Part Three

Berry Wendell describes the mind in two different ways, rational and sympathetic. Rational, he says, is thinking about profit and doing what it takes to make it. The sympathetic mind is about "wholeness" where it favors nature and how it takes its course. The coal companies are seeing the mountains with the rational mind where they see a source they need to make money, they find out how to get it, and they make their profit, whereas the people neighboring the mountain are more sympathetic in that they want to the mountain to be how it was. The sympathetic mind realizes that everything needs something else for a reason, the wolf is needed to kill the deer, because the deer eat the vegetation, which feeds other animals and is home to others.

Reece talks about how the coal companies just simply don't care about the nature in the mountain and that they make the excuse that "it's already fucked up anyway" based on some locals' litter and decide to mine it. Reece then mentions how the companies decide that the soil that gets dug up has "no monetary value" and "sees no value at all," thus appealing to the rational mind. He says that the coal companies are planting grass instead of trees for reclamation, burying streams instead of tunneling for coal, and constantly polluting the air with no regards to nature, but only for the money that they are making. Reece also takes the sympathetic mind when he talks about how the land of the mountain is a macro-organism and everything living on the mountain takes part in the life of it. Everything needs something else indirectly for the life of the mountain to be healthy.

To quote a significant part of the Conclusion, I thought that the following was interesting: "And while the United States produces twice as much carbon dioxide as Russia, Bush made it clear in the presidential debates that he would not sign the Kyoto Protocol because it could 'cost American jobs and stifle economic growth.' In other words, short term decision making will continue to rule the day, though the long term effects of those decisions could be disastrous." This is interesting because it seemed like the entire book was based on it. The coal companies have mined the tops off of mountains thinking nothing of how they're effecting the wildlife that lives there. Sure, having more coal is better for having energy right now, but if we are getting rid of these plants and animals' habitats, then later on, we are going to see worse consequences. He mentioned how when the wolves were dying off, there were more deer, which meant there was less vegetation, which mean that other animals were dying because they had less to feed on. In thinking purely of the short term, we are forgetting that there is always an indirect relationship between us and what we are destroying. And by signing the Kyoto Protocol, there wouldn't even necessarily be a stifle in economic growth because with more regulation on something that is harming our environment, there would be more incentive to find ways to create energy that are more ecologically friendly and less wasteful.