The Appalachian Voice
Santa train rides again through Appalachia
ftp://avweb:U9e3KxY@www.appvoices.org:21//appvoices.org/images/voice_uploads/krause.santa.gif The crowd started to trickle in by nine, watching the volunteers of “Dante Lives On” set up their bake sale on the concrete slab that marks the site of the former theatre. By ten, children were playing on the grassy lot that once housed the company store. The Santa Train used to stop at…
Read MoreIt takes a universe: An interview with Thomas Berry
Last year, Southern nature writers John Lane and Thomas Rain Crowe traveled together to the home of ecologian Thomas Berry, in Greensboro, North Carolina. At 91 years of age, Father Thomas Berry is one of the most profound, if not most celebrated, spokespersons for the preservation of the environment in the English-speaking world. His books…
Read MoreNC’s Mountain Bogs Show Amazing Diversity
ftp://avweb:U9e3KxY@www.appvoices.org:21//appvoices.org/images/voice_uploads/Bog.scientists.gif It’s been a long day in the field, but sitting around a kitchen table strewn with plants, bags of soil and books, N.C. State researcher Brenda Wichmann and Misty Franklin, botanist with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, still have a few bags of specimens to work through. This is the end of the…
Read MoreAll in favor of cranberry bogs, please raise your forks
The cranberry sauce on your holiday table is probably from somewhere along the low-lying New England coast, brought to you courtesy of Ocean Spray. Chances are good it was shipped along with millions of other supermarket cans to travel across the nation, to be opened and dumped onto fine china dishes, and to be set…
Read MoreWestern religion is already ‘green’
Two decades after “Dirty Dancing”
Early travelers once believed Virginia’s Mountain Lake was bottomless – or, at least, up to 300 feet deep. In reality, the mountaintop pond extends about 100 feet from the surface. And there’s a hole in it. Water comes into the natural 55-acre basin from a 500-acre watershed, but it escapes at a rate of 600…
Read MoreA Moment of Crisis for the Region’s Forests
images/voice_uploads/Deforestacion_02-.gif I have lived near Blowing Rock (always between Burke and Watauga Counties) since 1979. I, like many of you reading this now, remember Blowing Rock in the eighties with P.B. Scotts, The Farm House, Holley’s, Clyde’s, Antler’s, The Mayview Manor, and Blowing Rock as a different resort town than it is today. I watched,…
Read MoreBlaze Orange and Forest Green
Like just about every other 9-year-old boy in rural America in the 1960s, I received a Crosman BB gun as a Christmas gift. That present sent me down the trail of a lifetime of hunting, although I don’t remember killing a living thing with it. I did fire at a mouse once, while I was…
Read MoreAmerica’s Adopted Fruit
Many newcomers to the Appalachians lament the fact that a person is not defined as a native unless one’s family has lived in the area for generations. In the natural world, the definition is even more stringent. In short, if it wasn’t here when Columbus arrived, it is not native; though numerous Old World plants…
Read MoreThe High Cost of Coal
As this, the fall issue of the Appalachian Voice goes to press, millions of Americans are flocking to the mountains to see the gorgeous vistas of autumn foliage as they can only be seen in the Appalachians, home of the most diverse forests in the nation. According to a mapping project recently completed by Appalachian…
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