I’ve been out all day planting (thanks to the bounty of the nature goddess) several buckets of roots and remnants of ramps — the leavings and root trimmings from a local ramp festival feed. Our local Southern Appalachian ramp festivals are becoming so popular that our native ramps — the first green harbingers of spring […]
Author: Betty Cloer Wallace
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Women’s rights are eroded by retrogressive politics and religion
The new wave of conservatism in America is nothing new. The combination of politics and religion has always, for centuries, been geared toward the aggrandizement of men and the subjugation of women, and so it is happening once again with moralistic fervor. The human-rights gains made during the last century by half our population — […]
Smart destruction can be good for preservation
I felt a little sick when I heard that dead trees along the Joyce Kilmer Forest trails would be “cut down.” But after visiting the forest last month, I believe the Forest Service did the right thing — both in what they did and how they did it. The point of preservation of the virgin […]
Salting roads harms environment
With so many environmental activists in our mountains, why is there no outcry about the massive salting of roads? Come spring, our roadsides will be deprived of healthy vegetation and our streams and groundwater will be seriously compromised. Even a handful of salt can kill plants, including trees, and the tons of salt dumped on […]
Fighting back
Bill O’Reilly’s recent denunciation of Appalachian-Americans on FOX News is only the latest example of the widespread, multigenerational problem of Appalachian hillbilly stereotypes. Quite simply, O’Reilly once again reminded the world that Appalachian mountain natives are the only group in America that many people still have the audacity to publicly ridicule as being ignorant—and worse. […]