Something’s Rising:
12 years later, still crushingly relevant.
University Press of Kentucky, 2009
Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, a book of personal narratives compiled by Appalachian writers Silas House and Jason Kyle Howard, creates a stained-glass look at a resistance movement that spans decades. The introduction lays out the authors’ intent, tracing the history of mountaintop removal and its dissenters from the inception of the method right up to the publication of the book in 2009. The body of the work, compiled from eleven Appalachians who have stood against the practice, surveys the legal and cultural battlefield. House and Howard acknowledge their own stake; their writing is underpinned by an ice-cold fury as they describe the impacts of surface mining on their own lives.
The authors write with novelists’ attention to physical details and descriptions. Somehow, without making them seem less human, they mythologize each of their subjects. Yet even as they introduce each figure, the rigor of the introduction carries through. Superscripted reference numbers continue to crop up amid even the more artistic passages.
It’s an obviously collaborative effort. The authors’ distinct styles join the mosaic of narrative textures, bringing readers back around to a unified perspective before each new interviewee’s statement. The contrast between the authors’ writing is not always as intentional as it might have been—House’s background as a novelist and Howard’s experience as a more technical-minded nonfiction writer and editor don’t always settle neatly against each other on the page. But the compassion and love they share for their subject serve to unify the framing passages. Thematically, if not quite stylistically, the work is cohesive.
Each contributing activist brings a different hue of experience. From Jean Ritchie’s artistic environmentalism to Pat Hudson’s land-honoring spirituality to Nathan Hall’s hands-on, nuts-and-bolts pragmatism, the voices compiled here offer something close to the full spectrum of response to mountaintop removal. Themes of suppression of information, regional alienation, and stubborn tenacity suffuse the text. No one’s happy the mountains are coming down—the closest we get to acceptance is momentary despair.
The patterns expressed in narratives whose origins reach as far back as the 1950s are still present in the 2020s. Almost every Appalachian has watched economically predatory parties abuse spiritual and political authority. Many have repressed their Appalachian identity in the face of coastal and flatlander disdain. And every voice that joins the dissent has done so in a turn toward home.
Something’s Rising is a history of the movement to save not only Appalachia’s hills, but its people and culture from outsiders’ belief in their disposability. The fight has changed shape in the decade since it was published, but the same dynamics are still at play. It’s still a movement for decolonization and dignity, and in that way, Something’s Rising is a revolutionary text. It’s an ultimatum, not an argument; the rest of the world can choose to align itself with the reality of the situation or not. But Appalachians are indestructibly stubborn, and they’ve decided for good and all that this land will not be sacrificed.
