There’s an environmental disaster in progress in the Appalachian mountains of the United States, almost unthinkable in its proportions and scope and in its sheer hubris. Man as a species does a lot of damage, usually in the course of heedless pursuit of gain and in the name of progress. Rivers get polluted, forests get clearcut, trash gets dumped. But that kind of damage is mostly reversible, over time, lots of time. But someone’s found a way to completely scrape away an entire landscape, obliterate it all the way to the bottom, taking what they want and dumping what’s left over-much of it poisonous- into rivers and valleys. Just tell me this one thing-how do you rebuild a mountain? How do you fix that one?

Some eloquent writers are bringing this horror out into the light of day where it belongs, and where there’s light, there’s hope.

More links here, and here.

“There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.”
—Wendell Berry