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FORE! Legacy trash no longer par for historic golf course in nation’s capital January 1, 2026 by Elizabeth McGowan - NORTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C.—On a foggy, finger-numbing Sunday morning in early December, chief “litter-gitter” Don Bates guides his jaunty crew of six to a sleek, low-slung motorboat camouflaged among the weeds along a raggedy shoreline near the 10th tee of Langston Golf Course. “In a way, we are going to church,” he says, “right there in that ditch.” The selected place of “worship” he is referencing is a stretch of Kingman Lake where the local Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) has labored for decades to restore swaths of native wild rice. Over the years, hundreds of metal stakes and football-fields’ lengths of steel fencing were erected to… Read more >
Reforesting reclaimed minelands in Appalachia – one tiny tree at a time October 6, 2025 by Elizabeth McGowan - Russell County, Va.—On a sunny Friday morning in late March, the scene atop a 21.5-acre dome of bare, grooved soil at remote Stonecoal Creek unfolded like an outdoor ballet. A dozen or so agile men lined up across the slope of a shuttered coal mine, gliding synchronously to an inaudible beat that repetition had embedded in their muscle memories. In unison, each man raises a hoe-dad in one arm, arcing it high enough for the pick-like tool to pierce the earth with just enough force. Seconds later, the other hand plucks a tiny tree seedling from a cloth bag draped from the opposite shoulder, placing… Read more >
Beyond Lip Service: Why can’t Congress fund an Rx for Appalachian coal country? April 19, 2019 by Elizabeth McGowan - WHITESBURG, Ky.—Clinton Sanders can never gulp quite enough air. At night, he is tethered to an oxygen machine. And his constant daytime companion is a small, blue zippered case packed with an array of inhalers and other medicines doctors have prescribed to open passageways to his darkened, shriveled lungs. The soft-spoken 79-year-old, who spent 27 years mining coal near his hometown of Ashcamp, was diagnosed with black lung disease in 2010. And like the thousands of other miners, young and old, slowly suffocating from an incurable disease that has reached epidemic proportions in the region, the great-grandfather of five never knows if his next breath… Read more >