The watches of the night

In 1963, Harry M. Caudill published his now classic account of the reckless, deliberate despoliation of the Appalachian Plateau, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands". Thirteen years later, Caudill continues the heartbreaking story of an incredibly rich land inhabited by a grindingly poor people whose problems, despite every kind of state and local aid and an unprecedented boom in coal following the oil embargo, have worsened: the land is being stripped more rapidly than ever; the people's traditional relationship with the land -- the robust, independent way of life that generations of men and women have preserved so stubbornly -- is being uprooted and their old customs eliminated by standardization; the brighter young people have pawns either of the coal companies or the federal, state and local bureaucracies. Both a narrative history and a polemic against greed and waste, "The watches of the night" hammers at the "profligacy growing out of the persistent myth of superabundance." The author ponders an even darker future if the cycle of boom and bust is not broken. He writes: "Americans have never understood or respected the finely textured, little-hill terrain of the Cumberland Plateau. Even the pioneers knew little of its somber, magnificent forest and warred upon it and its creatures. Neither the farmers nor the miners who followed them saw it as a place to cherish, but vied with one another in the harshness of their treatment. Through decades that have lengthened to nearly two centuries the land has fought back, sometimes with savage floods and always with persistent efforts to reforest...."But now time runs out and our 'inexhaustible' resources have turned finite...the Kentucky Cumberlands are many things but most of all they are a warning."