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In the mountains of Appalachia, illiteracy and poverty are higher than anywhere else in the country, with a focus on extreme hardships in the daily lives of its people. Even though the Appalachian Mountain runs from New York to Mississippi, when we think of the impoverished area of the Appalachians, it is within Central Appalachia.  The odd thing is that these counties contain some of the richest natural resources located in an area with some of our nation's poorest people—with excessive tax breaks previously given to the mining corporations.

Not a new thing, the economics of Wall Street seem to be a foreign area to these Appalachians, with the current recession simply just another normal day in their lives. Homeless people in major cities today fill the media across the United States with pictures of crowding in shacks and tent cities, with nearby cities demanding their removal and of their garbage build-up. Yet homes in the Appalachia area are just that—shacks with little or no plumbing, garbage stacked along roadsides, and health care is something only slightly heard of. The high levels of unemployment touted in the media as "severely threatening to our country" is seen as simply another day in the Appalachian unemployment line, where at times the national average seems almost high in comparison.

For a short time, several presidents have focused on the area, seeking a war on its poverty, but eventually they were conceded as lost situations with more approaches toward less government interventions and more self-reliance. And now with President Obama's administration reversing the go-ahead on mountaintop removal mining, poverty may take another turn. But many environmentalists and activists are fighting this type of mining due to its toxic effects on the people and on the land.

What many people do not know is that mountaintop removal mining uses less miners than other types. In fact, to date over 470 mountains in Central Appalachia have been destroyed due to this type of mining. Women like Theresa L. Burriss in her interview "Appalachia & Clean Coal" refers to the fact just recently Virginia overturned a lower court's ruling in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is making it much easier for seeking coal companies to extract coal through the process of mountaintop removal. This is occurring in an area which is the second most bio-diverse region in the entire world, second to the tropical rainforest.

The Appalachia area is considered a throw-away area and full of Scots-Irish hillbillies and rednecks. But not too long ago the politicians were fighting over it, out of nowhere, a battle between Obama and McCain. All of a sudden these typically no-account people were important!  This is a tragedy within our own country, as this beautiful area needs to be looked at objectively with what it has to offer. At least other than using the term hillbilly white trash as one of the least objective racist slur than can be spoken today and still being lucky enough to get away with it.