Paradise Hauled Off in Coal Train

End Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

A panel of federal judges has ruled in favor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a controversial mountaintop removal mining legal case. The ruling will permit mining companies to conduct devastating mountaintop removal coal mining operations without acting to minimize stream destruction or conducting adequate environmental reviews.

As a result, Appalachia could now be facing up to 100 new mountaintop removal coal mining permits, which would destroy huge swaths of the Appalachian Mountains.

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Paradise

©John Prine

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.

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 man.

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

Notes on Paradise: Paradise was a real place in Kentucky, and while I was away in the Army in Germany, my father sent me a newspaper article telling how the coal company had bought the place out. It was a real Disney-looking town. . . Then the bulldozers came in and wiped it all off the map. - John Prine

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