The Appalachian Voice
Mountaintop Removal by any Other Name
Ask any Tennessean to sing the chorus of “Rocky Top,” an official state song and the fight song of the University of Tennessee, and you’re sure to hear a rousing refrain of “Rocky Top, you’ll always be home sweet home to me.” But in some parts of east Tennessee, residents and visitors who wish that…
Read MoreRegion’s Businesses Pitch In for the Mountains
This fall, dozens of homegrown businesses from across Appalachia pitched in for an autumn Appalachian Voices benefit. From a mountain bike to raft trips, from a fine bottle of wine to bed and breakfast getaways, these businesses donated over 75 items to Appalachian Voices’ benefit raffle and silent auction, held during Appalachian Voices’ first annual…
Read MoreAltapass Orchards combine Stewardship, Enterprise and Cultural Preservation
images/voice_uploads/ContentsApples.gif When Robert Young marched through what is now known as McKinney Gap in 1780, he never imagined his descendants would grow heirloom apples and preserve Appalachian heritage literally on the ground he trod. Young, an east Tenneseean, was a member of the Overmountain Men, a group of backwoodsmen who defeated the British at the…
Read MoreThe Ubiquitous Coyote
images/voice_uploads/ContentsCoyote.gif To paraphrase William Faulkner, the highly adaptable coyote has not just survived, it has prevailed. “It has defied every effort to defeat it—hundreds of thousands are deliberately and legally killed every year—and has literally taken over North America,” wrote William K. Stevens in a New York Times article in 1999. For a species that…
Read MoreAn Appalachian Earthship: Reinventing the Wheel
Ken and Etta Lebensold reside in a house made of garbage. If their walls could talk, they would tell of traveling cross-country thousands of times. They are well-traveled walls, insulated with 700 used tires, which have been rammed with soil from the home site to create large rubber-rimmed bricks. The Lebensold house is an earthship,…
Read MoreSassafras in America
While the Southern Appalachian Mountains abound in flora traditionally known for their medicinal properties, few equal the sassafras tree in its historical economic impact. The tree triggered a health craze in Europe upon its discovery in North America, when it gained a reputation for curing everything from wounds to rheumatism. Sassafras became a major commodity…
Read MoreLetters
Dear Appalachian Voice, I like to get your paper even if our government will not stop [mountaintop removal mining]. I received my first copy through a friend. I was born and raised in SW Virginia in the beautiful mountains. Now it’s terribly dirty. The mountains in Pardu, VA, north of Appalachia are nothing but one…
Read MoreA Tennessee Fairy Tale
In the Elk Valley region of East Tennessee, coal companies are telling a tale of a new type of mountaintop strip-mining that they say will not destroy homes, rivers, mountains and economies (see story on p.12). This new mining technique is called cross-ridge mining and it differs only slightly from the highly controversial mountaintop removal…
Read MoreEditorials and Letters
Forests On May 20, the House of Representatives passed the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and on July 24, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed a similar bill. The purported aim of this legislation is to reduce the risk of wildfire damage to communities, address threats to forest health, improve understanding of insect damage to forests, and…
Read MoreChattanooga Comes Back Strong and Green
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…
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