FIVE more coal miners are dead. Now, turn off your lights while you read this. If every coal miner in the United States decided to walk out of the mines, crawl off their draglines and bulldozers, hop out of their overburdened dump trucks and refuse to work until the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush sat down and came up with true mining safety legislation — and more importantly, the wherewithal to enforce that legislation — you would sit in this darkness. Now turn back on your lights. Over 50 percent of our electrical needs are met by coal miners.

And yet, they continue to die needlessly, and coal mining communities continue to carry the burden of unsafe roads, unsafe coal slurry ponds, unsafe water contaminated by discharged chemicals and waste, and in the last decades, reckless mountaintop removal strip-mining methods that threaten to wipe out their very homes and livelihoods.

This is a fact: Over 104,000 Americans have died in the coal mines in our country’s short history of energy use. At one point, it was safer to serve on the frontlines of war — such as the Spanish-American War or World War I — than take your pick to the end of a mining shaft in West Virginia. Untold thousands have suffered horrible injuries or black lung disease.

But miners, especially in Appalachia, have not been victims of this historical process; they have been in the vanguard of reminding our country that its energy needs, and the way it seeks to meet them, must rise to the highest American standards of workplace justice and safety. In 1921, West Virginia miners launched the largest armed insurrection in the country since the Civil War, marching on Blair Mountain in a symbolic act to “liberate” areas that had been prevented from free and fair union organizing.

The latest mining tragedies and their clearly documented trangressions and oversights make me wonder if the time has come to march again — not on Blair Mountain this time, but on Capitol Hill.

My grandfather was buried with pieces from a coal mine. After barely surviving a cave-in in southern Illinois, his face was embedded with coal bits. The doctor didn’t bother to remove them all; meanwhile, black lung ravaged his body. When I moved to the Southwest as a child, I assumed our family had left the mines behind; that it was part of the underworld of our southern enclave in the Midwest, or Appalachia, or the remote ends of Wyoming and Colorado; that as long as I didn’t see it, coal mining was no longer part of my future, or my past.

…

This is the illusion most Americans live every day. The danger of the mining industry, in whatever form, never enters our lives beyond news stories about catastrophes. We never take a moment to realize that every time we flick on a light switch or appreciate the goods and services of American shops and factories, we are relying on coal, and the outrageously precarious existence of coal miners, and coal mining communities, and the mountains that hold them. More than 8 million people vacation in Appalachia each year. Thousands hike the Appalachian Trail, and yet few look beyond the ridge at the destruction.

In truth, there are dueling mining crises taking place today in the coalfields: workplace safety and mountaintop removal. As hearings take place on the enforcement and upgrade of mining safety laws, including overloaded hauling trucks, coal slurry ponds, mining waste and discharged water, we also need to make the reality of mountaintop removal — an extreme form of strip mining — part of the discussion. The huge role of mountaintop removal in Appalachia — literally, toppling mountaintops into valleys and waterways to obtain the coal in a cheap but devastating process — has set in motion a potential of erosion, flooding and dam breaks. In the past decade, more than 1 million acres of forests have been erased, literally, from our American mountains. An area that rivals the size of some eastern states is on the verge of being wiped out.

Mining workplace advocates such as the United Mine Workers of America and environmentalists, community activists and lawmakers need to come together to discuss these two issues at the same time, not on opposing sides. Common ground must be found between the reality of our coal demands, and the sustainability of our land and communities. More so, we must make coal mining — including mountaintop removal — a national issue, not a regional affair on the back burner until disaster strikes. If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we find a way to mine coal or develop some other form of renewable energy that doesn’t take the lives, livelihoods and lands of our American citizens?

Far from being a backwoods outpost, coal miners have always been in the forefront of national issues. For example, the United Mine Workers have always been an integrated union. Appalachian coal miner Carter Woodson became an eminent historian and founder of Black History Month. While Appalachian miners and mill workers have led some of our country’s dramatic campaigns for labor rights and safety, we tend to forget that Walter Reuther, Detroit’s legendary auto workers leader, came out of the West Virginia labor movement. After decades of labor rebellions, Appalachian labor organizers shifted to the issue of desegregation and trained the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement — including Rosa Parks — at the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. And now coal miners and coal communities must make the link between the way we protect our miners and the way we protect our environment, that disrespect for one leads to abuse of the other.

