In 2006, Riverhead books published Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, by Erik Reece, a version of which had appeared earlier as a folio in Harper’s Magazine. Reece—born in Virginia, raised in Louisville, schooled at the University of Kentucky, mentored by Guy Davenport—spent a year chronicling the death of a mountain.
I wanted to speak with him on the book’s 20th anniversary. Lost Mountain was the first book published about mountaintop removal, a form of surface mining in which mountaintops are blasted away to expose coal seams, drastically altering the landscape, burying valleys and streams, destroying ecosystems and, arguably, the communities that depend on them.
In June 2025, Erik and I headed south and east out of Lexington, Kentucky—the Bluegrass—toward Hazard, Kentucky, and the foothills of some of the oldest mountains in the world: those of the Cumberland Plateau and the Appalachian range. Lost Mountain isn’t a mountain in the mind’s eye—no epiphanies where you feel awe at the sight of it, where the ego falls away and, if you are lucky, you sidle up next to your god. This isn’t that place.
We talked over several days about how he came to Lost Mountain, about teaching, and about finding the Kingdom of God in a mountain watershed.
I. Morning, Day 1: Toward the Mountain
William Major (WM): What drew you to this project?
Erik Reece (ER): I had a grandmother on my father’s side who was from Hazard, and so we would visit. As a kid, I remember driving by the strip mines. But it was two hours away, so it was really abstract to me my whole life.
And then, when I got into college, my grandfather gave me this old canoe. So I started doing a lot of canoeing, and started trying to get into nature writing and I read all the greats, Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson. I would take a little trip and then I’d write it up, and I just really enjoyed that. When I got to the University of Kentucky, I proposed a nature writing class, and I started teaching that, and then I started looking for a place outside of Lexington that I could take my students for a field trip.
The university owns this experimental forest called Robinson Forest, which is 14,800 acres. I started taking my students there. And I was pretty naive at the time. I basically just wanted them to have this Thoreauvian experience, like having an epiphany in nature and that kind of thing. We were staying in these chestnut cabins and it’s very bucolic. But we would go on these long hikes, and all the hikes would end at the end of the forest, and that would be a strip mine.
And so we realized that the whole forest was completely surrounded by strip mining. It’s just a disconcerting experience: You’re walking through this mixed mesophytic forest—which is the most biologically diverse forest in North America—and then all of a sudden you’re just staring at a wasteland, where that whole forest has just been completely destroyed. And that’s the mine.
The students and I, we all started writing about the strip mining. And that wasn’t at all my plan for the class. But that’s what it turned into.
And my mentor at UK, Guy Davenport, was writing a column for Harper’s Magazine at the time. I pitched to his editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, an idea about this experience of me moving through the forest and then seeing the strip mines, and he wrote back and he said, “We’ve wanted to do something about mountaintop removal for a long time. We’ve wanted somebody from the region like you to write it. But what you propose doesn’t sound like it has enough of a narrative to it.”
Then he just said out of the blue, “Why don’t you take one mountain and follow it from the beginning to the end of the process?” I went to the office of surface mining in Frankfort and I just looked through all the permits, and the permits are like 18 inches thick and they’re all this legalese, and I had no idea what I was looking at. I was a blind man.
But I picked up this one permit. It’s at Lost Mountain, and I pulled the map out of it, and I could see from the map how low they were going to take it out, and how many coal seams they were going to take out. And being an English major, I saw the metaphorical potential in that. And I just thought, This is my mountain. It’s going to be Lost Mountain.
WM: We spoke earlier about your work in Robinson Forest when you were with your students, when you were out hiking and you would come to the edge of the forest, both literally and metaphorically. How did the students react to what they were seeing? Do you remember?
ER: The forest literally drops off because you hit a high wall. And you hit a place where they’ve already gone down to like the number 11 or number nine seam: which means you’re literally looking down 30 feet into just nothing
One kid in the class was right wing. He’d actually repaired mining equipment. He was an older kid, and he would give me shit all the time, but it was in a good-natured way. And I enjoyed it. We got to that and he like looked at it. He just said, “What the hell.” And I said, “Well, what do you think, Dan?” And he said, “Well, when are they going to reclaim this?” And I said, “They have reclaimed it … and they’re gone.” He said, “This is no way to do things. My politics are different than yours, but this is just no way to treat the land.” And so that was the most dramatic response I got.
