A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

In 1987, it casually announced that it would allow private timber interests to remove hundreds of acres of wood a year from the venerable and verdant Pisgah National Forest, next door to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and that 80 percent of that would be through what it delicately calls “scientific forestry”—clear-cutting to you and me—which is not only a brutal visual affront to any landscape but brings huge, reckless washoffs that gully the soil, robbing it of nutrients and disrupting ecologies farther downstream, sometimes for miles. This isn’t science. It’s rape.

just so immensely cruel… i don’t even want to know the current stat

Thirty years ago it was still possible on especially clear days to see the Washington Monument, seventy-five miles away. Now, on hot, smoggy summer days, visibility can be as little as two miles and never more than thirty.

so so sickening.