience or constraint.

Look hard and you can find Lost Mountain in grid 71, coordinate B-10 of the Kentucky Gazetteer. According to that topo map, the summit rises 1,847 feet above Lost Creek, whose headwaters come to life on the mountain’s north face. This morning I left the bluegrass region of central Kentucky, where I live, and drove east along the Mountain Parkway, where the last of rolling grasslands, dotted with black tobacco barns, finally gives way to the Cumberland Plateau, the foothills of what may be the oldest mountain range in the world—the Appalachians. From there, a narrow two-lane follows the meanderings of Lost Creek, so named because early hunters frequently lost their bearings when they ventured too far from the stream itself. In the 1920s, the midwife-turned-folk- singer-turned-union-activist, Aunt Molly Jackson, wrote a ballad that included this telling verse:
These Lost Creek miners
Claim they love their wives so dear
That they can’t help giving them
A baby or two every year.

When the blacktop ends, I follow an old logging road that winds up and around Lost Mountain, ending at its peak. I set the parking brake on my truck and get out to take a look around.

Curiously, a fire tower that was standing a year ago had been blown or torn from its foundation and sent crashing down the ridge side. But even without the tower’s perspective, I can see to the north thousands of acres—former summits—that had been flattened by mountaintop mining. Where there were once jagged, forested ridgelines, now there is only this series of plateaus—staggered gray shelves where exotic grass struggles to grow in crushed shale. When visitors to Eastern Kentucky first see the effects of mountaintop removal, they often say the landscape now looks like the Southwest—a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas. I too have traveled through Arizona and New Mexico in the late spring when ocotillo and Indian paintbrush are in bloom, and I understand the allure of that harsh landscape. But this is not the desert Southwest; it is an eastern broadleaf forest. At least it should be.

There was, of course, a time in this region when union miners would have extracted the coal with hand picks and shovels in deep underground mines. But twenty-five years after Jimmy Carter signed into law the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), the coal industry has developed much more expedient and much more destructive methods of mining. I came to Lost Mountain because last month, Leslie Resources Inc. was granted a state permit to shave off its summit. I came to see up close what an eastern mountain looks like before, during, and after it gets turned into a western desert.

Before the mining has started, I follow on foot the old logging road that winds up to the summit of Lost Mountain. There are, to my mind, two ways of thinking about a mountain: as something to be conquered, or as something to be revered. The conqueror is after personal gain in the sense of either taking something from the mountain, or scaling it in order to say, “I did it.�? The conqueror, therefore, goes straight for the summit. By contrast, one who reveres a mountain either admires it from a distance, as in the paintings of Thomas Cole, or one climbs it in a state of mind that is meditative, almost prayerful. Many Native American tribes refused to climb certain mountains because they deemed those heights sacred. Though America’s greatest mountaineer, John Muir, scaled the glaciers of California and Alaska, he never bragged about his climbs, but rather wrote about them with the ecstatic reverence of an acolyte. In recent years, E.O. Wilson has called this wilderness mindset “the naturalist’s trance,�? and I try to place myself in it as I slowly climb from the hemlocks up to the pines.

Four-wheelers command this dirt-and-gravel road by day, but four-legged mammals and members of the pheasant family take it back at night. At one muddy wheel rut, I stop to sketch the tracks of a deer, a fox, a raccoon and a wild turkey. Then I drop down into the forest proper, the watershed that feeds Lost Creek. After extricating myself from a blackberry thicket, I climb noisily over a barricade of fallen tree limbs. A crow warns a white-tailed deer of my approach, and the doe hoofs it up over the ridgetop. When she is gone, I find myself standing beneath an austere canopy of tulip poplars. This is Kentucky’s state tree, and it grows as straight as a flag pole. Daniel Boone once hollowed out a sixty-foot canoe from a single tulip poplar and packed his family down the Ohio River in it. The tulip tree is also the first hardwood to establish dominance after a deciduous forest has been cleared by fire, a blow-down, or in this case, chain saws that chewed through here about forty years ago. These poplars have already lost their leaves, and sunlight fills the understory of younger sassafras, hickory and sugar maple. The woods are quiet except for a piliated woodpecker; the songbirds are already vacationing in Belize and other points south. Given time, one hundred years or so, oaks, beech and hickory would come to dominate this transitional forest. Three different communities of highly diverse trees would eventually agree on a silent charter about how best to inhabit these elevations. But that’s not going to happen here.

I wander on down the ridge. Without thinking, I began to follow the moist furrow of an intermittent stream. Such a lacework of tributaries feeds the lower creeks, but as the name implies, they only flow during wetter periods. I step around moss-covered cobble and maidenhair ferns that grow in the shape of delicate tiaras. Colonies of liverwort cover some of the rocks like small, green scallops. These modest-looking organisms actually carry on pretty fascinating sex lives. The liverwort needs moving water to spawn. And its preferred habitat seems to be these rain-catching, intermittent streams. During a downpour, the male liverwort extends a tiny, umbrella-shaped antenna. When a drop of rain hits it, sperm explodes inside that raindrop and bounces a couple of feet, where hopefully a female liverwort has sent up a little umbrella of her own to catch the flying spores.

