An environmental hero died yesterday and no one seems to be paying attention.

[countryjake]

55. Saddest thing about mountain-top destruction, like what's been done to Kayford Mt....

is that most of the coal mined in this manner is deliberately raping Appalachia just to export that resource overseas. We're fighting the coal trains up here in the Pacific Northwest, trying to stop the expansion of yet another coal depot, a shipping terminal that loads millions of tons of the black stuff to be hauled straight over to China.

I found this quiet notice of Larry Gibson's passing late last night over in the Videos and Multimedia forum and had to cry...I already knew of him and had been following his heroic efforts to save our mountains for years.

Here's a quote of Mr. Gibson's, taken from this piece, gleaned by the people who created the video at
http://earthjustice.org/blog/2012-september/mourning-a-hero-and-a-friend?selectname=/about/offices/northeast

For the filming of our video, he took us up on Kayford Mountain. We finished filming just before sunset. When we were done, we took him off microphone, but we left the camera rolling as we sat there and watched the sunset in silence with him. As the sun set over his decimated Kayford—sublime colors of the sky over the surreal strip mine moonscape—he wept.

"You want to know what the real truth is about me? I just can't get used to it," he said, wiping his tears away. "The truth is, my heroes are the people who don't get used to this. The one that gets used to it is the one that won't do anything about it. I pray to God I got a lot of heroes."


Rest in Peace, Larry