Ronald D. Eller

“While I was home last summer, I attended a celebration of historic Old Rugby in Morgan County, Tennessee. For a while that afternoon I sat in a yard listening to some musicians and speakers. Two flatland women were sitting on chairs in front of me, and one of them was being bothered by a long stem growing out of a plant behind her. There was nothing pretty about this stem. It was sort of ugly. It bore neither flowers nor leaves. But on the upper end it held two immature seedpods, and to me it represented life. The one woman complained to her friend about the nuisance of the stem, whereupon her friend leaned over and with some effort broke the stem. That action seemed to me a typical response of technological society. If a flower bothers you, break it. If the environment restricts you, change it. If people get in your way, manipulate them. I believe that the more typical mountain response in this situation would have been to move your chair—to adapt yourself rather than to manipulate your environment. It is a practice we all need to learn—to move our chairs before we use up the world and bury ourselves in our own waste.74”
― Ronald D. Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945