In this way, the unassuming liverwort dramatizes one of the issues at the heart of mountaintop removal. In response to the charge that such mining methods bury hundreds of miles of central Appalachian streams, Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, is quick to point out that an intermittent stream, such as this one, is not really a stream at all because there are no fish in it. But consider the assumptions behind such a belief. According to this line of thought, if something, like the liverwort, is of no immediate and obvious use to us, then it is of no use at all. That modest flora like the liverwort are helping to hold rich soil in place, purifying water downstream, and providing habitat to other small animals like salamanders—or that they even hold an intrinsic value beyond what we might understand today—is a logic to which homo sapien Americanus seems curiously immune. But we cannot bury entire ecosystems with bulldozers and then discover their value later. It will be too late. And as Aldo Leopold said in the middle of the last century, the first rule of the tinkerer is to save all the pieces:

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

But of course we are no longer tinkering; we are leveling entire mountaintops. And as for where the pieces have gone, consider this sad commentary: when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, some older Eastern Kentuckians refused to believe it had happened. They were sure NASA had simply gone up to a strip mine at night and taken pictures of a guy in a space suit.

When I reach the mouth of the intermittent stream, I follow Lost Creek until I can see no signs of human intervention, not even the inevitable Bud Light can. I sit down on the bank, beneath the yellow glow of beech and maples. Dark water glistens in the shallows below. Squirrels rustle through the leaves. Trees decay where they have fallen, providing shelter and food. A Carolina wren hops among the tangled branches. These days, it is thought unfashionable, even backward, to talk about laws of nature or to read a philosophy, a morality, into the workings of the natural world. For 4,000 years, theologians and philosophers have debated whether an Intelligent Designer stands behind it all. I have nothing to contribute to that discussion. But this much seems clear: this forest certainly demonstrates an intelligence, one it has been honing for 290 million years. Its economy is a closed loop that transforms waste into food. In that alone, it is superior to our human economy where the end of the line is not nutrients, but rather toxic industrial waste. Is there design behind this natural intelligence? I have no idea. But I will venture this: The forest knows what it’s doing.

Compare these two economies: the forest’s and ours. The sulfur dioxide that escapes coal-burning plants is responsible for acid rain, smog, respiratory infections, asthma and lung disease. In 2000, the Clean Air Task Force, commissioned by the EPA, determined that coal-fired power plants account for 30,000 deaths per year. In Kentucky, the number of children treated for asthma has risen almost 50% since 2000. Due to acid rain and acid mine run-off, there is so much mercury in Kentucky streams that any pregnant woman who eats fish from them risks causing serious, life-long harm to the fetus she carries. A National Academy of Science report warned that 60,000 babies born in the U.S. each year could have been exposed to enough mercury in utero to cause poor academic performance later in life. Of the 113 tons of mercury produced each year in the United States, forty-eight tons come from coal-fired power plants. Furthermore, as we all know but choose to ignore, fossil fuels—coal and oil—are responsible for the carbon dioxide that is making the planet hotter and its weather more volatile. This year, climatologists found record-high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. At the same time, forests worldwide have shrunk from 5 billion hectares (12 billion acres) at the beginning of the 20th century to 2.9 billion hectares (7 billion acres) now; over 2,000 square miles of Appalachian forests will be eliminated over the next decade under current mining regulations. Due to such deforestation, 12% of the world’s birds are endangered, as are 24% of its mammals and 30% of its fish.

A forest, by contrast, can store 20 times more carbon than cropland or pastures. Its leaf litter slows erosion and adds organic matter to the soil. Its dense vegetation stops flooding. Its headwater streams purify creeks below. A contiguous forest ensures species habitat and diversity. A forest, in short, does all of the things that the mining and burning of coal cannot—that is its intelligence.

One November morning, I cast my vote for the Kentucky gubernatorial candidate who had accepted the fewest contributions from the coal industry, and who promised, if not to revoke strip mining laws in this state, at least to enforce them. Now, driving up the muddy switchbacks of Lost Mountain, I can see a thin column of gray smoke rising over the next ridge. As I round a bend near the summit, the forest falls away below my driver’s side window. I am not speaking figuratively. The trees that lined the left side of this road two weeks ago, and that held in place the southern slope of Lost Mountain, are gone. Stumps line the road. Down below, all of the ground cover and topsoil had been churned under—“grubbed�?—by D-11 bulldozers. Nothing but mud, rock and fallen trees remain.

I park my truck out of sight of the workers below and sit down on one of the stumps. Scalped is the word that keeps repeating itself in my notebook: this mountainside had been scalped. The trees that covered it now lay in massive piles all down the slope. The pile at the bottom has become a burning pyre, and a haze of smoke fills this concave southern valley. One dozer, with its long crescent blade, is slowly pushing the other piles down into the fire.

