E. M. Keller’s Reviews > Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene > Status Update

"In the early 1900s... mountain culture was being swept away, overtaken by outside interests whose investments in West Virginia's extraction industries had quadrupled in the [last] fifty years... Families oblivious to the real worth of their mineral rights and powerless against the wealthy politicians and businessmen who wanted their land, were essentially robbed of the earth that once sustained them..."