A few years ago, my family’s 200-year-old homestead and hollow in southern Illinois was destroyed by strip mining. Two hundred years of history now lie in a black amphitheater of death. Every time I flick on the light switch, I think of the explosions ripping our heritage from its roots. I think of the lives that the explosions have taken with them. I think of my coal-mining grandfather, who loved the land he tended as a steward, sitting in the darkness after his cave-in. I wonder who is next, either from failed safety laws or flooding or governmental and company neglect, and indifference by citizens.

As our nation comes to grips with our energy needs and mining realities, it needs to come up to the mountain and become part of this mining process. If Washington, D.C., won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain needs to go to Washington, D.C.

Until then, coal miners and coal mining communities need to use the power in their hands to remind the rest of America what a day would be without coal.

When I ventured out my back door to enjoy the spring evening on May 5, I found this newly emereged moth Cecropia Moth (Hyalophora cecropia) perched on my deck. Upon a short investigation I discovered that this moth is the largest moth in North America with a wing span of 5-7 inches. The caterpillar spins its cocoon in the fall and spends the winter snoozing and morphing into its final stage and finally emerges at this beautiful moth in early summer. The Cecropia Moth is not a rare or unusual species, actually it is pretty common all over the southeast, it was the first time I witnessed this amazing and beautiful creature.

After reading through the websites about this particular moth I realized that at some point last fall we had this amazing greenish-blue caterpillar, 4 inches long, living right there under my nose on my deck and I didn’t even see it once. I guess my observation skills need some fine tuning; if I don’t even notice a 4 inch caterpillar on my deck spinning its cocoon (4 feet from where I sit and enjoy my morning coffee) what else am I missing?

The emergence of this moth on my deck is an indication that a new season has arrived and with that a new season for me to be more observant in the natural world. Oftentimes we are so busy and wrapped up in the fast paced world, we forget to look and enjoy what is in our “backyards.” When I forget to “look in my backyard” I tend to lose focus on why I do what I do. So, thanks to the moth on my deck, I have vowed to be more observant in my backyard and the rest of this place, the Appalachians, which I call home. Who knows what I will see; a green heron resting on a downed tree over the creek; a woodpecker searching for bugs on the flowering pear tree; a farmer plowing up the field and preparing to plant broccoli; or a spider spinning its web in a corner of my front porch?

I urge you all to “look in your backyard” and share what you find!

The effects of logging are vastly underrated by most of the general public. They still do not connect the increasing contamination of their water with the logging of watershed. Anybody who needs water to live should be concerned.

The Walden Logging Bill, HR 4200, is scheduled for a vote on the House floor this week. The vote is expected on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. American Lands Alliance is scheduling a national call in day on Tuesday, May 16th. You can read about it here.

They are shouting FIRE! in a crowded theater. It is the same tactic used again and again. And they offer us a dream of temporary safety, a myth, if we will just give up what few protections for the environment that are left.
HR 4900 is an indirect assault on the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, which I wrote about in my first dKos diary.

The cost of this bill will be tremendous, both financially for taxpayers, and ecologically for the state of sustainability of our homeland. Check out the
taxpayer costs of the Biscuit Fire “Recovery” project as an example.

Salvage logging, one of the most ecologically dangerous practices in modern forestry, employs an overriding short-term economic rational as an excuse to summarily ignore all current ecological knowledge about the long- term biological sustainability of forests. The sole objective of salvage logging is to convert trees into money, thus replacing the art of forestry with the technology and economics of cutting trees.

Jump this muddy ditch with me, for a closer look.

Jeffery St. Claire’s excellent article on Chainsaw George explains some of the history of fire, and the beginnings of Corporate theft of our forest resources.