Most people don’t see it because there’s no way to see it unless you’re in a plane. And even then you don’t have the experience of just walking up on it. So my students were doing something that no one ever does: Just walking through a forest and then seeing the forest end. And cognitively it took them a long time to figure out how to deal with that. It is one of those great moments you want as a teacher where you just watch them literally changing. And it’s not something you can get in the classroom.
We would go back to the camp, and we’d sit around on the porch of the cabins and process that, and talk about it and figure out how to write about it. And I was doing it along with them; I was trying to figure out how to write about that experience.
I just thought, This is my mountain. It’s going to be Lost Mountain.
WM: So much of your writing revolves around that sense of affection for place. And when I was going back through your books and thinking about sense of identity, what comes through is very porous. You talk a lot about that in Clear Creek: about trying to overcome this subject-object, me-thou dichotomy. Is that something you think about in your daily life?
ER: It’s something I think about a lot, just this idea of self.
As Americans we’re drowning in self. It’s just social media, this whole FOMO phenomenon. You walk around with these fragile egos. I look at my students, and their sense of self is so shaped by social media and who they want other people to think they are. It just seems so fragile.
But for me, as an alcoholic, self is something you feed for so long, yet so much of recovery is about getting outside of yourself. That’s why service is so important in recovery communities. That sense of escaping the self into something larger, whatever that larger thing is, it’s just incredibly healthy. For me, for a long time, it was the natural world. Is that a place where I can find this larger sense of identity?
So that’s why I told that story in Clear Creek about how you can say biologically that we’re literally genetically kin to every living thing. Or you could say, like the Upanishads say, spiritually, we’re all part of this one large self. What I like is there’s no contradiction in those two ideas. Biologically, it’s true, and if you want to say spiritually, it’s true. It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s a hard thing to put into language, but it’s something you feel when you’re out in the woods or down by the creek or fly fishing in Montana.
That’s important to me, and that’s what I try to do, to make opportunities for my students to get into that space. When I take them to Robinson Forest and there’s no cell phone reception, they’re just so morose for the first few hours. But then they get around the campfire and the fire’s going and there are foxes watching us. And all that falls away.
We’re just going to have to sit here and tell stories, because that’s all we can do. And then they find out they really enjoy that.
WM: One of the things that struck me when I was reading Lost Mountain, and then Clear Creek, is just how much you call yourself an amateur naturalist. But as I was reading, I’m thinking, God, this guy, he’s naming everything. He’s got the plants; he’s got the wildflowers. He’s got the trees. He’s naming the birds. Tell me a little bit about how you came to that.
ER: It’s just taking field guides into the woods. That’s all it is. It’s just being deliberate about learning it.
When I was writing Lost Mountain, I was hanging out with a lot of scientists and learning a lot of things from them. But the naming thing is important because it calls you into that place. It’s a way of belonging. Adam and Eve naming the animals. It’s such a primal thing to do. I quoted Mallarmé in Clear Creek, where he said to name something is to kill it. And I know what he means; there is something destructive about using language. Somebody running for mayor is a Communist. You’re trying to kill that.
But the flip side of that is this naming. When you say something beautiful, like “jewelweed,” that calls you into the presence of jewelweed, because you’re taking the time to give the attention to that plant.
What it can do, when it’s done poetically, is it can erase that subject-object dualism. We’re both here together in this experience of just being. And when you can erase that subject-object thing, then you’re entering the space of poetry. You’re entering the space where you are overcoming the self because you’re allowing these other things to be part of this larger definition of who you are.
II. Late morning
The several miles to Lost Mountain ran alongside Lost Creek through the towns of Rowdy, Jones, Dice, and Rock Fork. We swung around the front of the mountain to get a closer look at the valley fill, the moonscape image on the cover of the book. Now, however, trees and shrubs filled in what was left, obscuring our view of the fill.
The climb was nightmarish. We bent under thickets of what would have been the forest understory—except there was no longer a forest—grappling with Chinese silvergrass, autumn olive, tree of life, multifloria rose, and privet, among others.
After an hour and a half of bushwacking, we emerged near the top, a flattened landscape of invasive grasses, lespedeza, the occasional early emergent sycamores and pines. I picked dozens of ticks off Erik. We made our way to the edge of the fill but thick undergrowth prevented us from getting close.
ER: I really thought we would just be able to look over the lip of the valley fill.
