Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields (A Quadrant Book)

A coal mining technique practiced in southern West Virginia known as mountaintop removal is drastically altering the terrain of the Appalachian Mountains. Peaks are flattened and valleys are filled as the coal industry levels thousands of acres of forest to access the coal, in the process turning the forest into scrubby shrublands and poisoning the water. This is dangerous and environmentally devastating work, but as Rebecca R. Scott shows in Removing Mountains, the issues at play are vastly complicated.

In this rich ethnography of life in Appalachia, Scott examines mountaintop removal in light of controversy and protests from environmental groups calling for its abolishment. But Removing Mountains takes the conversation in a new direction, telling the stories of the businesspeople, miners, and families who believe they depend on the industry to survive. Scott reveals these southern Appalachian coalfields as a meaningful landscape where everyday practices and representations help shape a community's relationship to the environment.

Removing Mountains demonstrates that the paradox that faces this community-forced to destroy their land to make a wage-raises important questions related not only to the environment but also to American national identity, place, and white working-class masculinity.

After a day of wandering around Toronto and visiting some Contact sites (i.e Photography Month events in Toronto), my colleague (lalique7) and I headed back for dinner and took the Queen streetcar. Because it was quite full, we moved to the back of the car and found some seats at the very back. I sat there people watching and decided to surreptitiously snap off a frame. Luckily the noise of the wheels masked the shutter sound and left the riders undisturbed and unaware while they engaged in their travel pass-times. Still working on my 'street photography. - JW This is a single image processed using HDR software and thus only makes use of the tone-mapping component. The original image was taken using a hand-held Nikon D5000 fitted with a Nikkor 12-24mm lense set to 12mm, ISO200, Aperture priority mode, F/5.6, 1/125 sec. HDR processing was done using Luminance/Qtpfsgui with settings as shown below. Additional PP was done using GIMP: overall tone curve adjust to darken the image (primarily mid-tones) to restore a more natural appearance after tone-mapping, slight saturation decrease to the red channel, dodge the highlights in the rear window (left of frame) to remove the gray cast produced by the tone mapping, burn the highlit portion of the gentleman's face (slightly), sharpen, add border and sacle to 1024 wide for posting. ============================== DSC_6701_queenstreetcaradjbordx1024_pregamma_1_mantiuk_contrast_mapping_0.1_saturation_factor_1.2_detail_factor_1 ============================== Qtpfsgui 1.9.3 tonemapping parameters: Operator: Mantiuk Parameters: Contrast Mapping factor: 0.1 Saturation Factor: 1.2 Detail Factor: 1 ------ PreGamma: 1