by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
February 14, 2011
Image by iLoveMountains.org via Flickr
The writer and philosopher Wendell Berry, armed with little more than a copy of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and his conscience, has been camped out for three days with a handful of other activists in the governor’s outer office in Frankfurt, Ky. Berry, who is 76 and the author of a number of important books including the “Unsettling of America” and “Life Is a Miracle,” has been sleeping on the floor of Gov. Steve Beshear’s reception area since Friday night with 13 others to protest the continued blasting of mountaintops in eastern Kentucky and the poisoning of watersheds, soil and air by coal companies.
“We’ve come, we’ve lobbied legislators,” he said when I reached him by phone this weekend. “As recently as last May we had an interview with the governor in his office. None of this has produced any effect. There are no changes in the attitudes of the government towards surface mining, and attention from the media is minimal or nonexistent. We understood, not because we like what we are doing, that this was the next thing that had to be done if we were going to carry our efforts any farther towards the elimination of surface mining.”
[…]
via Truthdig
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Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
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I Love Mountains Day – Wendell Berry
blueathena | February 19, 2008
Wendell Berry speaks at the rally at I Love Mountains Day. February 14, 2008, Frankfort, Kentucky.
http://www.kftc.org
from the archives:
Jeff Biggers: In the Midst of a Coal Field War + The Debeautification of America
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Wendell Berry! A voice of sanity in the wilderness. And it was prophesied that our true leaders would not be politicians or businessmen… nor even religious leaders. Ad so anon a poet steps forward to lead.
I support the civil disobedience of Wendell Berry and the 13 brave folk sleeping in the outer office of the governor’s office in Kentucky to halt the coal companies from blasting the tops off the mountains of a land once held so sacred that nobody lived there until the white men came.
I urge the people who can, to take to the streets Monday in Kentucky. Join Wendell Berry and the valiant 13 stewards of our land in showing Governor Beshear that the people will not allow him to join forces with the coal industry to sue the EPA from carrying out its work to protect the environment.
The Real Work by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Let us start singing!
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