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Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters by Duncan Maysilles

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You are darn right. It is one of the earth’s greatest environmental disasters. When Americans first went up into space, they could only see two manifestations of the presence of their species on earth: the four-corners coal-burning electric facility and the barren landscape surrounding Ducktown’s copper smelting plant that had released sulfuric acid into the atmosphere completely denuding all the vegetation from an entire valley. I recall driving through the area over 50 years ago with a companion who cried and said that she now understood for the first time why Chinese peasants had killed their landlords as portrayed in Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton and Fred Magdoff. “Ducktown Smoke is an extremely important and expertly written book,” says Donald E. Davis. Duncan Maysilles earned a law degree from Duke and a history doctorate from the University of Georgia.

Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, a 2016 reprint of a 2011 release. 333 pages with an index, bibliography, footnotes, photos and a map. Trade paperback,