Erik Reece Biogrphy
Environmental Journalist, Instructor, Author, b. 1967
What began as an article became a powerful tool in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining, or MTR. Erik Reece wrote a piece entitled “Death of a Mountain: Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia” for Harper’s Magazine, which evolved into his book LostMountain. Mountaintop removal is a form of mining where the tops of mountains are blasted off in order to mine the seams of coal within them. What isn’t coal is pushed into the valleys, burying streams and destroying flora and fauna which will almost assuredly never recover. The runoff from processing coal turns the water orange and pollutes wells. Toxic dust settles everywhere in the communities sickening those who still live there. It is a cheap form of mining which generates huge profits for the coal companies while the local townspeople live in poverty.
Reece, an instructor of environmental journalism at the University of Kentucky, decided to document the mining of Lost Mountain in Kentucky over a period of several months (the book itself chronicles a year’s worth of visits). He writes, “I came here to see what an eastern mountain looks like before, during, and after its transformation into a western desert.” Every trip saw more destruction than before, as when Reece notes, “As I round a bend near the summit, the forest falls away below my driver’s-side window. I am not speaking figuratively. The trees that lined the left side of this road two weeks ago, and that held in place the southern slope of Lost Mountain, are gone….This mountainside has been scalped; the trees that covered it now lie in massive piles all down the slope.” His is a stark, firsthand account of how the most ecologically diverse (our rainforest) part of America is being blown away for profit.
In 2009, Reece published An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God. Here, Reece recalls his life, his relationships with his father and grandfather (both Baptist ministers; Reece’s father committed suicide when he was three), and his own struggle with his religious heritage. His grandfather fervently believed and preached that it is what happens in the afterlife that matters, not during life itself. Seeing the destruction of the mountains around him, Reece takes a different view of man’s role on the planet. In his book, Reece writes that “the more mainstream Christianity emphasizes a theology of salvation from this world, the more it ignores Jesus’ teachings of how we should act while we inhabit this earthly realm.”
Erik Reece’s writings are forceful arguments in the environmental justice movement. He believes “the kingdom of God lies all around us, not waiting in the sweet hereafter. Therefore, we must conduct our lives in ways that honor – and will make more manifest – this immanent kingdom through stewardship, empathy, and a very real sense of the just.”
Erik Reece Biography