Forest fires became stigmatized only when forests began to be viewed as a commercial resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. Fire suppression became an obsession only after the big timber giants laid claim to the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were loath to see their holdings go up in flames, so they arm-twisted Congress into pour millions of dollars into Forest Service fire-fighting programs. The Forest Service was only too happy to oblige because fire suppression was a sure way to pad their budget: along with the lobbying might of the timber companies they could literally scare Congress into handing over a blank check. [For an excellent history of the political economy of forest fires I highly recommend Stephen Pyne’s Fire in America.]

Ah, fear again.

Well, I fear HR 4200 a lot more than I do fire, and I have been up close and personal with one at my home. Anyone who has tried to walk through where the forest used to be after a timbering operation can tell you that the fuel load is increased, not lessened. And the firefighters agree with me! Or perhaps better put, I agree with them.

Wildland firefighters’ group seeks defeat of salvage logging bill

[Washington, DC] A group representing wildland firefighters Tuesday called on Congress to defeat a bill aimed at speeding up logging dead timber and planting new trees after storms and wildfires. The bipartisan bill demands that areas hit by disasters greater than 1,000 acres be restored quickly, before the commercial value of fire-killed timber diminishes, and insects and rot set in. But Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology said the bill could increase fire risks and undermine efforts to reduce hazardous fire conditions near communities. “Post-fire logging and planting does not ‘recover’ a burned forest, but rather, sets it up for future high-severity burning,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, the group’s executive director and a former firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Young, densely stocked timber plantations are prone to sudden “blowups” of extreme fire, and can start crown fires in nearby old-growth stands, said Ingalsbee, whose group includes about 80 professional firefighters from Alaska to Virginia. The bill awaiting action in the House “not only will create more hazardous fire conditions, but it will divert financial resources away from one of the most urgent needs of society: community wildfire protection,”

The best available science shows that logging in forests after natural disturbances can be extremely damaging and can actually increase fire risk by leaving piles of limbs and branches on the ground. Letting trees regenerate naturally works better than logging and replanting. Bulldozers destroy naturally regenerating fragile seedlings. Logs left in place following fires or other disturbances are crucial building blocks, providing nutrients for the reemerging forest. In a recent letter, 169 scientists including some of the most prominent forest ecologists in the nation wrote to warn Congress that HR 4200 “…is misguided because it distorts or ignores recent scientific advances.” American Lands Alliance

Adbusters.org has a fine bunch of economists working on sustainability issues.

Paul Hawken

A spider can spin silk as strong as kevlar, without using high temperatures or sulphuric acid. Trees use sunlight and water to make cellulose, a sugar with greater bending strength than steel. In his acclaimed book Natural Capitalism, https://www.natcap.org/ Paul Hawken (with co-authors Amory and Hunter Lovins) proposes an industrial system where natural resources are treated as capital, and “smart designers apprentice themselves to nature” to learn the secrets of efficient production.

HR 4200, same old same old. Profit for Corporations at cost to taxpayers.

The Walden Logging Bill sacrifices accountability and transparency in federal decision making by casting aside the most important law the public has to provide meaningful and informed input on federal projects – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). All projects authorized under the bill would be exempt from NEPA, which requires that federal projects undergo a “look before they leap” review that takes into account sound science, a reasonable range of alternatives, and lets the public know about a project and its environmental impacts before moving forward.

Please make the call. Click on your rep to find phone number.

Cross posted at the Daily Kos

North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina have become the first states in the nation to request protection of all the wild, roadless national forest land within their borders.

The move was part of a process set in motion by the Bush Administration in 2002. Instead of implementing a Clinton Administration policy that would have protected all roadless national forest lands in the US, the Bush Administration rolled back that policy and required every governor to file their own formal petition that would determine the fate of the federal roadless lands in their state.

According to the Media General News Service,

Three Southern states – Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina – asked the federal government Monday to protect hundreds of thousands of acres in national forests from road construction.

The three states were the first in the nation to ask the Agriculture Department to use a new federal rule that governs whether roads can be built in pristine areas of national forests.

Makes you proud to be a Southerner, doesn’t it?

