This week, I’ve been teaching a class at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, sponsored by Orion magazine, in a beautiful Vermont town called Craftsbury Commons. The town looks exactly like it does in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Trouble With Harry,” which he shot here in 1954. There is no traffic, no cell phone service, no distractions. Sitting on the porch one night, I watched a man lead two oxen down the main street of town.
Ten aspiring writers and I sit in a room all morning and we write, talk, critique, encourage. In Richard Russo’ brilliant academic satire, Straight Man, his main is also a writing teacher. At one point in the novel, he has to break off a contentious conversation with his mother because his once-a-week writing workshop is about to start. His suspicious mother replies, “Is that the one where you sit in front of the class for three hours and don’t say anything?”
I admit I do a lot of sitting and listening as well. After twenty years in the classroom—I mean the twenty years I’ve spent in the front of it—I’ve come to the conclusion that there are about six of seven lessons a writing teacher can impart to his or her students. The rest is mainly, as my friend Wyatt Mason says, cheering. I’ll do my share of cheering this week. I’ll also try to offer some suggestions on structure, pacing, character development. Hopefully I’ll send my students away with the conviction—my conviction—that in a world of so much manufactured speech, the nonfiction writer must act as the protector and the purveyor of authentic, original language. It is our pleasure and our responsibility.
This is my second year at Wildbranch. In the summer of ’07, I had just finished a book about mountaintop removal strip mining, called Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. So I suggested to Jennifer Sahn, the editor of Orion magazine, that I lead a workshop called “Writing about Imperiled Landscapes.” The members of my workshop had, for the most part, come from various New England states. Slowly, I realized that some of them seemed puzzled by my writing prompts. And finally I began to understood why: not everyone thinks of the places where they live as imperiled. As a Kentuckian, I have grown accustomed to thinking that way. I have grown used to knowing that the forests I loved most could be clear-cut, the gorges could be flooded, the mountains could be annihilated with explosives, and the streams below those mountains could be buried or turned toxic—and it is all perfectly legal. But some Americans, Vermonters, for instance, simply expect their Green Mountains to stay put, their rivers to remain protected by law. They expect their food and milk to come from local sources. They don’t like “visual pollution,” so they outlawed billboards.
It’s all very civilized.
While I was up at Wildbranch, a few people asked if I thought I would like living in Vermont. Probably. But I doubt I’ll ever find out for sure. I’ve grown used to living around imperiled landscapes. I find that it sharpens one’s focus, something a writer needs. It also creates a sense of urgency. A writer doesn’t always need that, but sometimes it helps. It clarifies purpose.
One of my fellow-instructors at Wildbranch was Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagra and the novel Flight. Ginger kept posing this question to her writing group: “What is the story here?” It’s an excellent question, perhaps the only question. My fellow Kentuckian, Barbara Kingsolver, wrote recently, “Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us.”
We are a culture awash in stories, of course. But getting at the real story—that seems to be becoming harder and harder. There’s too much static, too much distraction. The real grows ever more elusive, and all the more important.