WM: When we were looking from the bottom this area appeared pretty well forested over. Seeing the growth, the sycamores and the poplars and the pines, does it give you any hope?
ER: A little bit. A lot of this is invasive, the Russian sage and autumn olive and the privet. It looks nothing like what a native forest here would look like. But there are some things—like the poplar and the sycamore and the redbud—that are just crawling and flowing, filling their way back in.
I’m ambivalent about it because on the one hand, I’m glad this looks better than I thought. On the other hand, I know how much selenium has been dumped into the watershed and the many heavy metals.
WM: They’re not going anywhere.
ER: They’re still down there, so all those aftereffects of strip mining are being felt by pregnant women and anybody who drinks the water.
WM: I haven’t seen any streams or anything. Normally, you would see something where we are. We would cross some water by this point.
ER: It’s a lot of junky shit up here. A gray wasteland. I am pretty surprised that 20 years later, well, it’s just the resilience of nature. And again, it’s a lot of scrubby stuff. None of this is gonna amount to anything. You’re never going to get a mature forest. Except for the poplars, and the sycamores and the pines.
But the main thing I worry about at a site like this is just what it did to the water. The water is wreaking havoc on the community. There were 60 different native hardwoods up here. Now there’s three. The water is undrinkable. The forest is fragmented.
WM: That’s big, too, just in terms of the birds, the songbirds. You talked about the cerulean warblers that need territory. And David Quammen talks about the island effect, what that does to species and habitats.
ER: Absolutely, Song of the Dodo is such an important book in that regard. Two thirds of the songbird populations are in decline.
WM: I wrote one of the newspaper pieces partially inspired by your book, 20 years ago, and I said that something like this would never happen in the Berkshires or the foothills of the Berkshires in Connecticut. Somebody would put a permit in and there would have been 30 lawyers crawling up their ass within 10 minutes.
ER: It’s a completely different mentality. They just think of their mountains differently.
First of all, there’s no coal. Around here, it’s just always been solely an economic argument. That’s all it’s ever been. And people always bought into that. It’s telling that John Muir wrote one book about the East and left. We don’t have the John Muirs. We got Wendell Berry, of course. We don’t have those 19th-century voices writing in that ecstatic purple prose, celebrating the divine nature of the mountains. It’s just a different way of thinking about the natural world.
People like me, who try to push that argument down here, it’s just a hard argument to make because people think you’re taking food out of their mouths. And that’s not what you’re saying. What you’re saying is, Look, this could have been a solar array. There could have been jobs up here. We don’t have to light the world on fire to get electricity.
This isn’t the grandeur of the Rocky Mountain front range. Or even the Presidential range in the Northeast. These mountains, they’re the oldest mountains in the world. They’re just worn down. So it’s just different.
III.
On my last day in Lexington, Erik and I sat outside at Transylvania University—empty of students during summer—for our final discussion.
WM: We’ve had 24 hours since our odyssey. How are you thinking about your experience on the mountain, aside from the ticks and the chiggers and everything that we went through?
ER: I’m conflicted. I told you I was there 10 years ago, but it must have been more like 15. It was still a wasteland when I was up there. It was absolutely nothing. And it looks like they have done a little more reclamation than I thought they were going to do.
I’m really surprised at how just the vegetation has filled in so quickly. It’s not the vegetation that should be there; it’s 90 percent crap. But there are trees up there sequestering carbon. And providing habitat, as we saw, for towhees and things like that.
I’m impressed by the resiliency of the natural world to fill that void and move back in. Unfortunately, what moves in first is all those exotics. That’s pretty depressing. If I were a coal operator, I’d say, Well, this is great. It’s green again and everything’s come back.
But you look at it more carefully and you’re looking at autumn olive, Russian sage, privet, rose of Sharon, lespedeza, all of these non-native species that are just gonna infiltrate the native forest and be even more of a problem. Because that’s what loves the void, and the natives just can’t compete.
WM: When we were in the truck, I was thinking a lot about nature’s resiliency, and it really becomes a question of what we mean by nature. It’s a human idea. It’s our construction, and whether we’re there or we’re not there, it’s going to do something unless we completely poison it. Which is certainly what has happened up on these strip mines, especially in terms of the water, the watersheds.
But I came away from it thinking, Something is occurring right now that we don’t have any control over. And I just don’t think it needs us.
ER: No.
WM: It needs us to not do bad shit. But it’s going to do something.
ER: It would have needed us to do better reclamation. But like you say, it doesn’t need us at all.
