Customer Reviews

An Appalachian Tragedy: Air Pollution and Tree Death in the Eastern Forest of North America

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Photographers: note the photos, and the stark parallel images of trees versus factory stacks. They make the point of the entire book in dramatic thought-provoking images that make you want to go out and stop every smoke-producer in the world.

This book is about mountaintop removal in the pristine Appalachian mountains where I grew up. The coal industry is blasting the mountaintops off and scooping out the coal, shoving all the tops into the valleys and leaving the area desolate and ugly. West Virginia is a very poor state made poorer by this process because the few houses remaining are overcome by dust from the blasting and all the mountain people can do is stand and watch their homes become more worthless until the coal company buys them out. This is a true book and amazing that they can get away with it with only a handful of people trying to help. There has to be another way to get the coal like the miners have been doing for so many years without destroying the beautiful mountains.

From the moment you turn back the cover of this eloquent plea for action your understanding begins to grow. Pictures. Pictures. Smokestacks. Skeletal trees. Power lines. Dying forests. And then the text: essays concerning the history, sociology, ecology and above all the beauty of our Eastern mountain forests. Each step of the way Jenny Hager's practiced vision illuminates the argument: this is the priceless landscape we are losing -- this is the cause. Some years ago I engaged in a brief scurmish with a scientist of the Doubting Thomas sort, who demanded equal radio time to shoot down my assertions about the pollution triggered plague which is overwhelming our mountain eco-system. "No proven mechanism," he told the audience. "Each tree specie is dying of independent causes. Just coincidence ...." Right. The utterly damning evidence is collected in this volume with a carefully compiled bibliography to bolster the claims. Anyone who can pass through this book and remain sanguine about forest health and dirty air is either brain- dead or in the employ of the polluting industries. (As was the "scientist" who took me to task. I later learned he was a hireling of the TVA.) A heartrending plea for action, one can only hope that AN APPALACHIAN TRAGEDY will help move a large enough segment of our population to demand meaningful pollution control before the Eastern forests are completely converted into memory and myth.