Here are the details for the three states, according to the Media General News Service:

Virginia is seeking protection for 374,000 acres in the George Washington and Jefferson national forests. That’s 21 percent of the land in George Washington and 9 percent in Jefferson.

“We need to have land available for backcountry recreation, wildlife protection and to protect our water quality,” said Nikki Rovner, Virginia’s deputy secretary for natural resources. “The only place in
Virginia where those characteristics exist is on public land. We are not going to find them on private land.”

“North Carolina faces phenomenal growth pressures, and our opportunity to protect these areas may be limited,” Jennifer Bumgarner, an advisor to Gov. Michael Easley, a Democrat, told the Agriculture Department’s advisory committee on roadless areas.

North Carolina is asking that nearly 174,000 acres in the Pisgah, Nantahala and Croatan National Forests be kept without roads. That amounts to 15 percent of the national forest land in the state.

South Carolina is asking to save the remaining 7,581 acres without roads in Sumter and Francis Marion National Forests.

“This is all the roadless national forest we have in South Carolina,” said South Carolina forest supervisor Jerome Thomas. Forests must have less than a half mile of road for each 1,000 acres to be considered roadless. The rest of the 624,000 acres in the Sumter
and Francis Marion forests already have roads.

Appalachian Voices is seeking a motivated individual to play a central role in our effort to improve private forest stewardship in the southern mountains. The AmeriCorps member will be responsible for distributing and outreach of the second edition of a sustainable forestry handbook for landowners in the southern Appalachian region.

Appalachian Voices is a non-profit, grassroots environmental organization that brings people together to solve the environmental problems having the greatest impact on the central and southern Appalachian Mountains. Our mission is to empower people to defend our region’s rich natural and cultural heritage by providing them with tools and strategies for successful grassroots campaigns.

This position is available as part of Project Conserve, which will place 20 AmeriCorps service members with 15 conservation organizations and agencies that share the common goal of protecting western North Carolina’s natural resources through education, community involvement, and direct assistance.

This is a full-time AmeriCorps position from September 5, 2006 through June 30, 2007. Full-time AmeriCorps members receive a $10,600 living stipend over the course of their service and a $4,725 Education Award at the completion of 1700 hours of service. Benefits include health insurance, childcare assistance if needed, and worker’s compensation insurance. The position will be based in Boone, North Carolina. The application deadline is June 15, 2006.

For more information about the position and to request an application packet, please call (828) 262-1500.

Some days I wake up writing diaries in my head. It’s one of those days. It’s Gate Crashing that’s on my mind this morning. I sort of crashed the gate right here, following jdub home the way I did, then harassing him to post first one thing, then another. Arrg, he said, post it yer own self!

I was minding my own and Mother’s business over at the fantastic political blog The Daily Kos, when I stumbled upon faithfull’s invitation to this AppVoice party. I’ve been posting diaries on the Environment over there for a while, in a sense crashing their gate too. Environment is not a big thing over there. But it’s getting bigger, due to the persistent posting of a handful of folk. Marcos is the site owner, and along with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong has written a new book called Crashing The Gate. It is about the paradigm shift that we need to accomplish to get things done. He will be in Asheville on Friday.

Markos Moulitsus Zungia and Jerome Armstrong have written the guide to Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics.

You are invited to help Crash the Gate, make him welcome in Appalachia, and pick his brain. It is, as we say, a good’un.

Friday, May 5th, 7:00 p.m.
Signing and discussion at Malaprops Bookstore and Cafe
55 Haywood Street
Asheville, NC

Follow me over for some reviews.

The book is about the Democratic Party, why it has been failing, and what it needs to do to get back in good health. A couple of review clips.

Environmentalists are some of the most passionate people that I know. Passion is a wonderful thing. It drives us, and with the tempering of knowledge, allows us to teach and persuade. Political leaders have written us off as myopic. That needs to change.

From Beyond Cheron

It’s often said that the Republicans are a party – but the Democrats are a bunch of interest groups. Moulitsas and Armstrong begin by persuasively showing how labor, environmental and pro-choice organizations have missed the forest for the trees as they demand a purist electoral agenda that hurts all their causes. The answer is not for Democrats to “sell out” these groups, but to build coalitions among them to ensure that we don’t sabotage each other’s goals.