It’s frustrating that, in the whole history of strip mining, just better reclamation really never took hold. I’ve done good reclamation; I’ve been on strip mines where we planted 40 different hardwoods, 10 different soft woods, we really jump started a native forest. But here, what’s up there now? You got some poplars coming up, but in terms of that being what it should be, God knows how long that will take, if ever. And the frustrating part for me is they just do the cheapest thing they can do and walk away. When we know what should be done with a little bit more effort.
WM: It’s a political problem. It comes down to effort but also will.
ER: It seems like every 20 years you put together a blue-ribbon task force to come up with a vision for Appalachia, everybody gets excited about it. We’re going to have local food systems and we’re going to have local economies.
But it just never happens to scale. You never get an Asheville. The outside world has so few expectations for what the region could be, and so the region itself thinks about how to squeeze the last little bit of coal out of here. There’s no sense that all this could have all been solar panels. Solutions come along and they go nowhere because the politicians in the region won’t get behind it and people feel frustrated. The Appalachian Regional Commission started, what, 50 or 60 years ago, and there’s really just so little to show for it other than a lot of highways.
All of these non-native species [will] infiltrate the native forest. … Because that’s what loves the void, and the natives just can’t compete.
WM: Outside of coal and timber, you think about whether it could be tourism or Shaker furniture or the silva-culture of the hardwoods like they do up in Wisconsin. Those ideas don’t seem to catch hold except maybe on a hyper local level.
ER: Part of it is there’s a sense those are hippie projects, or, that’s just left-wing thinking. It’s like I wrote about in Clear Creek: The only thing that’s really gonna force us to change is catastrophe. We’re going to keep letting somebody kick us in the teeth. And it’s already happening with the flooding, the flooding’s just gonna keep happening. And we’re finally going to get to the point where, left wing, right wing, none of that matters. It’s just survival, and what’s that going to look like?
And that’ll probably mean more people leaving the region. It may mean people moving up to the mountaintop removal sites. They build these subdivisions up there. That just pushes the problem around. It doesn’t solve the economy. It doesn’t help poverty or anything like that.
You saw how people were living when they were driving around yesterday. Like you said, people live on the edge. They’re living in a trailer literally on the edge of a creek. They’re putting their houses on the only flat place they can put them. They’re living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck.
ER: You look back at the early mountaineers who settled the region, all they needed from the outside world was salt and coffee. These were just incredibly self-reliant people. The mythology is well earned.
But you bring in a single extractive industry and say, This is all it’s going to be, and you convince people that that’s all it’ll ever be. And then that disappears and you replace it with opioids. It’s just a perfect storm for disaster.
WM: That’s the ultimate extractive industry right there. You’re extracting life, human life. We’ve done the timber, we’ve done the coal, now let’s get the people.
ER: It’s the same mentality of the coal operators: We’re going to come in here and we’re going to tell you this great story about how your pain can be relieved. But what we’re really going to do is fuck you economically. We’re gonna take all of your resources, all of your pride, your human faculties. You have Peabody coal come in, then you have Tampa Electric Company come in, then you have Purdue come in.
And it’s Trumpism. It’s preying on the most vulnerable people that you can.
WM: Another word that comes to mind is “grief.” I don’t know that I have standing to be grieving for the region, not being native; but as a human being, I do. There’s a lot of grieving going on down there that gets unrecognized.
ER: That’s a good word. What do you do with that grief? You try to relieve it. So how do you relieve it? You relieve it with opioids; you relieve it with alcohol. You relieve it by taking your anger out on your spouse. And there’s all these malignant ways that that grief gets redirected.
That’s what we’re seeing now. And you still have these core things: You’ve got family, all these things that Appalachia is known for, but you don’t have that sense of community anymore. You just see the communities being pulled apart.
WM: Can I pivot for a minute to Clear Creek? Your grandfather was a Virginia country preacher, and he plays such a huge role in your recent writing. I see you as having this conversation with someone who had such a huge effect on your life, both good and bad. Is that accurate?
ER: Yeah, mostly bad. Good in the sense that he gave me a canoe. I wrote about this in several books, but my love of the natural world did flow through him.
