Sierra Magazine | Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Sierra, the magazine for the Sierra Club.  Update story on the problems with Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia and Southern Appalachia.  The Photo Editor for Sierra wrote me last month about my Mountain Top Removal images that I had shot in Logan County, West Virginia.

This collection of images were shot in 2005 and 2007 as a personal project.  Audubon were the first to run the images as an essay and several continue to be licensed for editorial and book projects.  I have also been a big believer in personal projects and feel that they help me grow as a photographer.

Mountain Top Removal is shocking when seen from the air.  On the ground, the companies practicing this type of coal mining can use beauty strips of trees to keep the public from seeing how the earth is torn apart to reach the seams of coal.  From the air, it is impossible to hide the scale of devastation to the Southern West Virginia landscape.

A writer once asked me how I felt that my photographs of MTR were beautiful even though they showed the destruction of these mountains.  It took me by surprise.  I never thought of them as beautiful.  I felt that they were effective in presenting the truth of MTR. I tend to shoot in early morning or late afternoon light and I liked the sense of calm from the fog surrounding these mountaintops and how that contrasted with the ragged scars of surface mining in the sunlight.

If you would like to see more of my MTR images, please follow this link.  To read the article on Sierra magazine, follow this link.  To read about the continuing controversy about MTR, follow this link to the Huffington Post.