
Beyond Coal: Imagining Appalachia’s Future - pgrote
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/beyond-coal-imagining-appalachias-future.html
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niftich
Though farming, including farming partially on reclaimed land, receives a
cursory mention in the article, generally most of Appalachia is understood to
be a poor fit for farming as the topography is rough, the soils are poor, and
the narrow river valleys are where all of the population and transportation
routes concentrate.

One solution is that after the (controversial, but still commonplace) practice
of mountaintop removal surface mining, you restore land in such a way to
enable flat-surface or terraced farming, instead of just planting it with
fast-growing pine forest and/or grass as it's usually done. This is obviously
a transformative process with non-negligible environmental impacts, but it
would increase economic throughput.

Historically in Europe, and early colonial America, ridgelines were favored as
transportation routes because river fordings could be avoided. This wasn't the
case deep in the Cumberland Plateau because the terrain was too rugged, but
nowadays ridgelines show good potential for highway and other flatland
construction like the King Coal Highway [1][2] and associated developments
[3].

[1] [http://www.mcra-
wv.org/assets/images/sliders/_Resized/king-c...](http://www.mcra-
wv.org/assets/images/sliders/_Resized/king-coal-highway-web.jpg)

[2]
[http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/maplg.gif](http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/maplg.gif)

[3]
[http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/11082010/2010-11-09_12.JPG](http://www.wvkingcoal.com/images/11082010/2010-11-09_12.JPG)