But for him, there was always this great chasm, this great dualism between this world and the next. I always think about that gospel song, “This World Is Not My Home.” That’s the way he felt about things. And my whole being, my whole metaphysic is a rejection of that. It’s a return to Luke 17:20, which says, “The kingdom of God is in your midst.” And that’s why American Gospel is so much about the Gospel of Thomas. That idea comes through so clearly in the Gospel of Thomas, whenever the disciples are asking about the afterlife, Jesus is always saying, “This is it, this is the kingdom of God.” So act like it.
What does that mean to act like it? It means to nurture your soul on some day-to-day level. This is all you have. And for me, that’s always been pretty easy to do. But it also has this political wing of, “If this is the kingdom of God, then how would you treat it?” You wouldn’t be strip mining it.
WM: But you point out in your books that you have to break down that connection between self and other, you and me and nature, the way Emerson did.
ER: Yeah, that’s right. Emerson and Thoreau were the first Americans to do it. And if you go to Shakertown, that’s what’s so impressive: It looks like the kingdom of God in many ways, because they took that so seriously. They literalized it. They truly believed it. If they built it, then Jesus would come. You and I went to the opposite of that yesterday, a strip mine.
There’s this mentality: We need to get out of this world as quickly as possible, and it doesn’t matter what we do here because we’re going to a better world. That’s the antithesis of what the Shakers thought, which is, We’ve got a farm here in Mercer County above the Kentucky River. How do we create the kingdom of God here?
Well, we do incredibly progressive farming, husbandry. They wouldn’t have called it organic agriculture, of course, but that’s what it was. And we welcome people who want to come, runaway slaves, women leaving their abusive husbands. Absolute egalitarianism in a Shaker community. And what drove my utopian project [Utopia Drive, 2016] was that idea of, if you really took Luke 17:20 seriously, or if you took the Gospel of Thomas seriously, how would you act on that? And that’s what the utopians did.
We can say they failed or whatever, but they tried it, and my argument is they didn’t fail. A lot of them didn’t fail. And then you just look at something as dispiriting as a strip mine.
WM: And the waste is reused in a Shaker community. It’s not even waste.
ER: Exactly. There’s no trash in a Shaker village. Everything is recycled into something else. We have a model for that; nature or a watershed is the model.
How do you create the kingdom of God? Well, you basically follow the laws of the watershed. And how do I know you do it? Because I see people do it. I see the Shakers do it. I see the folks over at Twin Oaks in Louisa, Virginia, doing it. I know it can be done.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Shakers: that’s my bedrock for the way I think about the natural world. And it also goes back to that famous sentence, by Leopold, that you judge something is good if it demonstrates integrity, stability, and [beauty], and it’s wrong if it does otherwise. If you apply that to any landscape, you can pretty quickly come to a conclusion about what’s right and what’s wrong.
A strip mine certainly isn’t stable, it’s not beautiful. What we saw yesterday, there’s nothing integrated about that. It’s just every weed for itself.
There’s that line in Wendell Berry’s poem “How to Be a Poet” where he says, “there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places.” That’s what a strip mine is. It’s a desecrated place. He’s thinking about the kingdom of God there. He’s thinking about the natural world as a sacred place, which was a very Greek idea. It was a very pagan idea. It didn’t get unraveled until Christians came along.
WM: The kingdom of God is a weighty idea.
ER: It’s a simple one, too. My favorite philosopher is Richard Rorty. I love the way Rorty gets rid of all foundationalism. We don’t need it. We do not need any Socratic, Platonic foundationalism. He says, All we really need are good metaphors, and if we find better metaphors to make us alleviate suffering and to prevent cruelty, that’s what he says we’re here to do, to alleviate suffering and to prevent cruelty. That’s right in a lot of ways. Metaphors like the kingdom of God have helped me think through my economic theory, my political theory. It’s given me ways to talk to a larger audience outside the academy.
You can say the world is completely divine, and you can say it’s completely material, and they’re exactly the same statement. That’s true. And you can apply that to the Big Bang or you can apply that to the Book of Genesis. Like there’s this subatomic level of consciousness that’s holding things together.
What might happen is that climate catastrophe is gonna push us to a place where that’s [the watershed economy] the only option. It’s gonna push us into being generalists. Like all of these desk jobs that we have are going to be meaningless in that economy. We’re going to have to go back to these really primal ways of being in the world just to survive. It’s like dystopic fiction and movies and shows; but the big difference is, it’s not gonna be done by loners. It’s not going to be one guy out there on his own fighting zombies. It’s going to be a cooperative. It’s got to be cooperatives coming together to do that. 