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Be a Locavore: Support your community and sustain yourself
By Maureen Halsema As you are savoring your roasted turkey, dumplings, cranberry sauce, and hot apple pie this holiday season, keep in mind the average item in the grocery store travels over 1,000 miles to your table. Appalachia is rich in farmer’s markets and food co-operatives featuring locally grown and organic foods. Besides being fresher…
Read MoreGreen Gifts That Keep on Giving
By Maureen Halsema The holidays are upon us and as visions of sugarplums begin to dance through our heads, thoughts of presents for loved ones are not far behind. Instead of searching the crowded stores for a gift that may get thrown in the back of the closet, this year give a gift that really…
Read MoreChasing Copenhagen
By Bill Kovarik (In September, Appalachian Voice was invited by the governments of Germany and Denmark to see first hand the commitments and the costs of renewable energy development, as the world considers what might be done at the international climate summit planned for Copenhagen in December of 2009.) A sobering dinner with…
Read MoreSustainable Living Center: Teaching by Example
By Maureen Halsema The sun was shining, the wind was blowing and the energy was flowing into the little office in Floyd, Va. “You can’t miss it,” Billy Weitzenfeld said. “It’s the building next to the 42-foot tall wind turbine.” The Sustainable Living Education Center, a branch of the Association of Energy Conservation Professionals (AECP),…
Read MoreWar Spur Trail at Mountain Lake Wilderness
Story by Joe Tennis Call this a place of highlands and headwaters—an old growth forest where solitude and breathtaking vistas are unmatched—a getaway in southwest Virginia’s Jefferson National Forest. Here, in the Mountain Lake Wilderness Area of Giles County, Va., lies the Eastern Continental Divide. Streams in this region flow into either the New River,…
Read MoreAugean Cleanup on Aisle Six
It’s been widely observed that the next president will be left with an enormous cleanup task. At one point, Vice President-elect Joe Biden compared it to cleaning the Augean Stables. He was referring to the humblest of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, a Greek myth dating from before 600 B.C. Hercules took on the impossible…
Read MoreCarbon Emissions to Drop Under VA Climate Plan
Virginia could cut new power plant construction — and save money in the process — under a new plan to reduce carbon emissions and promote energy conservation. The plan emerged from the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change this November, and legislation from the planning process will be proposed at the state level in 2009. “This…
Read MoreExcerpt from a Letter
MEMO TO: President-elect Obama FROM: The Appalachian Alliance Dear President-elect Obama, … We are dealing with the devastating effects of the cycle of coal, from extraction, cleaning, transport, burning and the disposal of coal combustion waste. Coal industry abuse has cost many of us our homes, our health, our loved ones, and sometimes our entire…
Read MoreBiodiversity in Appalachia’s Future
By Paul L. Angermeier Paul Angermeier is a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA Appalachia is blessed with fantastic biological diversity that is practically invisible to most of us. Biodiversity is the variety of living organisms and their assemblages in our backyards and regions. It’s…
Read MoreThe Future of Blair Mountain
By Wess Harris Wess Harris is a former coal miner, a union organizer, a farmer and the editor of When Miners March Blair Mountain is a site that is sacred to American labor, so why not claim it as our own? Blair Mountain should become the Blair Mountain Center for the Development of American Labor.…
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