From E Puribus Media’s Arron Barlow

Boiled down to its essence, the book presents four key observations about the state of contemporary political affairs vis-à-vis the Democratic Party:

Democrats almost always govern better than Republicans. The comparative track records are clear at all levels. So, Democrats, whatever the details of their individual beliefs, need to be supported over Republicans — if we are to have effective government. Issue allegiance must take second place.

The old Democratic strategy of developing a coalition of interest groups only worked when the Democrats were a consistent majority in Congress and state legislatures and therefore could afford some splintering. Such a coalition is extremely fragile, easily broken apart by `litmus test’ adherents to particular causes (the siphoning off of Democratic votes to Ralph Nader in 2000 is the best case in point). Major elections will continue to be lost if another organizing model is not developed; it’s way too easy for opponents to fracture such coalitions.

The Democratic Party, dominated by inside-the-beltway consultants, does not succeed today in part because it has difficulty recognizing that its decision-making process needs to stem from the grassroots, from the bottom up, not the top down (as has been the case for the last twenty years, at least). Out of touch with the electorate, the consultants do more harm than good.

The Democratic Party has failed to protect its own future by neglecting to nurture up-coming young activists and overlooking the need to develop think tanks where strategies and plans can be devised and discussed. Instead, the Democratic Party focuses its financial rewards on those at the top, not the ones with the potential of coming to the top tomorrow with new ideas and enthusiasms. As a result, the party stagnates.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in grassroots activism, and how to effect change in the structure and function of our failing government. Complete tour schedule here.

Please help get the word out by using your e-mail lists and posting around the Net, if posting around is something that you do!

Wombat

The American Lung Association has just released their 2006 State of the Air report. It gives air pollution grades for counties, cities, and towns across America.

Visit the American Lung Association’s website and click on your state, to find out the grades for your area. Some highlights from our region:

– In North Carolina, counties that received an “F” for high ozone days (which are dangerous for children, the elderly, and people with lung diseases) included Wake, Forsyth, Mecklenburg, and Guilford.

– Several east Tennessee counties received an “F” for days with high ozone levels, including Knox, Sevier, Jefferson, Anderson, and Blount.

– In Virginia, Wythe County recevied a “D” for high ozone days, while the city of Roanoke did slighty better with a “C.”

This just in – the Tennessee legislature has passed a bill that gives the state authority to shut down surface mines if they are in violation of the law, rather than having to go through a lot of red tape. Tennessee has been at the forefront in dealing with the devastating impacts of mountaintop removal.

By The Associated Press
April 20, 2006

A bill to give the state the power to shut down polluting surface coal mines is headed for the governor’s signature.

The House voted 93-0 to approve the measure on Thursday. The Senate passed the bill on Monday.

The bill introduced by Gov. Phil Bredesen was carried by Rep. John Tidwell, D-New Johnsonville.

“What this bill does is correct the problem immediately and provides an alternative to the court system, which is cumbersome and expensive,” Tidwell said.

Appalachian Voices celebrated this Earth Day at Appalachian State University in their annual Earth Day tabling event on campus. The event brought together students, faculty and community members to educate one another on how everyone can do their part to protect and preserve the Earth. Thank you to the volunteers that tabled for Appalachian Voices; Adam Wells, Erica Palmer, Adam Johnson, and Stephen Callihan.
Check out the full article!

…I rambled, oh yeah, then settled in the Appalachians, right on the edge of the Coal. The deep and the stripable both.

1973 or thereabouts. I hooked up with some of the early Appalshop folks. It was a wild and crazy time. One night, a bunch of us, and Mutsmag, took ourselves up on Pine Mountain, on the boarder of Virginia and Kentucky.

We ambled around the outcrops, in the partial moonlight night. We were Owls, and All That is Nocturnal, and it was Good. A couple of us might have been spoken to by God, but if we were, we didn’t talk much about it, we just incorporated it into our lives. What little lives some of us had left.

