Communities, Welcome to Lost Mountain, Kentucky
“The coal industry operates with little conscience or constraint.” – Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain
Friday, October 19th, 2007
Over the course of one year, from September 2003 to September 2004, I watched at close range as one mountain was dismantled and destroyed so its coal could be extracted and sold to twenty-two other states and other countries. I visited the mountain at least once a month. I hiked over a hundred miles as I climbed to its summit over and over, then explored its flanks and descended along its headwater streams.
Today there is no summit. It may be too obvious an irony that this particular ridge was called Lost Mountain. But it is the truth, and now Lost Mountain exists only on topo maps of Perry County, Kentucky. The real thing is gone.
What follows is an account of events I witnessed over the course of that year. It is the story of how the richest ecosystem in North America is being destroyed and how some of the poorest people in the United States are being made poorer by a coal industry that operates with little conscience or constraint.
From Erik Reece’s book Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia, published in 2006.
