food cultures, whether real Key lime pie or the splendid simplicity of fried
fish with slaw and hushpuppies, is an unmitigated disaster.
In parts of Appalachia, monster coal-mining machines have actually ren-
dered a rugged vertical landscape flatter by cutting off ridges and filling
valleys. Moving about is easier than before, and there are larger cattle pas-
tures now, in a countryside rendered almost piedmontish. Such change
amounts to irreparable loss to some folks, however, and they will point out
as well that ancient streams are now fouled and/or buried, and toxic heavy
metals are brought to the surface. Heavy, dirty smoke hovers over the Great
Smokies, too, from upwind industries and especially power plants. Trees
die here now from acid rain poisoning, as in New York’s Adirondacks. And
surely one of the most harrowing driving routes in eastern America today
is Interstate through the Valley of Virginia, between the Blue Ridge and
Appalachian mountains. The valley’s green and yellow checkerboard farm-
scape is as lovely as ever, but no participant in the torrent of north-south
interstate traffic dare enjoy the view while driving. Some of us remember
the enchantment of driving west from Charlottesville, over Afton Mountain
—the same as in Earl Hamner’s elegiac ‘‘The Waltons’’—to Waynesboro,
then leisurely down to, say, Christiansburg, on old U.S. Route , parallel to
the present I-. Graybeards have ever wept forles temps perdu.
More broadly, today’s South is less associated with scenic delight than
with the pathology of ‘‘environmental discrimination’’ (especially ‘‘racism’’)
and campaigns for ‘‘environmental civil rights’’ that engage issues of pollu-
tion and social class and color. Arguably the problem is much older than en-
vironmental awareness. Poor and working-class people have always picked
the crops amid pesticides; mined the coal, iron ore, and phosphates; and
lived downwind of industrial smoke and sewage. The simple geography
of pulp and paper mills illustrates this. The mills are always situated next
to rivers, which carry in the raw materials and carry off the wastes. Mills’
smokestacks arise there, too. Workers live near the mills and rivers, usually
to the east. Owners, managers, and other professionals live upwind, to the
west, on higher ground and often with separate (and clean) supplies of
water. (A bit more on the paper industry appears below.) Making paper has
been relatively safe, however, compared with a variety of chemical facto-
ries densely established since the s, especially since the s, always
next to rivers. The Kanahwa, flowing past Charleston, West Virginia, is a
notorious ‘‘chemical alley.’’ So are sections of the James in Virginia. Re-
call the enormous and lethal pesticide (Kepone) spill at Hopewell in