It seems to me like arrogance compounded by ignorance. While a sustainable, value-added timber industry is this region’s most promising economic alternative to coal, this coal company, and many others, don’t even bother to save the timber they do cut. On the next ridge over, another dozer is pushing boulders out of the way to carve a haul road for the coal trucks. All around me there is nothing but rock, smoke and ravaged soil. Then I see something that makes this scene even sadder. Standing a few feet away is a single green seedling, shooting out a dozen small branches. Somehow the dozer missed it. And now, the entire emptiness of the slope gathers around this seedling like an unbearable presence, a ghost forest.

And not just any forest. What heightens the tragedy of surface mining in central Appalachia is that the chainsaws and dozers are stripping away the oldest and most diverse forests in North America. A million years ago, the Pleistocene glaciers forced northern trees to slowly migrate south. But the glaciers never reached this part of the Appalachians. And when the massive ice sheets finally retreated, they left in their wake a landscape that looked much like a modern strip mine. Consequently, over hundreds of thousands of years, the Appalachians were responsible for reforesting most of North America. But no forest ever achieved its diversity of tree species. It remains the continent’s seedbed, its mother lode.

In 1934, a formidable botanist named Lucy Braun bought her first car, and along with her sister Annette, spent the next 25 years studying the broadleaf forests of North America. Both sisters earned their Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, and they lived and worked together all their lives, never marrying. (Once, when a friend asked Lucy to go with her to a dance, Lucy replied, “How can you let strange men put their arms around you?�?) Though Lucy was the younger sibling, Annette always deferred to her, as did most people in the emerging field of forest ecology. The Braun sisters logged over 65,000 miles in their car as they ranged across the eastern United States. Lucy came to love the central Appalachian forests most of all. She was not intimidated by legends of moonshiners and mountain feuds. She was a small woman who showed the mountain people a courtesy that was not always forthcoming from outsiders. And here, on the Cumberland Plateau, she catalogued over eighty different species of trees. She named this forest community the mixed mesophytic because it was a middle climate—not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Unlike most forests, Braun found that in the mixed mesophytic, an astonishing number of mature trees make up the canopy; no species dominates. It is because of Braun’s discoveries that today many naturalists refer to these small mountains as the rain forest of North America.

What had stood here two weeks ago was not a mixed mesophytic forest, not yet. But it would have become one. Instead, the industrial equivalent of an 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 the election results. My candidate has been soundly beaten.

By March, Leslie Resources has blocked off every dirt road leading up Lost Mountain with imposing iron gates. I don’t take it personally. Eastern Kentuckians are as attached to their ATVs as urban Kentuckians are to their SUVs, and while both do their respective share of environmental damage, it’s the former that Leslie is trying to keep off Lost Mountain. NO TRESSPASSING signs hang on all of the gates.

If history is any indication, strip mine operators along Lost Creek may have reason to worry. On August 8, 1967, The Hazard Herald reported that $300,000 worth of mining equipment had been sabotaged at Lost Creek. One-and-a-half tons of carbo-nitrate was used to disengage an auger, a D-9 bulldozer, two trucks and two drills. A detective concluded that the vandals took the explosives from the company magazine on site. “It had to be a professional job which required several hours preparation,’ estimated one official, ‘it definitely wasn’t any kids.�?

By 1967, nearly every other coal-producing state in the country had laws protecting property owners from coal companies that own the rights to the minerals below. But in Kentucky, anyone could find their land literally stripped out from under them. There were no regulations on how the coal was to be extracted, and so the companies used the cheapest method—blasting away everything that stood between them and the coal. Retaliation seemed the only recourse that citizens had. The violence peaked in 1967 when another local paper, The Mountain Eagle, carried in a single issue five reward offers from five different coal companies, all seeking information about industrial sabotage.

Today, coal companies must first obtain permission from landowners before they can begin mining. And because the companies must also pay the landowners a small percentage of the profits, that permission is often given. To many Eastern Kentuckians, strip mining is no longer seen as an act of political injustice, but rather as a burden of economic necessity.
However, since Leslie only leases the mineral rights on Lost Mountain, I tell myself it has no jurisdiction to keep me off property it doesn’t own. I duck under one gate on the eastern side of the mountain, and start walking. Chainsaws have mowed down most of the trees on this slope, and they all lie where they fell. Only the dead trees have been left standing, and piliated woodpeckers move back and forth between them as if they can’t believe their luck—nothing now stands between them and the carpenter ants that colonize diseased beech 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 signal a coming blast. I am still too far from the site to actually see the explosion, but two minutes later, when the blast sounds out over the hollow, I feel a slight trembling beneath my boots. After a few more minutes, a yellow plume is moving through the trees, carrying with it a sharp, sulfuric smell.

I drop down the ridgeside to a lower logging road that leads directly to the source of the smoke. I can hear the constant beeping of haul trucks inching back to the edge of the hollow fill. A few months ago, I could follow this gravel road up to the mountaintop. Now I find it blocked by a row of impregnable boulders. Peering over them, all I can see is the top of a truck as it raises its bed and sends another load of rubble down into the valley. I can tell, however, that what used to be a ridgeline leading west is now nowhere in sight.

