The Progress of Man

by Robert C. Koehler
How much longer can we tolerate soulless progress? "Then the coal company came, with the world's largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of John Prine was writing about his parents' home in western Kentucky, not Niyamgiri Mountain in eastern India, but I couldn't help but hear the echo of these four-decade-old lyrics as I thought about the struggle of the Dongria Kondh, around whom a global protest movement has grown to stop the digging of an open-pit bauxite mine in the middle of their land. Maybe it seems odd to link Appalachia and tribal India, but I do so intentionally because it's the same planet, the same phenomenon of progress, the same devastation of traditional life tied to place.

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