2003 – Issue 2 (September)

DatelineAppalachia New Documentary Showcases Region Over one trillion dollars; 1,000,000,000,000,000. That would represent one estimate totalling the value of the natural resources extracted out of Appalachia since the industrial age chugged up the mountains. This funnelling of the area’s riches all too often left many Appalachian communities at the bottom of the spout, mired in…

Virginia landowners will have an opportunity this fall to observe first hand possible alternatives for their forest and for the critters that depend upon it. Experts in managing forests for the future will be featured at Virginia Forest Watch’s (VAFW) fifth annual conference. “We want folks to know that there are alternatives to clear cutting…

images/voice_uploads/chatanooga-tn.gif Whether called Chat-to-to-noog-gee by the Chickamauga, reportedly meaning ‘mountain rising to a point’, or later Ross’s Landing, by 1969 the Environmental Protection Agency named Chattanooga something else; “the dirtiest city in America.” How dirty had the East Tennessee metro area become? Drivers had to use their headlights at midday to cut through the black…

images/voice_uploads/turtle-closeup-with-bug.gif Picking raspberries for breakfast on a moist morning early this summer, I came within a hair of stepping on an elderly male box turtle I first encountered on my homestead in 1995. I call him MG 75 because that‚s what I found carved on his shell when I first picked him up. MG 75…

Longtime coal miner Bernard Gibson can see what’s there and see what coming. “It’s going,” Gibson said. “I can’t predict when and you can’t either. But it’s got to go.” ‘It’ is the fractured point on the southern face of Kayford Mountain near Dorothy, West Virginia where for the past year residents have monitored a…

By Harvard Ayers Blaine Meador’s wife has heard Kayford Mountain talk, and she doesn’t like what it’s saying. Looming above Dorothy, West Virginia, a giant crack has opened out of coal-mined Kayford Mountain that she and everyone else in town worries may break off a chunk of the mountain, a chunk large enough to slide…

Local and regional land trusts all over the country struggle to cover their operating costs, which can be considerable, given the price of legal expenses and the price of land these days. Foundation grants are the traditional major source of funding but grants are ever-harder come by because of tough competition from other groups with…