by CKR
When I travel, I bring some of my magazine backlog. One on this trip was the April Harper’s Magazine. Erik Reece wrote the big centerfold essay, Death of a Mountain. I liked the premise when the magazine arrived: observe an Appalachian mountain over the year in which it is deconstructed by coal mining. I was undecided about writing a post on it until Phila wrote about an article in the NYT that irritated me in the same way.
Some things look different when you have to wonder if you should drink what comes out of the tap or buy bottled water, especially when the only thing available in bottled water is a carbonated mineral water that tastes strange the second day. When that kind of common assumption is challenged.
Reece is writing in a genre that’s been around for a long time, since Aldo Leopold at least. It’s hard to say anything new, and he doesn’t.
The forest knows what it’s doing.This is technically known as the pathetic fallacy, attributing thought and feelings to entities that don’t have them. He knows it and he suspects we will know it, so he said earlier:
These days it is thought unfashionable, even backward, to talk about laws of nature or to read a philosophy, a morality, into the workings of the natural world.This kind of moralizing goes on throughout the essay; the italics are his, by the way. He’s worried about the animals, the loss of beech mast, the damage to the wells that the residents drink from, the public meetings set up to minimize public input. There’s more purple prose.
What is being done in Appalachia is appalling. The damage to the environment will last for years, likely centuries, to come. We knew that before Reece wrote his article. The point of the article, perhaps, is a call to arms to defend what we know needs defending. But it’s a mild call to arms indeed. We shake our heads and agree that the pursuit of money over people’s lives and the environment are terrible.
…we are a species that has evolved to find beauty in the natural world. This trait serves—or should serve—an evolutionary purpose: we love what we find beautiful, and we do not destroy what we love. A strip job is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer a mountain and started thinking like the mountain itself.
That’s part of how Reece ends the article. I generally agree with the sentiment, but there’s something else. As I’ve traveled, I’ve found that we are a species that loves commerce as well. That’s where people learn others’ languages. After this trip, I can handle most simple buying transactions in Russian. I can also carry on a simple conversation about wildflowers. Krasnivy. Beautiful.
Reece has forgotten or never learned this. Or perhaps my too-practical scientist’s way of looking at things is cheating me from seeing deeper truths.
There’s a problem: the Appalachians are being leveled ahead of geologic schedule in ways that damage the environment and the people living there. I’d like to see a solution proposed. But solutions are worthless unless they address the real problem. The problem, according to Reece, is that some people are making money by leveling those mountains. His solution is increased esthetic appreciation.
It’s hard to base public policy on esthetics, which is, I suspect, part of the reason both for Phila’s scorn and for the quandry of the object of his scorn. It’s easier to base policy on interactions between people.
It’s the commerce part that Reece ignores. There’s a reason that those people are making money leveling mountains. The coal is sold to produce electricity. We plug into that electricity in our homes. It runs phone stations and television broadcasts and internet servers and traffic control signals. It keeps our food cold or hot and air-conditions the malls. Electricity is such a basic part of our life that we forget it’s there. More than half the electricity in the United States is generated from coal.
Reece seems not to have contemplated this as he typed his article on his electrical word processor and sent it, via electrical e-mail, to Harper’s, who then applied their electrical computers and electrical printers to publishing it. Esthetics may be one motivator toward eliminating the depredations he describes, but the solution lies in how we use and generate electrical power. The first step is realizing that we’re using coal to read this post.