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ever abundant yet it could be so if humans were not abusing and wasting this precious resource. As George explains, the amazing natural legacy of the Appalachians is endangered “a splendorous spread of rolling hills and green mountains mirrored nowhere in the world — is being systematically destroyed so than an unsustainable way of life in our cities may continue.”
    Coal is one of earth’s great gifts. As a child in Kentucky our family lived in an old Victorian style house. Its modern heating system was not effective. To stay warm during the freezing cold months we burned coal in the small fire places that were a given in this old style architecture. Watching the coal burn, feeling its hot heat, we were in our childhood filled wonder. Coal was awesome. Colored the deepest shade of black, it was both beautiful and functional. Yet it did not come into our homes and into our lives without tremendous sacrifice and risk.
    In the early evenings when the neighborhood men who mined coal came home from work with their bodies covered in ash, their hats with lights, their lunch boxes, we would follow them, not understanding that they were beat, bone weary, not in the mood to play. There is no child raised in the culture of coal mining who does not come to understand the risks involved in harvesting coal. In the world of coal mining without big machinery, coal mining has a human face. Man is limited in his physical capacity. He can only extract so much. Machines can take and keep taking.
    The smallest child can look upon a natural environment altered by conventional mining practice and see the difference between that process and mountaintop removal. Introducing the collection of essays in the book Missing Mountains, Silas House shares the way in which being raised in a cold mining family was for him a source of pride. He begins with the statement, “coal mining is a part of me” then recalls a long history of family members working in the mines. And while he speaks against mountaintop removal he shares this vital understanding: “We are not against the coal industry. Coal was mined for decades without completely devastating the entire region. My family is a part of that coal mining legacy. But mountaintop removal means that fewer and fewer people work in mining, because it is so heavily mechanized. If mountaintop removal is banned, there might actually be more mining jobs for the hard-working people of Kentucky. And beyond that the proper respect might finally be returned to the spirit of the land and its people.” Without a sustainable vision of coal usage, without education for creating consciousness that would enable our nation to break with unhealthy dependency on coal, we cannot restore the dignity both to the earth and to this rich resource.
    Mountaintop removal robs the earth of that dignity. It robs the folk who live in the cultural wasteland it creates of their self-esteem and divine glory. Witnessing up close the way this assault on the natural environment ravages the human spirit, the anguish it causes folk who must face daily the trauma of mountaintop removal, we who live away from this process are called to an empathy and solidarity that requires that we lend our resources, our spiritual strength, our progressive vision to challenge and change this suffering.
    A beacon light to us all, elder Daymon Morgan embodies the unbridled spirit of a true Kentucky revolutionary. He acts a conservationist, a steward of the land, and as one who is committed to the struggle to end mountaintop removal. Returning from World War II, Morgan bought land on Lower Bad Creek in Leslie County, Kentucky. Raising a family, growing herbs on his land, he had allowed the earth to teach him, to be his witness. His is special because he is in many ways representative of the ordinary citizen who is called to political action because of their love of the land and community. In recent times the Appalachian Studies program at Berea College makes