Last week, we got a tip from a friend in the know: "Head on down to Shining Rock Wilderness this weekend, the blueberries are in." And so on Saturday, my family and I got out onto the roof of southern Appalachia and traipsed along a treeline-level footpath for a couple miles before arriving at a mile-long expanse of open ridge from which immense views fell away in several directions. The sky seemed to hunker down close around us, and the air.... Well, I've tried many a time to describe the sensory experience of good Appalachian Mountain air and can only say that I felt a deep homesickness melt away as I savored its crisp bite and heady fragrance of too many flowers and green things to count.

And the wild blueberries were abundant indeed. There were quite a few pickers, many of them clearly the mountain folk who've lived in this area for generations, and all armed with containers of some kind, ranging from milk jugs to big joint-compound buckets. We'd been admitted, it seemed, into a seasonal ritual that probably has unfolded each August in this place for hundreds of years. And so we spent two idyllic hours up there, picked enough blueberries to make pancakes for a small army, and me feeling the joy of knowing that right here, right now is exactly where I want to be. On the way back down to the car, a fast-moving thunderstorm rumbled through, dumping a chilly rain on us; I did my best Gene Kelly routine, my daughter shivering but giggling away in the backpack strapped to me.

This was why we'd moved to Asheville, NC -- I wanted to bring days like this one much closer, within easier reach, than they had been in Brooklyn. But in the hubbub of actually moving, getting settled, starting a business, and expanding our family, I'd lost touch with my need to get outside -- hadn't managed a single day hike or fat-tire ride in eight months. I hereby vow to better see to the care and feeding of my inner mountain man.

The previous evening, I'd stayed up brooding about news that the Bush administration, in its latest gift to the extractive industries, would issue a new regulation smoothing the path for mountaintop removal mining, a brutally efficient descendent of strip mining that is literally remaking the face of southern Appalachia. It is exactly what it sounds like. (See pictures, video, or Kentucky-based journalist Eric Reese's essay Appalachian Apocalypse.) I don't at all like the idea that a patchwork of southern Appalachian topography equal to the size of Delaware has already been mined in this way. I wanted to write something for this blog that might in some tiny way contribute to putting the kibosh on mountaintop removal, and my instinct, regardless of personal feelings, is to eschew negative rhetoric and focus on energy alternatives that are simply better for the public good. So I started amassing facts and figures, planning to post something the next day, after we returned from our family hike.

But as I walked that Blue Ridge mountaintop the next morning, something became crystal-clear to me. Anyone who can't see the obscenity of mountaintop-removal mining -- can't see that it is way beyond criminal to lay waste to an entire region's natural and cultural heritage -- is beyond the reach of any coolly rational arguments against the practice that I could make. So for me at least, it's time to stand up and get loud. I'm outraged that this is happening in our country, that this White House has condoned and in fact worked relentlessly to legitimize mountaintop removal mining. This has to stop, and sometimes the only way to make that happen is to find others who think similarly, put your collective foot down, and say "No more."