It got toward dawn, and Lice said “We’ve got to go!” I said, “Let’s wait. It’s almost time for it to get light, let’s wait.” I looked out into the darkness, where dawn would break over the incredible lands of Eastern Kentucky. There was silence. And then Lice said, with this strange choking sound in his voice, that I had never heard before…..” You don’t want to see it. Believe me. This is my home. I was raised out there. You don’t want to see it.”

Some years later, I saw my first strip mine. At that time, I was told that under 10 percent of the surface of Eastern Kentucky was gone. GONE.

At this point in time, in West Virginia, it is estimated that 15-25 percent of the mountains no longer exist. GONE, Not coming back. EVER.

First the trees

Then the soil, the rocks, the rest of the life…then the explosions, the dust, rolling boulders, the roaring coal trucks. Poison water, and the death of Communities. I had no voice, and so was silent.

Fast forward…

I learned from faithfull that there is a contingent of people who will be heard by the United Nations. These are my Brothers and Sisters, my friends…..forget that we’ve never met. These are the displaced, much like the Katrina folks….only it has happened to them for 50 years. Floods? Yeah Boy!.

Take a virtual flyover of MTR.

Toxic waves of the contents of holding ponds with old dams a breakin’,

Jack Spadaro is an expert on coal slurry impoundments, and was on the federal investigation team that examined the Martin County disaster. It was a 1972 slurry dam accident at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia that has defined Spadaro’s career in mine safety. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed and 4,000 left homeless in that accident.

…boulders rolling down what used to be the mountainside, and fear of being killed in your bed.

Chaining themselves to dozers, while the elderly do all they can, even if it’s only sitting on a lawn chair on a bridge. (A little cheat here, this is actually a pic from a timber protest in the west. I like to pretend that is me in that chair. It could be any little old Appalachian grannie!)

Props to melvin over at The Daily Kos, who supplied this information in comments when this peice was posted there.

The woman in the chair was Joan Norman. Right after this photo was taken, she was in jail with a friend of mine and shared her story. This protest, near Selma OR was her last. One of her first was in Selma AL. She has since passed on, unfortunately. I am quite sure she is with you in spirit.

You can read a little about Joan Norman’s life here.

I believe that photo was from the “womens’ day of protest.” Everybody on the bridge, everyone lying across the road, all women. Supported very much by their men in the community of course.

So now we have a chance to speak to the world. Will you help?

I have 2 envelopes sitting on my desk. There’s five bucks, and a penny, goin’ in each one.

One is to the fund for Valle Vidal.

One is to President Fire Thunder.

I am writing a new one out as soon as I finish this little rant, and get it posted. To OVEC,
tagged “for UN trip”.

This May, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development will meet in New York to discuss international energy strategy. Most government officials continue to ignore the atrocities of mountaintop removal, coal sludge impoundments, and underground injections of sludge, so it is up to the people to let the world know the harsh realities of an economy built on “cheap” electricity.

The United Nations needs to know that we cannot have sustainable communities without the mountains on which we rely for clean water, clean air, our health and our children’s futures. It is the people of Appalachian coal mining communities who are most immediately paying the true costs of coal, and so…

The first Coalfield Delegation to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, a group of inspiring coalfield residents, is prepared to take the truth to the UN, but we need your support if we are going to make it. Please help us raise the $7,000 so we can get to New York this May and ensure that the international debate on sustainable energy development includes the voice of the people of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
Send checks to OVEC, PO Box 6753, Huntington, WV 25773-675. Be sure to write “UN delegation” in the memo line of the check.

I can’t afford this, but I can’t not afford it either. I want my people to speak to the world. I want to help send them to do it. I hope you do too.

I am finding my voice. Practice makes perfect, they say. Sometimes, particularly on sunny Sunday mornings, I subscribe to the old saying from New England though. “There’s good, and there’s good enough. And that’s good enough.” So this will just have to do. For now.

Inspired by faithfulls excellent diary
of several weeks ago.

Nemaste.