I am reading a remarkable book right now, just published by the Penguin Press, called Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I say “remarkable” because I am about to remark upon it. But also because its author Matthew B. Crawford skillfully hints at a notion that has long troubled me: a four-year college education is not what it’s cracked up to be.
Every Fall semester at the university where I teach writing, I gaze out at the fields of blank faces sitting before me. Sometimes I ask: Do you really want to be here? Two-thirds of the class usually answers, “No.” Those students are here because their parents made them come, or because they felt peer pressure to attend college. They would like to make “a lot of money,” but beyond that, they have no clue why they are sitting in Freshman Writing.
Still, my university keeps upping its enrollment, and the state advisory board for higher education has mapped out a plan to double the number of college graduates in Kentucky by the year 2020. I understand these goals, of course. We are a very poor, very under-educated state. We rank at the bottom of the list on just about everything. So the conventional thinking says: increase education, hand out more diplomas, raise the standard of living.
But in Shop class as Soulcraft, Crawford asks us to reconsider our definitions of education and the personal fulfillment that it promises. Crawford earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. In a bleak academic job market, he went to work for a policy organization in D.C. Gradually, he began to find the work soul-crushing and increasingly unethical. He was forced to make arguments he didn’t really buy, and at the end of the day, what had he really accomplished? He found himself sitting in his K Street office, thinking about a friend, Fred, who repaired motorcycles. The work was honest, useful, and at end of the day, Fred’s happy customer cranked up his rebuilt Kawasaki Ninja and sailed off.
Crawford quit his D.C. job and opened his own motorcycle repair shop. In doing so, he taught himself the value of working with one’s hands and he began to contemplate why we, as Americans, so often denigrate such work. After all, it wasn’t your plumber who bundled derivatives and send your 401k crashing. It wasn’t your mechanic who talked you into a sub-prime loan. Nor will their jobs get outsourced to India. So why don’t we value this work? Why don’t we seek it out?
The problem, says Crawford, is, well, dirt. These men and women get dirty. “Because the work is dirty,” he writes, “people assume it is also stupid.” And yet the very work “culture” has its roots in the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation of the soil. Of dirt. It is a dark indication of how far, as Americans, we have drifted from Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, self-reliant nation.
What’s more Crawford argues that he is tasked with far tougher cognitive problems when trying to figure out the inner machinations of a vintage European motorcycle then when working on K Street.
Beyond that, the work is ethical. He must take responsibility for it; he must look his customers in the eye. That responsibility situates him within a community rather than an anonymous network of immoral financial transactions.
I also appreciate Crawford’s resurrection of the word “craft.” As we have lost respect for the working class, we have also lost our respect for the well-made, the hand-crafted. In 1925, the German poet Rilke was already complaining bitterly:
“To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a family steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life ….”
All of these mass-produced dummies of life have led us to a culture based on what Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown calls a “fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy.” Those fossil fuels gave us vinyl siding and aisles of plastic, and the automobiles gave us the means to go procure it all. Our age of accumulation found little room, and little time, for craftsmanship.
One reason might be that craftsmanship is the blending of beauty and use, two things we have relegated to separate corners of our culture. One exists in a museum, the other in the discount furniture store. We think of art, by definition, as useless, and too often, we accept useful things that have absolutely no aesthetic qualities. But this is a troubling and unsatisfying dichotomy. It marginalizes art and the aesthetic, and it too easily accepts the uninspired and the mass-produced in our everyday lives.
But a true appreciation of craft might return us to a more satisfying economy where quality matters more than quantity because the human spirit trades more in beauty than in dollars. Indeed, this is an imperative. The global climate crisis and the reality of peak oil will not allow us to continue believing in the economist’s dream of endless economic growth. What we need is a dynamic, steady-state economy where real work—the kind Crawford describes—is valued again.
American 18-year-olds who want to be carpenters or mechanics or chefs should not be shuttled into four-year degree programs. The quality of all education would improve if we allowed the young to pursue their own version of knowledge, their own idea of rewarding work.

