The Katuah bioregion is located in the heart of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Not only are these some of the oldest mountains in the world, they are also home to one of the most biologically diverse temperate forests on our planet. Here, everything from bobcats and bears, to copperheads and flying squirrels live out their lives under a diverse canopy of oaks, tulip poplars, sourwoods, hemlocks, and big leaf magnolias, to name a few. Every holler and valley has cool clear streams running through them, filled with salamanders, crawdads, and trout. If that’s not enough for you, Katuah also holds some of the largest, most pristine wilderness areas on the East Coast.

Many of the folks who inhabit these mountains have lived here for generations and maintain a close connection to the land. They still depend on wild foods such as ramps, chicken of the woods, and blackberries, as well as wild game, to supplement their diet. And there are still many an old timer who heads out every fall to dig ginseng, goldenseal, and other medicinal roots.

But not everything is peachy in Katuah these days — just when you think you’ve found paradise, someone’s gotta shit on your doorstep. The forests, having nearly recovered from intensive logging during the 1800’s and early 1900’s, were met with a new threat during the 90’s: chipmills. These voracious consumers of trees popped up all over southern Appalachia like scabies at a rainbow gathering, greatly intensifying the rate at which our southeastern forests were logged. This new wave of industrial logging was met with stiff resistance and direct action by KEF!.

But one of the worst threats to the area goes beyond clear-cuts. The corporations and their lackeys have begun to blast the entire tops off of our mountains to get their greedy hands on the thin seams of coal that lay beneath. Through this process, known as mountain top removal, we have seen hundreds of square miles of our lush mountains blasted into flattened moonscapes, resembling the biological equivalent of a parking lot. On top of this, well over a thousand miles of our life-giving streams have been buried by mining “overburden” – i.e. the remnants of a mountaintop after blasting — not to mention the thousands of more miles of stream rendered uninhabitable by toxic mine runoff. To put it bluntly, mountain top removal is the “final solution” for the mountains we call home. Trees can grow back, mountains cannot.

With Smoky Mountain National Park ranking only second to Los Angeles in ozone levels on some summer days, air pollution is clearly a major threat to our bioregion (thanks TVA!). Now the government wants to put in two environmentally devastating roads in and near the Park. The first one, Long Shore Road, is a proposed 34 mile incursion into Smoky Mountain National Park, the largest roadless area in the East. The road would endanger over 100 mountain streams from the acid rock and open up one of our finest wilderness areas to cars and their accompanying pollution. To add insult to injury, a couple of lawmakers from Georgia have now proposed the new Interstate 3, which would run from Savannah, GA to Knoxville, TN. One of the main justifications for this highway is the almighty need to facilitate tourism in the area. Not only does the proposed route flank the southern border of the park, and ruin a prime stretch of the Appalachian Trail, it would also require the blasting of several mountains, and the displacement of a number of mountain communities.