Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities

摘要

For more than a century the people of Appalachia have depended for their livelihood on the extraction of natural resources, first timber, then coal. This dependence cost mountaineers their economic independence; it also made West Virginia, particularly the eight-county area in the south that is the focus of this work by Shirley Burns, a peripheral colony of the economy's core, the industrial Northeast. According to the core-periphery model, the core enjoys economic prosperity and its associated benefits at the cost of the periphery.