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Beyond Coal: Imagining Appalachia’s Future
- niftich 10y agoThough farming, including farming partially on reclaimed land, receives a cursory mention in the article, generally most of Appalachia is understood to be a poor fit for farming as the topography is rough, the soils are poor, and the narrow river valleys are where all of the population and transportation routes concentrate. One solution is that after the (controversial, but still commonplace) practice of mountaintop removal surface mining, you restore land in such a way to enable flat-surface or terraced farming, instead of just planting it with fast-growing pine forest and/or grass as it's usually done. This is obviously a transformative process with non-negligible environmental impacts, but it would increase economic throughput. Historically in Europe, and early colonial America, ridgelines were favored as transportation routes because river fordings could be avoided. This wasn't the case deep in the Cumberland Plateau because the terrain was too rugged, but nowadays ridgelines show good potential for highway and other flatland construction like the King Coal Highway [1][2] and associated developments [3]. [1] http://www.mcra-wv.org/assets/images/sliders/_Resized/king-coal-highway-web.jpg http://www.mcra-wv.org/assets/images/sliders/_Resized/king-c... [2] http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/maplg.gif http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/maplg.gif [3] http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/11082010/2010-11-09_12.JPG http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/11082010/2010-11-09_12.JPG