I circle back around the mountain, and begin climbing through the younger trees and wild roses that still cover the northern slope. The last obstacles are the capstones that mark the summit. I shimmy into a narrow crevice of rock, find a foothold, and haul myself up. At the crest, doubled over and gasping, I still see in the dirt the same traces of wild turkey, grouse and raccoons that I saw months ago. The mountaintop is still here, still as it was. These obdurate boulders attest to it. It’s not until I reach the other side of this summit and look down that I see what has changed.

The lower ridgeline is nearly gone. What was, last month, a gradual slope leading westward is now, right below me, a fifty foot vertical drop that gives way to dark pits and gray ledges.

You can think of this mountain, or any mountain in Appalachia, as a geological layer cake with seams of coal two-to-fifteen feet thick, separated by much thicker bands of sandstone, slate, and shale. The seams are numbered in descending order: the one nearest the summit is the Hazard 12 seam, and about three hundred feet below lies Hazard 9. The narrator of Merle Travis’s famous folk song, “Sixteen Tons,�? begins his lament with,
I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
Picked up a shovel and I walked to the mine
I hauled sixteen tons of number 9 coal
And the straw-boss said, “Well, bless my soul.�?

That same number 9 coal seam lies beneath Lost Mountain, but no deep miners are trying to dig it out. Why bother? Why send hundreds of miners burrowing underground when a few men armed with explosives and bulldozers can blast right down to the seam? And whereas in the ‘40s it took one miner all day to load sixteen tons of coal out of a deep mine, today one man behind the wheel of a loader can, in five minutes, fill a coal truck with sixty tons of this bitunimous rock. What makes strip mining so cost-efficient is precisely what makes it so devastating.

Here on Lost Mountain, the crew goes straight for the highest three seams where there is less earth to move and a more ready supply of coal. The dozers have pushed much of the vegetation and topsoil to the edge of this man-made plateau, called an area mine. The twisted trees and mounded dirt form a berm around the darker crater. Young maples and hickories stubbornly hold on at the edge of the mining, where so much of the topsoil had been upturned and compacted. What compounds the problems of mountaintop removal is that when the bedrock is disturbed, it increases in mass by 20 percent; that additional matter is called “swell�? and will eventually be dumped down into the valley below.

Staying out of sight, I loop down to the edge of the mining and duck in behind three toppled pine trees. From here I have the whole scene in front of me. At the far edge of the mine site, a white “powder tower�? now stands, filled with explosive material. In front of it, dozers have shaved down to the number 10 seam. A loader scrapes the coal into mounds, then shovels them into the first coal trucks to climb Lost Mountain. Those trucks will take their loads five miles up Highway 80 to Leslie Resource’s coal tipple, which sits beside the North Fork of the Kentucky River. There the coal will be processed and loaded into rail cars.

Closer to where I’m crouched, dozers push the loosened rock into piles and front-end loaders fill one haul truck after another with the debris. The trucks dump their load down the mountainside and return for more. It’s all extremely efficient. Like a colony of ants, everyone keeps moving, diligent in their single task.

I can almost make out the tattoo on the forearm of the man operating the loader right below where I’m crouched, and I wonder what it must be like to work in such a place day after day? “The interior landscape,�? wrote Barry Lopez, “responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape.�? But in a place that has neither character nor subtlety, what does a man’s interior landscape start to look like?

The whistle blows at 4:30—quitting time. The workers grab their lunch coolers and jump down from the dozers, trucks and loaders. I retrace my path down the backside of the mountain. My face and arms bear the scars of blackberry gauntlets and my water bottle is empty. My thoughts have turned from the ravages of strip mining to the shelves of cold beer at the BP station down below. I am not looking ahead, not looking at anything really, when the huge silver maw of a bulldozer comes lunging over the ridge about twenty feet in front of me. The driver doesn’t see me; he is cocked at too steep an angle. I leap back over several fallen trees and take cover. Whatever else bulldozers do, they do not move fast. This one backs down the hill, coughs another cloud of black smoke into the air, then lurches back into view, shoving topsoil to the side. The driver pauses each time to get his bearings, and each time I get another look at the huge, serrated blade. For the first time I understand completely why Harry Caudill described it as a “monstrous scimitar.�?

Once the driver has cleared a space to work, he sets about the real task—knocking down trees. I’m startled to see how easily a twenty-year old maple succumbs to the dozer’s blade. The dozer is graceless and resolute. Each time the driver backs down the hill to take a run at another tree, I scramble about fifty yards further away. When I am finally far enough down the mountain to escape the driver’s notice, I take a seat on a stump. It is almost dusk, and the mountain has darkened to a silhouette. I can no longer see the dozer. But from the stump, I watch as one tree after another falls against the violet light of the setting sun.

