Book Sources

Reece, Erik. (2006). Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. New York: Penguin Group.

(See Expert Sources for bio on Erik Reece.)

Lost Mountain is a book that documents a year in the life and death of an Appalachian mountain called the Lost Mountain. The book has been a leading document in mountaintop removal, and is the first publication where the process of mountaintop removal has been detailed. The book also includes interviews and testimonies from Appalachian residents to how the practice has changed their lives. The book would be a useful source for a researcher because it was written by a man who has personally seen the devastation of mountaintop removal and has been trained in the environmental studies field. The book would provide a researcher with solid, accurate documentation of a mountain's fall and the coal mining process, as well as personal testimony by those who have seen the process day in and day out.

Goodell, Jeff. (2006). Big Coal. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

(See Expert Source for bio on Jeff Goodell.)

Big Coal is a book that debunks today's myth that coal is the best resource to generate power, and that is has become a clean method. From an investigative reporting style, Jeff illuminates America's economic imperatives and the collusion of businesses and politics that has lead us to a dependency on a resource that is continually heating up the planet. The book reveals the truth of what coal is actually doing to the environment in all aspects, including mountaintop removal, and proves the coal industry's "clean coal" promise to simply be an advertising slogan. This book would be a good source for a researcher because it gives an overview of coal in it's many different issues, not just mountaintop removal. Because mountaintop removal is a product of coal extraction, without limiting coal, there's not a solution to stopping mountaintop removal. If a researcher were to study mountaintop removal, he or she would have to do general research on coal's overall impacts, and Big Coal would give the researcher a fact-based proposal to coal's control over America.

Rasmussen, Barbara. (1994). Absentee Landowning & Exploitation in West Virginia. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. 

Barbara Rasmussen, a professor at WVU with a graduate certificate in Cultural Resource Management, writes her thesis on land ownership in the land that she loves, West Virginia. Her thesis includes a detailed history tracing the maneuvers of various agencies and individuals from colonial times, demonstrating that the largest element of this abuse has been committed by land speculators and absentee owners. She includes land records and legal papers to support her argument that economic and environmental exploitation has occurred in West Virginia since the earliest settlement. This book would be a good source for a researcher because it would allow the researcher to observe the economic and environmental practices since the beginning of West Virginia's existence. A researcher may be able to see trends that have happened over a long period of time, and whether mountaintop removal has been practiced for longer than assumed. Knowing this, the researcher can then observe the long-lasting effects of the practice and whether some aspects are fixable over a long period of time.