A Mountain of an Issue:  Author decries strip-mining methods

By Art Jester © 2005 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources.

In 1963, an unheralded book by a Whitesburg lawyer grabbed national attention and for years shaped the debate over how to remedy Eastern Kentucky's economic, social and environmental woes.

In many ways, the influence of Harry M. Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands has never diminished.

Now another virtually unknown Kentucky author has produced new writing about strip mining in Eastern Kentucky that could set off a searching and acrimonious debate about the region, just as Caudill did.

The new writer is Erik Reece, a lecturer in English and writing at the University of Kentucky, whose 19-page article, Death of a MountainRadical Strip Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia, appears in the April issue of Harper's Magazine. It's an excerpt from his book that will be published in the summer of 2006.

Wendell Berry, the esteemed Kentucky author and longtime environmental advocate, called Reece's book the "most important document so far on strip-mining."

Berry said that Reece's book, while different in approach from Night Comes to the Cumberlands, nevertheless achieves Caudill's aim, to "think soberly and seriously about the fate of Eastern Kentucky."

Even Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association and a sharp critic of most of Reece's article, agreed that the author could have the same effect as Caudill, by forcing renewed debate about Eastern Kentucky's future.

Reece, 37, writes about what he and other environmentalists call the most destructive form of coal mining in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia -- mountaintop removal.

It uses explosives to blow the top off a mountain and then, layer by layer, removes dirt, then coal, then dirt, then coal, and so on, until the mountain is leveled -- a plateau of dirt devoid of vegetation, until and unless it is reclaimed.

But the mountain is gone -- and maybe more.

"I'm trying to help people see the beauty of this landscape because people don't destroy what they love," Reece said.

Berry said Reece describes the environmental cost of mountaintop removal so well that "by the time he's done, the cost is so great that it overcomes any possible good that can come from it."

Reece focuses his article on Lost Mountain, in Perry County, and traces how it was leveled by mountaintop removal mining in 2003 and 2004.

"I want it to show what the entire mountaintop removal process looks like from the beginning to the end, from an intact forest to essentially a Western desert," Reece said in an interview.

"Lost Mountain was once more than 1,800 feet tall. There had been a little logging on it, but it was an intact forest."

As he writes in his article, now across Appalachia lie "thousands of acres -- former summits -- that have been flattened by mountaintop mining."

"Where once there were jagged, forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered gray shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale," he writes.

Berry said Reece's findings are further proof that "you can't compromise with the destruction of the world.

"You can't say you'll destroy a little bit of it at a time, because you'll keep destroying it little by little until you end up destroying it all."

Reece resolved to write the book in 1993, when he was teaching in UK's Summer Environmental Writing Program, at the Robinson Forest in Eastern Kentucky.

One day, as he drove just beyond the forest, he was frightened to his core by what he suddenly entered -- a landscape of nothingness.

"I might as well have been staring at the Apocalypse," Reece said. "It was like a moonscape. I had gone from the most pristine part of Kentucky to barren waste. There were blackened craters, and gray and brown rubble. Just seeing that got me agitated."

Reece, a Louisville native, got his education in writing at UK, where his mentor was the internationally renowned author and critic Guy Davenport, who died Jan. 4.

From Davenport "I learned the importance of paying attention to detail," he said.

In his article, Reece contends that mountaintop removal mining is not only leveling the landscape but is also burying or polluting streams and does nothing to improve the economy.

His position, as expected, gets a thorough rebuttal from the coal association's Caylor and from Brian Patton, who as an executive with first Leslie Resources and later International Coal Group, supervised the mining project at Lost Mountain.

Patton, now with James River Coal Corp., and a distant relative of former Gov. Paul Patton, said he has met Reece but has not read the Harper's article.

Brian Patton took issue with Reece's contention that Lost Mountain had been destroyed.

"Lost Mountain had been mined and reclaimed for several years" before the period covered in the book, he said.

Together, Patton and Caylor's key points are these

• Mountaintop removal mining creates much-needed level land for residential, commercial and other development.

• Reece is wrong when he says waste from mountaintop removal is toxic.

• Reece was trespassing on Lost Mountain, risking injury from explosives and heavy equipment. (Reece says in the book that he did trespass; once he was barely missed by a bulldozer that suddenly came over a hill.)

• Coal operators have enriched the ecosystem by bringing fish and wildlife into the area.

• Reece's article is filled with errors and emotion. "On technical matters, I'd have to flunk him," Caylor said.

• Mining is noisy and disruptive, but the land can be reclaimed.

Reece said he only wants to save the mountains.

"I don't want Kentucky to look like West Virginia in 10 years," he said. "Mountaintop mining in West Virginia has just leveled the mountains, destroyed the forests, polluted thousands of streams and flooded out dozens of communities.

"Environmentalists say there ought to be a new state motto there'West Virginia -- Almost Level.'"author proclaims major threat to eastern kentucky environment