Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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PLOWBOY: Why?

CAUDILL: He was in the coal business and didn't want'to pay the tax. Practically everybody in the legislature from eastern Kentucky is in the coal business, just as most of your West Virginians are in the coal business.

There's practically no antidote to ignorance and sloth, you know. We've got everything in the world here in these mountains that's required to build anything we want to build except the willpower and the mind.

The only thing that holds us back is ignorance on the one hand and laziness on the other.

Look at our land. Let's take east Kentucky. We live here in the middle, so far as variety is concerned, of the richest forest on the globe. The only places that can compare with it are a few spots in the tropics. Europe has one type of oak and we have 22. According to the Encyclopaedia Britahnica, West Virginia has more seed bearing plants than any other place on earth-just an incredible variety-and the oldest forest on the globe. It goes back 60-some million years.

Much of the vegetation in the northern hemisphere is believed to have started right here in east Kentucky and spread, at one time, all the way to China before the ice sheets came down and cut off the Chinese forest over there and our forest here. Plant scientists say that's the reason the tulip poplar grows here and in eastern China and nowhere else!

The tulip poplar is one of the oldest plants on the globe, so old that there's nothing else it can cross with. All its cousins have perished., And it was right here when the coal beds were laid down. Its leaves-the imprint of the tulip poplar-are sometimes found in the coal.

All right. When the ice sheets moved down from the Arctic, they pushed everything ahead of them-all those northern plants including the rock lichen. All that flora crept down along the shoulders of the Appalachians, across the hills, and into this mountain range. And later, when the ice melted and the earth warmed, the southern plants moved up to this same spot. And that's why this is the only place on earth where you'll find a southern pawpaw, tree from Central America shading a rock lichen from Alaska.

The older people knew that, but the young ones don't. They don't know a white oak from a black gum. We don't Study our plants or our woodlands today. We're profoundly ignorant about them. But the woods are here! Rich in chemicals, rich in lumber, rich in medicines, rich in beauty, unbelievably rich in variety and antiquity. Then under that, look what you have!

There are three great seams of coal of metallurgical quality in the 'United States, and two of them are right here in eastern Kentucky. The Interior Department says the most valuable mineral deposit on the globe is an Appalachian coal seam that extends from western Pennsylvania, across West Virginia, arid terminates here in Kentucky's Letcher County. It's known as the Elkhorn No. 3 vein. The coal here in Big Black Mountain is rated as the best metallurgical coal on earth. And down 170 feet under our feet is another vein of coal that is very, very rich.

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