[Jeff Biggers’latest book is “The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America.” Buy The United States of Appalachia from a local book store. And read reviews here, here, and here. I just picked up this book Friday and am thrilled to get to read it. Ill be reviewing it here – jdub]

Excerpt from The Bloomsbury Review
Based in his native mountains of western North Carolina, Ron Rash’s third novel is a powerful, and at times hair-raising, story of historical loss and recovery, haunted by the spirits of the Civil War that still breathe life or death into our modern experience. For Appalachians, and the rest of the nation, World Made Straight (Holt) is a brilliant reminder that the past is often a prologue for our contemporary challenges. For Travis, a young high school drop-out unaware that his fishing trip on Caney Creek is about to launch him on a death-defying bildungsroman, the spirits of his past reside in an abandoned but not forgotten meadow in Madison County. Travis stumbles onto a plot of marijuana in the backwoods; but, this is just the first, and inevitably treacherous, step into an even greater secret hidden from sight. Steeped in the rich language and lyricism of Appalachia that has won Rash national acclaim as a poet, World Made Straight joins Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as an important lyric page turner for our times; an American masterpiece about the power of unresolved history to shatter, subvert and ultimately heal our heart-breaking attempts to understand our identities and own times.

Leaving behind an abusive home, the young Travis eventually takes refuge at the trailer of Leonard, a once idealistic teacher who has lost his job and child after being framed for drugs. Leonard turns on society; he ends up dealing drugs and retreating to his backwoods haunt as a disaffected bibliophile. His trailer become a magnet for other lost souls, including Dena, a strung-out pill-popping naïf who trades sex for kindness; who declares, in one of the novel’s most relentless moments, that she realized she had lost control over her life at the age of seven.

As dark as any Russell Banks novel, sharing his afflicted characters and their penchant for self-inflicted destruction, World Made Straight is a little threatening at times, yet big-hearted, even funny and always moving. One of the novel’s best characters, the vicious drug cultivating Carlton Toomey, defies the caricature of the hillbilly outlaw in a biting riposte to outside stereotypes; he hides his glasses and crossword puzzles when the urban drug dealers arrive.

Leonard, though, is a teacher at heart, and World Made Straight emerges as one of the most beautiful portraits of a natural teacher’s role as a guide despite the circumstances, or as Rash quotes Mozart, “the crookedness” of the times. Leonard not only sets Travis back on track toward his education and career, piling him down with history books and classical music, but provides him with a map to a bitter past that both men share. That past, and an infamous (and real) massacre at Shelton Laurel during the Civil War, opens up a memory vein that is both illuminating and irreconcilable.

“Why do you reckon people don’t talk much about what happened up here?” Travis asked.

“The men who shot them were also from this country. Even after the war some folks got killed because of what happened that morning. People believed it was better not to talk about it.”

In the end, Leonard and Travis are forced by history to make decisions that affect their daily lives. In a place where “landscape as destiny” shapes an unforgiving world, Rash packs his sentences and scenes with compelling and beautiful images—the recovery of the crushed glasses of a young boy killed at the massacre—that will leave the reader struggling with the same questions long after they have finished the book.

Good novels are written by people who are not frightened, George Orwell declared in his landmark essay, Inside the Whale. Beyond any cultural or regional limitations, Rash is one of the most dauntless, gifted and original writers today. World Made Straight is an enormously moving novel that will be read, discussed and grappled with beyond the rest of our lives. As the Robert Penn Warren for a new generation, Rash is an Appalachian writer deserving as much national attention as possible.

Email a friend about Rash’s work on Appalachia today; or even better, buy a book at your local bookstore and pass it on.

Some of Kentucky’s well known writers, Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Ann Taylor Hall and others writers spoke out against mountaintop removal at a community event at historic Union Church. They read excerpts from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized the tour for the writers and are organizing a “Mountain Witness Tour” in Perry County on May 13, which will show participants destruction from mountaintop removal mining and give members a chance to meet people affected by it.

For more information about Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, write to P.O. Box 1450, London, KY, 40743, or call (859) 985-7480.

Read the full story.