News Brief

Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness

by Erik Reece. Riverhead Books, New York City, 2006. Hardcover, 251 pages, $24.95.

“You can think of any mountain in Appalachia as a geological layer cake with seams of coal two to 15 feet thick, separated by much thicker bands of sandstone, slate, and shale,” explains Erik Reece in

Lost Mountain, which describes mountaintop-removal mining and its devastation of the environment and people of eastern Kentucky and the surrounding region. Treating North America’s oldest mountain range as no more sacred or formidable than the illustrative layer cake, mountaintop-removal mining is systematically dismantling the Appalachians to get at their coal.

The mountaintop removal process is really very simple. After the trees are cut and explosives loosen the underlying rock, earthmovers weighing up to 8 million pounds (3,600 tonnes) apiece and standing as tall as 20-story buildings dig into the rocks, and 250-ton (230-tonne) trucks dump the unwanted debris into the valleys between mountains. “Strip mining has sped up geological time to the point where mountains that took 290 million years to form can be leveled in a matter of months, and their coal consumed in even less time,” says Reece. In this heartbreaking book, Reece documents the leveling of aptly named Lost Mountain over the course of one year. “Now Lost Mountain exists only on topo maps of Perry County, Kentucky,” he says. “The real thing is gone.”

The effects of mountaintop removal are far more complex than the process itself. Blasting has cracked the foundations, chimneys, and wells of nearby homes, and errant “flyrock” has rained down on them. Clearcutting North America’s oldest and most diverse forests has taken away wildlife habitat and carbon sinks. Several hundred miles of streams have been buried, and nearly half of Kentucky’s rivers and streams are too polluted for drinking, fishing, or swimming. The destruction of streams and the loss of vegetation have increased both the frequency and the severity of flooding, to the point where eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia have suffered seven “100-year floods” in the last three years.

While coal industry executives reap generous profits from mountaintop removal, Appalachia remains one of the poorest regions in the U.S. “Central Appalachia is poor because so much has been taken from it and so little has been returned,” says Reece. “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.”

Reece sees two routes toward halting mountaintop removal. The first is to appeal to our ethics. “For a campaign against mountaintop removal to succeed, it will, like the civil rights movement, have to transcend right-left divisions and be about something far more fundamental than politics,” he says. The second is to appeal to our pocketbooks. “Coal remains, in the popular consciousness, ‘cheap energy.’ But the current price of coal tells nothing near the truth about the cost of air pollution, water pollution, forest fragmentation, species extinction, and the destruction of homes,” says Reece. “When consumers are forced to pay the true cost of coal, they will begin to think about small homes, better insulation, fluorescent lighting, strategically placed shade trees, and solar hot-water heaters,” he says. “The technology is there; we simply lack the will.”

Published April 3, 2006

Boehland, J. (2006, April 3). Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/newsbrief/lost-mountain-year-vanishing-wilderness

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