Customer Reviews

Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of the most important books WVU Press has published to date is Bringing Down the Mountains, by Shirley Stewart Burns. This book documents the effects of mountaintop removal on human communities and is the best study to date. The author focuses in detail--with rigor of mind and fidelity of heart--on the human impact of moutaintop removal. MTR may as well be called "extractive desertification," both in ecological and sociological terms.

This book is already having an impact and is serving to link more and more voices around the most compelling criticisms of MTR. The author is the daughter of a coal miner and knows first hand what devastation this practice wreaks: like me, her hometown is being encroached upon by one of these sites.

Mountaintop removal is not coal mining and it does not participate in that cultural legacy. Those who work these sites are excavators, and their employment is short.

If you care about Appalachia, the most diverse temperate forests in the world, a major source of water, or the impact of globalism, read this book.

I bought this book the day it hit the market and have read it twice. Dr. Burns lays out the case against mountaintop removal as only a native of southern West Virginia could. If everyone read this book the nation would finally understand the horror that is mountaintop removal, and take action to halt the practice. This is without doubt the authoratative academic work on this subject!

I personally know the author, Shirley Stewart Burns, and knew that the caliber of this story would be of the highest order. I was not surprised when I read it, and her emotional connection to the story and in particular the small mining communities of West Virginia shines through from start to finish. This is a story that should be read by all, as it highlights the power of the people and the ever increasing need for communities to rally behind a cause.
I congratulate Dr Burns on a wonderful, thought provoking and personally touching account. Even from the southern hemisphere where I am living, stories like this are relevant, and a number of my environmental friends have shown an interest in reading it.

"Bringing Down the Mountains" is only the latest in a line of books about West Virginia mining diasters, industrial carnage, and coal wars, going back to H.B. Lee's wonderful "Bloodletting in Appalachia" and Hubert Skidmore's heartbreaking "Hawk's Nest." You could fill an entire library room with these books. As a West Virginia native, my heart breaks whenever I read them. Most, like Ms. Burns' stirring expose of present-day mountaintop strip mining, show the most ruthless side of capitalism and Big Industry. And yet West Virginians have lately ignored the lessons of their own history of corporate exploitation and "gone Republican." Part of the problem is that the schools don't teach real state history and tell students about Buffalo Creek, Monongah, Union Carbide's Hawk's Nest tunnel, and the rest of the human tragedy and ecological degradation that seem so much a part of West Virginia, going back to the 1880s when the robber barons of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania essentially "colonized" the state and began mercilessly plundering its resources and grinding down the lives of its citizens. Like many Third World countries, West Virginia provides a bitter example of why large corporations, amoral by nature, should never be unregulated. It's a lesson, unfortunately, that too many West Virginians have either forgotten or never learned.

I had to get this book for class and I loved it, I kept it instead of selling it back. Its a great look into the past about coal mining in the States history. Its easy to read and full of emotion.

This book chronicles the events of a coal mining town that washed away due to mountaintop removal and rain. That being said, this is not a book one should require as a textbook for a semester long study. This book's contents could easily be summarized and discussed in a class hour lecture by the professor, and then move on to other topics. If one tried to use it for more than that, it would be like milking a dead cow.