[thecavemaster]

No one articulated more clearly the plight of the mountains and mountain people in the new era of Appalachia than Larry Gibson. Standing on the precipice of the three hundred foot cliff that marked the boundary between his farm and the strip mine that had destroyed his mountain, he lamented what had been lost, as he spoke to a group of visitors, holding up a broken miner's lamp that he had discovered in his surviving woods:

"We have a history here. We have a conversation with the land here. The land will talk to us. It will tell us things. Nothing comes easy for people in the mountains. This is a symbol of what the history of the mountains is about. We are a little worn. We are a little bent. We are a little broken. But we are real, and we are here. And we are tired of being collateral damage, a sacrificial zone for rich people and other people to be comfortable in their life...This is life for us. We don't have a choice here in the coalfields. We are either going to be an activist or we are going to be annihilated. And I am tired of seeing my people annihilated. So we are fighting back. It's the only thing that we have." -from Keeper of the Mountains