The photos of American torture at Abu Ghraib surfaced this week. I have often felt despondent about decisions that American presidents have made in my name, but this is the first time I have felt truly embarrassed to be an American. I am looking forward to seeing Lost Creek; I am remembering my favorite line from Thoreau: “He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.�? And when I pull off the main road north of Hazard, the creek is running clear and strong beneath the mixed mesophytic forest, now in full leaf. Families have set out their creekside gardens. Neat rows of early greens are almost a foot high.

This is the ninth month of my covert soujourn on Lost Mountain. I park below the eastern slope and start up toward the headwaters of the Lost Creek. I have taken to wearing camouflage pants and “earth-tone�? t-shirts on my visits, and so far I have avoided the attention of Leslie Resources.

Canopy leaves have now closed over this gorge, turning the air cool and moist. They have also muffled the sound of the large machines over the next ridge. As I step deliberately over the slick stones, an unannounced explosion makes the entire ridgeside tremble. But it is the mental shock more than the physical tremor that knocks me off balance, falling against a patch of ferns. I right myself and start climbing up the left bank, toward a clearing that affords a profile of the mining. From that standpoint, at about 1,000 feet, the mountain looks like a hideous wedding cake, a series of black and gray ledges that lead up to the summit, now only a rocky knob. There, an abandoned cinderblock shack still stands like some ominous cake decoration, covered in graffitti that bears this promising sentiment: MIKE LOVES ME BITCH.

From this vantage, an invisible trajectory runs up the eastern slope and divides Lost Mountain into two stark economies—that of the strip mine and that of the broadleaf forest. And from this perspective, what is valued by each economy is easy to discern.
Two empty explosive boxes have been discarded on the bench level with where I’m standing. I move in for a closer look when the sirens go off on the other side of the highwall. I quickly retreat to my earlier position, reasoning that if this is a legal blast, I should be alright. Fortunately, it is. A black spray of rock comes shooting over the highwall, but the closest chunks land about thirty feet away. Still, higher ground seems to be what’s needed.

I drop down into the watershed, where all of the leaves are covered with the chalky gray residue of blasting, then I follow my usual climb up the backside of Lost Mountain. Near the peak, chestnut oaks dominate the canopy. Sassafras and redbud fill in the understory, where a cool breeze is moving. I step around foam flower and bright red catchfly, so called because its sticky stem slows down insects to guarantee a fair exchange of nectar for pollen.

Though this side of the forest is quiet, I notice a silent ovenbird eyeing me from a low twig about thirty feet away. He has a handsome brown head, similar to a wood thrush, but his white breast is streaked with black instead of spotted like the thrush. This neotropical migrant has probably just returned to its breeding ground. The males reach the eastern forests about two weeks before the females to establish territory. He is usually an ardent suitor, his habits made famous by Robert Frost’s poem, “The Ovenbird�?:
There is a singer everyone has heard
Loud, a mid-summer and mid-wood bird …

The male takes up his all-day teach-er teach-er song once the female’s eggs have incubated. For her part, the female ovenbird builds a brilliantly camouflaged, water-tight nest on the ground. But because of this precarious placement, she likes at least forty acres of continuous forest cover to improve her brood’s chances against snakes and owls.

Biologists speak of “indicator species,�? those that can tell us something important about an ecosystem. In Frost’s poem, the ovenbird is indicative of lateness—lateness of season and lateness of the human industrial age.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in shadows
On 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 other fall�? is both the natural season of dying and the human separation from a prelapsarian state of nature. And then the machine suddenly enters the garden, kicking up dust—in this case, the dust from coal trucks and ANFO blasts. Finally, Frost’s ovenbird becomes an indicator in a final sense:
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The overbird’s song is a eulogy, not a jubilate. In singing, he knows there is less and less worth singing about. And so he poses the crucial question: What is to be made of a diminished thing? The answer, of course, lies just over this ridge.

From the summit, I ease down the southern slope around boulders and a stand of wild azaleas covered with nodding orange blooms. I take up a position behind the largest chestnut oak still standing on this side of the mountain. Two feet beyond it, a high wall drops about seventy feet straight down to the number 11 coal seam, which is now a flat black plateau, stretching out like a tarmac. Back at the EIS hearing, one man had stepped to the microphone and asked, “What are these mountains good for? They’re all up and down.�? He would be pleased with what has transpired here on Lost Mountain, where a pilot could easily land a small prop plane on the wide, level shelf below. As it is, two front-end loaders are filling the bucket of a coal truck from both sides. When they are finished, a long mechanical arm pulls a red, white and blue tarp up over the coal. The truck pulls away and another takes its place. Since I started coming to Lost Mountain, the price of coal per ton has jumped from $34 to $55—coal prices always follow oil—and the pace of its extraction has quickened.

