demonstrators, including wendell berry, have been occupying the kentucky governor's office to oppose coal extraction by mountaintop removal. i have a deep love of the appalachians, and i leave you to ponder, for example, how a swiss leader would be greeted who proposed to let corporations level the alps, and what such a procedure might do to the people who lived there. i have seen this, as i blogged a couple of years ago; i have never seen a more disturbing sight, except perhaps by brother bob's bullet-ridden corpse. i am not going to try to develop a moral theory on which mountains have rights, for example, though i will say that people are not fully distinct from the places they occupy, and that we are destroying ourselves. but i do intuit that something like a mountain or an ecosystem makes its own instrinsic claim to exist.

thanks, lisa; i hadn't heard about this protest.