12-36 (Large)

"In fact, we have always needed distinctly local arts of poetry, storytelling, painting, and music in America, just as we have always needed distinctly local arts of agriculture, fishing, and forestry. Without such rootedness in locality, considerately adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have: a country half destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused...a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy fraud and ecological ruin."

"But to destroy the earth is to destroy all the possibilities of the earth, among them the possibility of recovery. The land destroyed by strip mining is destroyed forever; it will never be what it would have become if left alone. Such destruction—which can now be accomplished on a vast scale by a few men in a short time—makes man a parasite upon the source of his life; it implicates him in the death of the earth, the destruction of his meanings. Those men who send the bulldozer blades into the mountainsides bear the awesome burden of responsibility for an act that no one can fully comprehend, much less justify".

At midnight, when suddenly you hear an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don't mourn your luck that's failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive -- don't mourn them uselessly: as one long prepared, and full of courage, say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving. Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and full of courage, it is right for you who were given this kind of city, go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with whining, the pleas of a coward: listen - your final pleasure - to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, to say goodbye to her, to Alexandria you are losing.