Spoken Like Poetry
(1 of 4)

Spoken by Teri:

We can’t live without water.
In Kentucky we live in a forest with forty to fifty inches of rainfall a year,
And can’t get a clean drink of water.
That’s a sad story.

And to think we have allowed one industry
-One industry-
To take it away from us.

You cannot continue to destroy the most diverse hardwood forests in the world,
Leaving deserts on top of these mountain ranges,
And expect to have water for the southeastern part of the United States.

You can live without coal.

You can live without oil.

You can live without gas.

But you cannot live without water.


This material originally appeared in Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining. The book was edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerther and it was published by Earth Aware Editions in 2009. The material was printed as a transcript of a spoken interview. I copied the transcript verbatim then I edited it by simply changing the sentences in paragraphs to lines in a “poem”.

Emerald