One of the permit maps drawn up for this particular job shows the “pre-mining�? contour of the mountain as a dotted line—something almost hypothetical, arbitrary. The “post-mining�? contour is designated by two dark lines, flat as a dead man’s EKG. When I first looked at that map, it seemed so impossible. Over two hundred feet lay between the dotted outline of the mountaintop and the flat line that indicated a reclaimed “pasture.�? Didn’t the engineers know this was solid rock up here? Didn’t they know this ridgeline had been standing longer than the Himalayas? Now, of course, I see they knew that perfectly well, and they knew exactly what they were doing. I had made the mistake of thinking in geological time. But as Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “in the modern world, there is no time.�? It has been annihilated by explosives and fossil fuel and hydraulic rock drills.

The pit that had been blasted out of the eastern ridge last month is now a gigantic black gash that looks like the work of an earthquake and opens like a canyon onto the southern side of the mountain.
Around on the western side, all that’s left is a pocked, deracinated landscape, strewn with boulders and absent of anything that could be mistaken for life. Off in the distance, I count nine pickup trucks.
When the 4:30 whistle blows and those pickups have disappeared down the mountain, I circle around to the nearest bench. From here, the highwall reaches forty feet up to the summit, where a clutch of pine trees hangs over the precipice. I climb over the rubble down on the western side, then follow the lower, longer highwall that sits above the #10 seam. Because this landscape shifts so quickly beneath the force of the explosives and dozers, a sense of vertigo sets in as I wander around these unnatural formations. Where last month I walked a ridgeline, this month, in exactly the same place, I’m standing on a black plateau, and it’s hard to even remember what the original contour looked like. I know it was here, I know there were a few trees left. Now there’s nothing. Everything that once stood here now lies a hundred feet away, down in the massive hollow fill. I stretch out my arms and slowly turn full-circle. My throat tightens and my breath becomes suddenly short. I cannot see one living thing.

On a hot Sunday in July, I climb up Lost Mountain, through the blackberry brambles that cling to what’s left of its eastern flank. But little is left. Just above this scrub, a huge black cavity reaching down to the 10 seam. Behind it, a gray bench flattens off at the 11 seam, while ugly scree washes down the side of it. One chestnut oak leans perversely out from the bench, as if its momentary reprieve were a final reminder of who’s in charge here.

With no one to haul the coal today, the black pit sits empty. My boots sink into the loosened soil that has been pushed out of the way. There are no more natural scents here, only the faint smell of chemicals. I follow some dozer tracks up to a twenty-foot wide haul road that leads all the way around the backside of the mountain. Now, the entire forest down below has been severed from the small clump of trees still hanging on at the summit. An eight-foot coal seam runs along the inside wall of the haul road. This is number 12, the highest seam, the last to go.

On the western side of the mountain, orange and yellow fuses wind through the black beds of coal like broken spider webs. Only a few dozers are working down below, grading the rubble in the valley fill. Haphazard mounds of black and gray rock are piled everywhere. Empty explosive boxes litter the site. I step over fissures in the ground where spoil has been piled back over empty pits and compacted.

So much spoil has been piled around the pits here on the west side of the mine that I can work my way around to the back of Lost Mountain without being seen by the dozer operators. But when I start to climb my usual path to the summit, I realize with a shock that the entire eastern ridgeside, where last month I was so tangled in blackberry briars, is nearly gone. All of the vegetation has been shaved away and a dozer has cut a long scar all the way up to the summit. The oak-pine forest that once surrounded the mountaintop is now only a narrow strip of trees. What was once a gently sloping ridgetop is now a long vertical rockface, dropping hundreds of feet and jutting out over the gray shelves below.

For the first time, I approach the summit with a real sense of urgency. I may not see it again. Next month, these capstones may be gone, these chestnut oaks erased.

From the top, my eye follows the long gash that the dozer carved down the eastern side. Brown sandstone gives way to gray haul roads and black coal pits. Beyond the mine site, dozers have already started grading the lower region of the valley fill, compacting the rock that once held up this mountaintop.

I sit down on the only capstone that hasn’t been dislodged from the top of Lost Mountain. Surrounded by several chestnut oaks, the stone is cold, and covered with lichen and Virginia creeper. The last remnant of the forest descends behind me, down the backside of the mountain. Two hundred feet down in front of me I can see nothing but this huge blister left on the land. The ugliness ends abruptly at the thin gray line that highway 80 draws across the lower horizon. Beyond that perimeter, low green ridges flow away into the distance, an undulation of densely textured green waves. Clouds cast dark blue shadows that settle in their hollows. What was once the bottom of a huge sea is now the bottom of the sky.