Last summer, I stood under the gilded dome of West Virginia’s state capitol in Charleston and watched a rally to prevent the strip mining of Coal River Mountain. These local residents wanted to bring a wind farm to the peaks of their mountains, thereby preserving the Appalachian landscape and creating a new economy based on renewable energy.
At one point, a band called the Long Haul took to the stage to play some bluegrass. And somebody said that was about right: fighting strip mining in the Appalachia is indeed a long haul.
That point came home again last week when the Obama Administration released new plans for mountaintop removal oversight. They include:
* stopping a streamlined process that allowed coal operators to get fast-tracked mining permits
* returning to a 1982 rule that prevents the dumping of mine waste within 100 feet of a stream
* offering more federal oversight of how the states enforce the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA)
Almost immediately, environmental groups responded that it wasn’t enough. Joan Mulhern, senior legislative attorney for Earthjustice, said, “Until the White House announces that it will stop the blowing up of mountains and burying of streams, we cannot support their policies, regardless of what process is used to review the mines on a case-by-case basis.”
Mulhern is right that the ultimate goal of the long haul is to stop mountaintop removal. However, I am concerned that we in the environmental movement may again err in making the good the enemy of the perfect.
It is as if, under George W. Bush we expected nothing good to happen, and now, because of the Mosaic dreams of deliverance that projected onto Obama, we will not accept anything other than the perfect.
It still remains to be seen what effect the new actions will have. If the Obama Administration is serious about making states enforce all of SMCRA, and if it is serious about preventing the dumping of mine debris within 100 feet of streams, then the new decisions could be huge. In Kentucky, where I live, the federal laws simply go unenforced, and they have since Ronald Regan took office in 1980.
For example, SMCRA specifies that all post-mined land must be returned to its “approximate original countour” (AOC). I have never–never–seen this happen. Coal operators gets away with a loophole in SMCRA that allows them an “AOC variance” if they convert the mined land to a “higher or better use.” This phrase is so vague, unfortunately, that it has come to mean virtually anything, so that a strip mine sprayed with hydroseed becomes a “pasture” or “wildlife habitat.” The only problem with this thinking is that the wildlife of Appalachia prefer their native habitat: forested mountains.
But to truly prevent the dumping of mine waste around streams would mean to halt mountaintop removal almost entirely. And if the Obama administration reversed the Bush decision to change the word “waste” to “fill” within the Clean Water Act, that would go even further to prevent such dumping. Then everything that isn’t coal would have to be returned to the mine site or trucked away. Coal operators would mind this far too cost prohibitive and would then be forced to return to underground mining–a method that employs far more miners than mountaintop removal.
Again the issue here is enforcement. If the Office of Surface Mining would bring in a director from outside the agency, real enforcement and real change could happen. What has happened in the coal industry is no different than what has happened in the banking industry. It simply went unregulated. But we cannot expect an economy based on hyperindividualism and greed to regulate itself by some invisible free hand. That has got to be the most naive tenet within the whole logic of market capitalism. The abuse of the land, like the abuse of credit, demands oversight.
It’s a long haul. But we risk alienating potential allies if we reject every imperfect proposal along the way as as affront to our idealism. We risk returning to the cynical despair of the last eight years. And no one wants that.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty died two years ago today. Rorty was, I think, our country’s most important philosopher since William James. And Rorty considered himself a neo-pragmatist of the Jamesian tradition. That is to say, Rorty rejected the notion that philosophy is a search for Truth. “We pragmatists cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake,” he wrote in Philosophy and Social Hope. The problem with truth, or more precisely, the problem with competing claims to truth, is that when you start flinging them around, someone usually ends up getting killed.

Instead, Rorty understood philosophy to be an instrument for change, a way of solving social problems. Language, he argued, is simply not a precise enough instrument to find the Truth, to represent the Ultimate Reality that all will agree upon. But it is a fine tool for talking, debating, reaching consensus. And it is an excellent tool for making art.

Western philosophy begins, of course, in Plato’s Allegorical Cave. Plato said that we must escape the cave to realize the eternal truths that lie in the light outside. To this philosophical tradition, Rorty said: “No. We like the cave just fine. Why don’t we paint some animals on the walls and start telling ourselves the stories of our great hunts?” In other words, he replaced the search for truth with the search for happiness. He wasn’t alone in this: Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Stoics and the Epicureans had done so as well. But Rorty did it in a uniquely American way.

His thinking and his writing was breezy and light. He made the dismantling of the Platonic tradition look like fun. Once, at a reception, I overheard Rorty talking to someone about John Rawls book, A Theory of Justice. Rorty said, “I don’t want to define justice. I want to tell stories.” Why? I think because the story, not the theory, is the true builder of Rorty’s highest ideal—solidarity. Back in the cave, our hunter-gathering ancestors sat around fires and told stories of the hunt. Those stories bound them together as a tribe, a culture. For 99% of our evolutionary past, this is what we did. Only very recently did we discover agriculture, move to cities, and become philosophers.

In the end, Rorty abandoned philosophy altogether and took up the cause of literature. He left the philosophy department at the University of Virginia to teach comp lit at Stanford. In one of his last books, Achieving Our Country, he argued that America could be a much more inspiring place if we … read more Walt Whitman. It was the poet, not the philosopher, who imagined a more just, convivial country in his poem, Leaves of Grass. He imagined a country of great equality and great diversity. He envisioned, in Rorty’s words, “larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” Rorty chided the American Left for being overly mocking and ironic. Be cheerful reformers, he urged. Be Whitmanesque.

Rorty believed that philosophy, when rightly practiced, should serve two goals: self-creation of the individual, followed by the creation of a just and equitable culture. To that end, Rorty offered what seems to be a startlingly useful directive: reduce cruelty, expand sympathy.

