Mountains of Injustice

The material sandwiched between these weighty essays (by Donald Edward Davis and Jedediah S. Purdy) is notable in that it, too, takes a long, broad, serious view of the context within which the degradation of the Appalachian landscape has occurred. What is the true cost of coal? Contributors to this well-documented environmental justice volume pose this question.... (C)oal extraction and industrial activities in low-income rural areas also impact the health of residents in a pattern of injustice overlooked in previous studies.... As Mountains of Injustice makes clear, people suffer because they lack the power and influence to prevent unfair practices. That is the theme hammered home in the essays by a dozen university scholars, environmental researchers and local activists.... Mountains of Injustice keeps environmentalism focused on people and community.... Mountains of Injustice has much to recommend it. It is deep in historical background, rich in case studies and stocked with helpful data. It also takes a broad purview of environmental justice issues in Appalachia, giving as much attention to hazardous waste and facility siting as to coal extraction and clearcutting. There is no equality among American landscapes: some are sacred, some protected against harm, and some sacrificed. As a result, there is no equality among Americans to the degree that they care about their landscapes, identify with them, and wish to imagine that their children and grandchildren might live there as they have.... But if you love the hills of southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, if they form your idea of beauty and rest, your native or chosen image of home, then your love has prepared your heart for breaking. -- Jedediah Purdy, author of The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination The cover of Mountains of Injustice evokes the coalfields of Central Appalachia but, while mining features prominently, editors Michele Morrone and Geoffrey Buckley have gathered studies that reflect the wider urban and rural Appalachian region.... What is most compelling about this volume are the lessons it offers on the experience of uneven development in US capitalism and its associated spaces of `sacrifice'.