> West Virginia Strip Mine Plan Revives Environmental Debate
>
> By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
>
> BLAIR, W.Va. -- Sylvia Weekley's family has lived here, in Pigeon Roost
> hollow, for so many decades that the 84-year-old matriarch no longer
> recalls precisely when her ancestors first arrived.
..............................................
> defiantly. "This is my home, and they are destroying what God created. I'm
> beginning to know how the Indians felt, and I've told the coal companies
> that the only way they'll push me out is with a bulldozer. I'm too old to
> change my life style."
Good one, Louis, but with a subject line like that one the story proper,
with its facts, figures and stand-pat positions, is rendered almost
superfluous. Maybe after another few years these born-again Indians of
the West Virginia hollows will even begin to know how war resisters
of their own language and nationality felt when their lives were being
threatened by beefy squares who were so sure the devil had deployed them
for purposes too foul for decent Americans to ponder.
These realizations are just too slow to arrive, almost too slow to matter.
Some years ago a Vermont farmer told me, "You people are awful snobs,
but you treat the land like it's God. When I walk along the highway and
see shitty diapers, beer cans, cigarettes and whatnot that get tossed out,
I just know in my heart it's not from one of you; not a scrap of paper."
Alas, as youth is wasted on the young, so land is wasted on the landed.
valis