These two landscapes, divided by the highway, illustrate two ways of thinking about the natural world that Wendell Berry recently set out in an essay called “Two Minds.�? Berry begins by making a distinction between a rational and a sympathetic mind. He admits that such a dichotomy risks oversimplification, but it is nevertheless a useful distinction. The Rational Mind is objective, analytical, empirical. It believes in industry, individualism, and an economy where profit is always the bottom line. The Sympathetic Mind is not unreasonable, but favors the organic, the intuitive, the wild. “Its impulse is toward wholeness,�? Berry writes. Conversely, the Rational Mind is governed by the equation “knowledge = power = money = damage,�? and nowhere is that more obvious than where I am sitting right now. If the mountains on the other side of the highway truly represented the Sympathetic Mind, they would not necessarily be cordoned off as absolute wilderness. Hunters would still find their protein in those woods. And the trees would be logged in a manner that sustained the forest for generations to come. Herbs would be harvested there, and shiitake mushrooms would be raised on cut logs under the damp shade of hemlocks. The mountains would still be a resource, but they would also remain whole, an ecosystem left healthy and intact. To think with the Sympathetic Mind is to think, in Aldo Leopold’s famous phrase, “like a mountain.�? When Leopold was working for the Forest Service the 1910s, hunters and foresters killed every wolf they came across. The wolf was a predator, and a dead wolf was a good wolf. The result? Deer populations grew to the point that they nearly stripped Southwestern mountains of all their vegetation. Leopold took something important from that experience. We cannot think of the natural world as a collection of individual parts: wolves, trees, water, coal. We must think of the entire system as a whole; we must think like a mountain. “Only the mountain,�? wrote Leopold, “has lived long enough to listen objectively to the wolf.�?

It was one year ago this month that I first came to Lost Mountain. When I look back at the pictures I took then, I see dense stands of trees and rolling ridgetops painted orange and yellow by autumn coolness. Now I see a long gray plateau piled with mounds of wasted rock and soil. It’s drizzling as I start up the eastern slope. Today is a Sunday, like a year ago, and the rain has probably kept even the smaller, weekend crews away. I don’t see or hear any dozers or loaders. At about 1,400 feet, I begin walking along the top edge of a long highwall that marks the eastern boundary of the land permitted for mining. This cliff line drops about one hundred feet down to the number 10 coal seam, where several pyramids of coal stand ready to be loaded away.

I’m walking along a thin strip of soil here at the edge of the highwall that divides the strip mine from the forest. The oaks and maples descend down into the watershed on my right, and the highwall drops away abruptly to my left. The sharp contrast between these two landscapes, heightened by the fall color and the gray mine site, gives me the strange sensation that I am standing on the edge of Creation, on a thin membrane between the world and the not-world. It’s as if the Creator had been busily composing this variegated forest, and then suddenly knocked off for the day, right where I’m standing. Everything past this point is an abyss, a lifeless canvas, a preternatural void.

At the end of the highwall, I climb down onto the mine site. The wet coal crunches softly under my boots. I walk toward the former mountaintop, where I had parked my truck a year ago. I stay close to the northern edge of the mine, just in case one of the company’s omnipresent white pickups should appear and I need to duck quickly down into the forest. Because all of this earth has been churned over many times, my boots sink deep into the orangish mud. It’s slow going. As a shortcut, I drop down into the woods, cross a narrow ravine, then climb back up through the inevitable blackberry brambles and young sassafras trees. At the top of this ridge, another long bench levels out below the northeastern side of the mountain. I slog across this coal seam, where coyote tracks appear inside the wider imprint of dozers. A muddy embankment rises at the back of this bench. There is no way to get any kind of a foothold, and my mud-caked boots now weigh twice what they did. I finally find a tree root sticking out a few feet above me and make a clumsy leap for it. Slowly I pull myself up onto a ledge where fallen trees lay scattered. I kick my boots against a stump and gingerly wade up through another thicket of briars.

Stepping over a final berm of spoil, I find myself standing where the capstones once sat. Now all of the vegetation has been shaved away. A long yellow fuse winds up to what once was the mountaintop, but is now only an awful black knob. I follow the fuse to the edge of that small plateau, leveled off at the number 11 coal seam. The wasted summit is now a series of tall, gray mounds of rock piled to my right. They almost look like glaciers, shooting unnaturally up from this manmade dessert, rising above small black pools of rainwater mixed with coal. To my left, the entire eastern ridgeline has been carved up and hollowed out; now it is only one wide black crater. And down in front of me, a gray bench has been turned to concrete by the heavy trucks that, over and over, have backed to its edge, then methodically dumped this mountaintop down its side. I’m standing in the middle of a wasteland, a dead zone, a man-made dessert.

It won’t always look this bad up here. Eventually, this spoil will be pushed down the ridgeside, then sprayed with a mixture of grass seed and fertilizer. With any luck, the grass will take hold and keep the spoil from washing down the hillside. This fractured landscape at the top will be slowly leveled by graders, then it too will be seeded with an exotic legume called lespedeza. According to the reclamation section of the Leslie permit, what was a mixed mesophytic forest will be turned into a “pasture.�? When I showed that part of the permit to an office manager for OSM who is known for his frankness, he shook his head and said, “It’s a joke the way reclamation is done now, to have pasturelands just sitting on the top of a mountain.�?

But whatever this landscape becomes, the mountain is gone for good. Its trees are gone, its topsoil is gone, and its forest-dwelling species, many nearing dangerously low numbers, are gone.

From here, I take in the entire panorama of this blasted ridgeline, this eviscerated forest. I think for a moment that I might write a short poem, a eulogy to Lost Mountain. Nothing comes to mind. The ancient Chinese poets wrote out of a deep identification with their own mountains, one so strong that many of those poets are now remembered, not by their own names, but by the names of the mountain they ranged across. Here, there is little left to identify with, nothing that seems the proper subject of poetry.

