Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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In addition to that, I've seen the geological reports prepared by The Geophysical Resources Corporation of Oklahoma City and Tulsa: That firm came in here three years ago on a contract with a consortium of four oil companies and they set off explosions in the earth and read the vibrations that came up and calculated that, at 12,000 to 14,000 feet below the surface, there's a pool of oil extending under a million acres of east Kentucky. And natural gas. A lot of natural gas.

There's also an enormous brine bed down there a layer of salt up to 600 feet thick. There's iron ore here too. Our old pioneer ancestors built little furnaces along Pine Mountain and made their own plows and other implements with that iron. That's the reason the Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company was so named when Kentucky was still part of the Commonwealth of Virginia. And that's the reason all those old broad form deeds call for "all coal, all oil and gas, all salt and salt waters, all iron and iron ore and all other mineral and metallic substances and all combinations of the same".

PLOWBOY: It sounds as if a community could be almost completely self-sufficient here.

CAUDILL: When the town of Jenkins was built, the founders baked their building bricks out of local clay, sawed their lumber out of local trees, produced their scrap iron from local iron deposits; and made their cement out of limestone taken from Pine Mountain. There's a million tons of cement-quality rock up there.

We have everything we need here, including enough agricultural land to feed many, many people. When the Swiss ambassador was here a few years ago, he said that Switzerland could feed itself if necessary. Now remember that the area of Switzerland and the area of east Kentucky are roughly the same and there's six million Swiss and less than one million eastern Kentuckians.

You take the Big Sandy Valley. It's unbelievably rich for potatoes, berries, and so on. And water? At a time when water is very precious in many parts of the world, we have 55 inches of rain a year. Now that the forest is returning into these old, open fields, our rainfall has increased from about 45 inches to 55 inches annually.

Except for strip mining, which has torn up and ruined the beauty of the countryside, we have some of the most lovely landscape on the globe: There is no place anywhere any prettier than the Red River Gorge.

So what do we need? Will and brains. Give us those two things and we'd be rich. Without them, all the rest is superfluous.

PLOWBOY: Is there any way we can attain, or obtain, them now?

CAUDILL: I don't know. I doubt it. We have two types of young mountaineers. One wants to leave and the other wants to stay here and rip and tear and ruin anything to get rich. Essentially, those are the two dominant groups.

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