Why neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have dared to challenge "King Coal" while campaigning. That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices as...
Kentucky is fleetingly in the news today because of the US Presidential primaries, but I wish there was more attention being paid to the extraordinarily destructive coal mining that has been going on in that state day after day. There is a lot of debate about how to reduce coal consumption and...
Daniel Boone’s road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of the Kentucky coal industry’s closest friends in Washington, a Republican Congressman of 34 years. It passes through a mountain range older than the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the Amazon...
clipped by: papananookclipper's remarks: The devastation being wrought on Appalachia is best appreciated from the air. An organisation called Southwinds offers people an eagle-eye view of the carnage, not readily appreciated from the road. Another way to see what’s going on behind the ridge-line...
The act of destroying a million-year-old mountain has several distinct stages. First it is earmarked for removal and the hardwood forest cover, containing over 500 species of tree per acre in this region, is bulldozed away. The trees are typically burnt rather than logged, because mining...
We know how the coal industry is contributing heavily to global warming---more than any other industry. That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices...
The road slicing through the thickly forested hills of eastern Kentucky used to be called the Daniel Boone Parkway. It was named for the controversial American folk hero who fought his way across Indian country to settle a state where many of his descendants still live.