Imagine how many useless arguments, how many stupid “culture wars” we could avoid in this country if we simply adopted that definition of morality. Imagine how different our social landscape might look.

Rorty agreed with Whitman that “democracy” is a “good word, whose history has yet to be enacted.” But through his writings, Richard Rorty offered an piquant and inspiring discourse on the promise of democracy.

Below is a letter to Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar. It was written by Tom FitzGerald, an environmental lawyer here in Kentucky who has done more to stop the radical strip mining of central Appalachia than probably anyone. Fitz is a man of unimpeachable integrity. He is rightly concerned that the Obama Administration may skip over two extremely qualified candidates to head the Office of Surface Mining.

OSM is an often overlooked part of Interior, but its influence is enormous. Under Steven Griles (a coal lobbyist who did time in the big house for lying about his associations with Jack Abramoff), OSM changed one work of the Clean Water Act–”waste” to “fill”–thereby making legal the dumping of mine waste into thousands of miles of Appalachian streams. For the last ten years, it has been extremely lax–negligent really–about enforcing the Surface Mine Reclamation and Control Act (SMCRA).

Suffice to say, OSM is currently an agency “captured” by the coal industry. Just as President Obama appointed an outsider, Leon Paneta, to oversee a corrupt CIA, he must now appoint someone from the outside to change the environment at OSM so that it will become an agency that actually enforces the law.

Coalfield resident Mickey McCoy once told me, “The watch dogs of the people have become the guard dogs of the industry.” That will change if either Joe Childers or Pat McGinley are put in charge.

I, therefore, urge readers to sign Tom FitzGerald’s letter and send it to Mr. Salazar.

May _________, 2009

Hon. Ken Salazar, Secretary
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20240

Re: Appointment of Director
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement

Dear Secretary Salazar:

We are writing to you concerning the appointment of a new Director for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), which as you are aware is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

The citizens of the coalfields of the eastern and western United States have waited through successive administrations since 1981 to see the promises that Congress made in 1977 fulfilled. In a number of key areas, the failure of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to assure full and fair implementation of the law has betrayed the promise Congress made to those who live in coalfield communities– that they would be protected from harm, that mining would be a temporary use of land, that reclamation would contemporaneously follow excavation of coal, and that the amount of time between disturbance of the earth and completion of reclamation would be minimized. Though Congress intended that the choice of technology would follow, rather than dictate, environmental protection, the coal industry has over the decades systematically replaced the workforce with larger machines more indiscriminate to the terrain, and key concepts in the law have been weakened by regulatory interpretations in order to accommodate this shift.

The tools needed to restore this agency to its potential, and to minimize the heavy footprint of coal on the land, water, people and communities of the coal-producing regions and to fulfill Congress’ promise to the citizens of the coalfields, await the hands of a new Director – one who will come to work each day with those goals, and will help a troubled agency recover a potential that existed for a brief period of time between 1978 and 1981.

Along with that leadership, we need to restore a level of funding that will allow the agency to fully implement its oversight functions, and a regulatory oversight policy that combines on-the-ground assessment of state regulatory programs with analysis of the implementation of state program components by the state agencies, in order to identify weaknesses in program implementation in a more timely and efficient manner.

We are aware that two candidates have been interviewed who each bring strengths and a score or more years of familiarity with both the coal industry, mining issues, and the 1977 law. Joe Childers, recently appointed to Chair the Kentucky Mine Safety Review Commission, and Professor Pat McGinley, Judge Charles Haden Professor of Law at West Virginia University.
Either of these candidates would be an excellent choice to head the agency, and we believe that the overwhelming majority of the environmental, conservation, and social and economic justice organizations will support your selection of either as Director. While one group or another may have a preference based on working relationships, both candidates are widely respected and your selection of either would have the support of the grassroots organizations who have toiled for decades against long odds to see the 1977 law implemented.

What would be tragic would be to miss the opportunity to install one of these two well-respected and knowledgeable candidates as Director.

We look forward to working with Joe or Pat as the next Director of OSMRE, and to helping the agency to restore to the administration of the 1977 law the central principles that drove its passage – a belief that mining should be a temporary use of land, and that the rights of people living downhill and downstream should be fully protected.

Cordially