Foreword by
Wendell Berry

Most people, even the many whose homes are cooled, heated, and lighted by coal-fired power plants, know little or nothing about surface mining in the Appalachian coal fields. They know so little, for one reason, because this is a subject hard to learn about. The coal companies, knowing well what an abomination surface mining is, have gone to considerable trouble to hide it from public view. The “media” have paid it far too little attention, even though it is a matter of the most urgent public interest.

Another reason for so much ignorance is that the learning is painful. To know about strip mining or mountaintop removal is like knowing about the nuclear bomb. It is to know beyond doubt that some human beings have, and are willing to use, the power of absolute destruction. This work is done in violation of all the best things that humans have learned in their long dwelling on the earth: reverence, neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, love.

A conservationist trying to oppose this enormity must accept heartbreak as a working condition. People whose homes and homelands are under the dominance of the coal industry must accept heartbreak, poverty, and various everyday lethal endangerments as a way of life. And the coal companies themselves must live always a little frantically, trying to protect their contempt for everything human and natural by “Private Property” signs and purchased political friendships.

So much needs to be said as a way of suggesting our inestimable debt to Erik Reece for writing this book. This is by far the best account of mountaintop removal and of its effects. It is a superb job of reporting, and we have it at the cost of the effort, grief, and risk involved in observing from beginning to end the process of the industrial destruction of a mountain and the ruin of its watersheds. No other reporter has had the perseverance and the guts to do a respectable fraction of what Mr. Reece has done.

He has worked in the face of a public ignorance both conventional and enforced. His book confronts a disgraceful history in which generations of political hirelings have sacrificed their land and their people to the benefit of a few mainly absentee corporations. And so the Appalachian coal fields most spectacularly, but in fact every one of our economic landscapes, have been put at the mercy of a class of economic aggressors whose aim is to convert the natural world into money as quickly as is technologically possible and at the least possible cost. If that least cost is the total destruction of the land and the land’s communities, that is understood as an acceptable cost of doing business.

It is hard to get the public and public leaders to see any issue of land abuse as urgent. Can that indifference be penetrated by a mere book written in love for what has been destroyed and for what remains?

Well, we had better hope so.