I used to hear that only APRA, or only foreign investment could save Peru. Then I heard that only Alberto Fujimori and the sinchis could save it. Now mining is supposed to be saving the country, which has coal among other minerals. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to show this video about coal mining.
I should be also giving instructions for action – the video came from the Sierra Club, which wants donations to stop this kind of mining, and that is one thing to do – but there may be other things to do as well. I recently observed a pretty good slag heap. It is not at all clear to me how to stop the complete and final destruction of Peru, whose ecology is in my view near collapse. Salute that Pastoruri one last time. Canten con nosotros: How green was my valley then, the valley of them that are gone!
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I read *How Green was My Valley* ages ago. And I belong to the Sierra Club.
Have you read *Sons and Lovers?*
The place I’ve seen recently that I thought was in the worst environmental trouble was Spain, largely due to the imposition on the land of a grotesquely overscaled tourist infrastructure and overbuilding in general.
Every summer they run out of water sooner.
Sons and Lovers – yes, but long ago, very long ago, I do not remember it well enough. But it has that lyrical prose.
Spain, oh dear. I haven’t been there in ages but I’ve heard about the overbuilding … remember the water rationing even forty years ago. Tourist infrastructure, do you mean those beach places or is it everywhere now?
It’s mostly on the coast, but the strain is felt everywhere.
Yes, Lawrence is out of fashion, I think largely because his writing on sex was so embarrassing. And of course the kind of upper middle class and upper class people he wrote about are out of fashion and worse he did not understand them very well. The working over Kate Millet administered to him in *Sexual Politics* was probably the coup de grace to his reputation.
Which is too bad. There is his poetry, and there is *Sons and Lovers.*
He saw the miners as displaced peasants who still had a natural beauty, much as did the defiled landscape around them. That was a major insight. But he got picked up by the smart set and I think that ruined his art.
Spain – very interesting. I liked DHL although I suppose I wasn’t very sophisticated when I read him.
I think I was in junior high when Sexual Politics came out. It was so famous, I felt as though I’d read it, but really I haven’t. I just Googled Millet and thought WOW what an interesting person, someone I should have been as brave as, someone I should read.