by Patricia M. DeMarco

the book ReImagine Appalachia: Healing the Land and Empowering the people is now available in paperback and as an electronic edition from Springer Nature at a much reduced price from the originally published hardcover. You can order it here. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-61921-2

The concluding chapter is important today as we look toward the Midterm elections. Policy re-adjustments to enhance and grow the middle class upwards have worked. Policies proposed from the ReImagine Appalachia Blueprint and adopted into the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act began to turn the curve towards investing in communities and working people, as opposed to further enrichment of the top 1% of the wealthy, as is happening now.

This reflection from Rachel Carson seems amazingly relevant for today’s situation:

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy—no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. (Carson RL (1998) The real world around us. In: Lear LJ (ed) Lost woods—the discovered writing of Rachel Carson. Beacon Press, Boston, p 163)