Christian Ecology

Rockcastle County in Kentucky is a land both beautiful and ugly. The beauty is in the tightly bunched hills, the forests flecked with spring dogwoods. The ugliness is in the wounds scarring these same hills, open sores of raw earth left by unclaimed strip mines. There's another form of raw earth left by unreclaimed strip mines.

There's another form of ugliness here, too: poverty. It's kind that leads people to deadly feuds over the area's most reliable cash crop—marijuana. The kind that produces a sense of utter helplessness in many residents. The kind that leads to vandalism, petty theft and a "burnout" different from the bane of busy executives: people torching each other out of their homes.

Against this disheartening backdrop, one solemn middle-aged man works to restore both property and pride. For almost a decade, Al Fritsch has holed up along the steep banks of Rockcastle Creek, quietly running Appalachian Science in the Public Interest (ASPI), a nonprofit environmental and service organization dedicated to "making science and technology responsive to the needs of poor people."

Fritsch's soft-spoken, gentle manner only slightly mutes his intense, almost Spartan, dedication. His office is a small, circular cordwood building—one he constructed out of firewood and cement. (His personal living quarters? One room in that building.) His staff consists of student volunteers and local Indians whose modest wages are paid through a government employment program.

This third-generation Kentuckian faces tough odds: "I cannot possibly convey an intellectual appreciation of the suffering of our region .... It's like the South Bronx in the woods."

Al attacks the problems on several fronts at once. "We combine environmental work with the presentation of positive alternatives—primarily helping to restore land and showing what good land looks like." ASPI itself demonstrates careful land use. Nestled along its steep, wooded hillside are a two-story solar house, a small yurt, a wooden dome and that main cordwood office. Compost toilets, solar greenhouses and more dot the landscape. This array of alternative energy-efficient technologies attracts 1,000 visitors a year. "When a passing logger looks over our cordwood building and says, `Hey, I could build this,' that's a victory," Fritsch says proudly.

On the environmental-action front, Fritsch works to "create citizen monitors." Mountain Stream Monitors, a water-testing laboratory, provides the expertise necessary for checking stream and household water quality. ASPI staffers also publish, among other things, manuals for building insulated windows shades and for using nonviolent direct action to save forests.