The Appalachian Voice
Appalachian Voice Members: Hear Them Roar!
This spring, Appalachian Voices’ staff, members and volunteers worked together to achieve an enormous success for clean air in North Carolina and across the Southeast. As a result of those efforts, North Carolina is taking bipartisan strides to help keep big industrial polluters from weakening federal clean air standards and further dirtying our air in…
Read MoreAppalachian Treasures Project Touring Nation to Protect Coalfield Communities
On a recent March morning, a group of community and business leaders from Ashtabula, Ohio sat riveted and astonished as they listened to the stories of three visitors from Appalachia. They learned about how the peaceful lives of the two elderly women, members of coal mining families and life-long residents of the mountains of southern…
Read MoreAsa Gray: Legendary Botanist and Pioneering Appalachian Naturalist
I have a field guide addiction. Upwards of a hundred of the gems adorn my shelves, although none are more impressive than my massive Gray’s Manual of Botany (1848). Great advances in botany have rendered it somewhat antiquated, but it is nonetheless a masterpiece and testament to a great thinker. With the arrival of spring…
Read MoreAction Alert! Help Stop Rollbacks of Clean Air Laws
As the 109th Congress launches its session, the administration in Washington is clearly determined to advance new air pollution laws that will undermine the existing Clean Air Act. Their first attempt comes in the form of the Clear Skies Act, a bill with a misleading name that would actually allow more air pollution and delay…
Read MoreToxic Lakes of Goo and You
Members of Coal River Mountain Watch, concerned coalfield residents and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition are working together on a “Sludge Safety Project,” www.sludgesafety.org. The Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation is funding the initiative. Focusing on West Virginia, the project’s goals are to push for state policy changes that will better protect coalfield residents and people…
Read MoreAppalachian Treasures Project Launched
In March, Appalachian Voices and Coal River Mountain Watch will begin touring the country to build a national network of people who will work together to protect coalfield communities from mountaintop removal. Dubbed the Appalachian Treasures Project, the effort will feature a multimedia presentation and the personal testimony of residents of Appalachia’s coalfields, who will…
Read MoreOne Valley, Two Worlds
Climbing the steps at C.D. Owen High School in Black Mountain, NC, as hundreds of my classmates do each morning, offers two unique and contrasting perspectives. Looking straight ahead, as most do when preparing to start their school day, we see the rigid vertical and horizontal lines of the school’s modern facade-the carefully laid cinder…
Read MorePersonal Geography
We are marked by the place we call home, not the house or people (though that is true, too), but by the land. I am the daughter of the mother of mountains, child of this earth’s oldest river, suckled by Appalachian breasts, sung to sleep by New River’s roar. The road ended, petered out, at…
Read MoreIn Search of the Pileated Woodpecker
Both the sight and sound of a pileated woodpecker are unforgettable. The call of the bird has always struck me as jungle-like, sounding more like a chattering monkey than a chirping bird. Most folks who spend any amount of time outdoors will probably recognize the sound, even if they cannot identify the source. Its exotic…
Read MoreStates Should Step In to Safeguard the Mountains
As this issue of the Appalachian Voice goes to press, the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is poised to vote on the Clear Skies Act. Despite its misleading name, Clear Skies would actually make air pollution worse by allowing the release of greater amounts of pollutants like mercury, while delaying clean up…
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