Not that I came to Lost Mountain for inspiration. Though I have been inspired by its songbirds, its watersheds, its wildflowers, I knew its fate a year ago when I started wandering these flanks that no longer exist. I came to Lost Mountain for a first-hand education. I climbed to its summit again and again to see what can’t be observed from below—the systematic destruction of an entire biological community.

In short, I came to Lost Mountain looking for what Aldo Leopold called an ecological education. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,�? wrote Leopold, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.�? Certainly coalfield residents and their allies can feel quite alone when they face the enormous power, and sometimes the violence, of the coal industry. No one who inflicts wounds, from soldier to strip miner, wishes to be reminded of the fact. But to watch a 300 million-year-old mountain destroyed over the course of one year, and to view from a plane the number of mountains that have suffered the same fate, is to understand that this land is a badly wounded organism.

That the land is one organism Leopold thought to be “the outstanding discovery of the 20th century.�? James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis reaffirmed this discovery in the early ‘70s when their research into the temperature, composition and oxidation rate of the atmosphere found that the earth does indeed act like one self-regulating macro-organism. They even gave it a name, Gaia—Greek for “Mother Earth.�? Leopold chose another metaphor, one from the folklore of his native Wisconsin—the Round River. It was Paul Bunyan and his blue ox who discovered this mythic river that flowed into itself in a continuous cycle, and Leopold rediscovered it in the ‘50s with the advent of ecology. “Wisconsin not only had a round river,�? he wrote, “Wisconsin is one. The current is the stream of energy that flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never ending circuit of life.�? Margulis has even suggested an analogy between the circulation of blood through our arteries and organs, and the circulation of the earth’s waters from clouds to streams to oceans to evaporation and back to clouds—another Round River.

The upshot of all this is that if the land and its atmospheric membrane behave like a single organism, then everything within that organism is serving some function—all of the parts are working interdependently for the health of the larger organism. Even the wolves that prey on the deer are working to preserve the health of that larger entity, the mountain itself. For Leopold, whose influence on wildlife conservation and wilderness protection in the U.S. can hardly be over-estimated, the health of that land depended on two things: stability and diversity. The stability of an integrated forest leads to the accumulation of soil fertility; soil fertility leads to biological diversity; biological diversity leads to “one humming community of co-operators and competitions, one biota.�? Of any biome, of any watershed, Leopold said we must ask two questions: “(1) Does it maintain fertility? (2) Does it maintain a diverse fauna and flora?�? These two questions formed the basis of what Leopold called a “land ethic,�? which if successful, would “change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.�?

Standing on this sterile ledge, I am surrounded by the work of conquerors, not members of any land-community. No one who felt a responsibility to other citizens within a community would destroy its water, homes, wildlife and woodlands. The difference between conquerors and community is the difference between the words economy and ecology. Both come from the same Greek root, oikos, meaning “the study of homes.�? But only ecology has remained such a study. A true case of home economics would, as Leopold said, make sure that the place called home maintains its health and stability. To create an environment where mudslides, flooding, and slurry spills are common will not ensure a community’s health. To bulldoze and burn a renewable resource—trees—will not ensure its stability. To tear a nonrenewable resource from the ground to provide short-term economic gain for the few and long-term environmental destruction for the many is undemocratic, unsustainable and stupid.

We are, unfortunately, a nation that values technology and wealth much more than we value community, and the result is the wasted land that lies all around me. The twentieth century was a Faustian gamble that combined industrialism and greed to make us cash rich and resource poor. As E.O. Wilson wrote, “We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that.�? If our species is to make it through this century, the forces of science and technology must be tempered by two other forces—ethics and aesthetics. As Leopold observed, all philosophies of ethics, from Aristotle on down, are actually based on this ecological principle: “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.�? And as the cave art at Lascaux makes brilliantly clear, we are a species that has evolved to find beauty in the natural world. This trait serves—or should serve—an evolutionary purpose: we love what we find beautiful, and we do not destroy that which we love. What a strip job demonstrates, then, is the absence of any ethic or aesthetic. It is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination—a failure to understand energy and employment alternatives that would preserve the integrity and the beauty of the Appalachian mountains.

The fighting between conservationists and the coal industry–between an ethic and the economy—will rage on for years. That’s clear. And the fight might have to get quite ugly before substantial, sustainable change occurs. We are not a country given to velvet revolutions. We will have to chose sides, it seems, to reach the point where we realize there are no sides, and that there are no sides because there is no outside. This small planet is all we have, and to continue on our current course will be to insure that we all become outsiders. It is, I think, for this reason that former Czech President Vaclav Havel said we must “reconstitute the natural world as the true domain of politics.�? Ideology and arbitrary borders mean little when roofs won’t stay on houses anywhere and people die of bronchial infections everywhere. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer mountains and started thinking like the mountain itself.