Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Families gather for a boat ride and check a crab pot that also contained a common sunstar (Crossaster papposus) that feeds on crabs and other intertidal, marine creatures.
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  • Skateboarders show off their skills and moves in graffiti-lined tubes where families gather together to watch on a Sunday afternoon in a Quito city park.
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  • Graffiti lined tubes where families play and skateboarders show off their moves on a Sunday afternoon when people head to the parks in a Quito.
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  • A large extended family cans apples from their garden. everyone has a different chore from washing the fruit, peeling and cutting it to put into jars. After a hot water bath, the jars are divided up to store for the winter.
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  • Women set a table with food for a pitch in dinner for their family reunion. Reunions are a long standing tradition for families in rural areas.
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  • Caudill family members rest on the front porch and yard when they gather on weekends to work in the garden and maintain their homestead. <br />
<br />
It took several years and a lot of money and determination, but kin of the Caudill family fought to keep their family homestead on Mud River from being taken over by the St. Louis-based Arch Coal Company. Nearly swindled out of their homestead, they battled all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court where they finally won their case.<br />
<br />
For 100 years, Miller’s wife and family owned the 75-acre tract that includes a farmhouse, built in 1920, several small barns and a garden. John Caudill, a coal miner who was blinded in a mining accident in the 1930s, and his wife, Lydia Caudill, raised 10 children in the home. <br />
<br />
Arch Coal wanted to tear down the family’s ancestral home because it stood in the way of the company’s plans to expand its 12,000-acre Hobet 21 mountaintop removal complex. Hobet 21 produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. Mines like Hobet yield one ton of coal for every 16 tons of terrain that is displaced.<br />
Under Hobet’s plans, statements from Arch submitted in court say that “ a valley fill and an impoundment pond would destroy the inundate the farmhouse and outbuilding and bury the immediate surrounding land under the valley fill.” A lower court agreed with the company, but in the end, the family won.<br />
The mining operations have expanded to surround the Caudill property.
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  • Families hike through the wilderness following the few rough trails on Moser Island in the Tongass National Forest.
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  • A mother and daughter and other family members visit at the end of a reunion of the Caudill/Miller family at their homestead in Mud, West Virginia. The family fought Arch Coal Company in court to keep their 26 acres where they plant a garden and spend weekends. The home stood in the way of Hobet 21, a 12,000-acre, mountaintop removal mine. After a long battle in court, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a Lincoln County family was wrongly forced to sell its home to make way for the surface mine. Justices said a lower court was wrong to discount the family’s ‘sentimental or emotional interests’ in the property in favor of the economic concerns of a coal operator.”<br />
<br />
The mining operations expanded to surround the Caudill property.
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  • A family detained in Barcelona because family member is suspected terrorist.
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  • A family works together snapping green beans at the Caudill-Miller family homestead.<br />
It is a summertime ritual for everyone to put up produce from the garden.
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  • A family siting in the kitchen of their apartment has a complicated family life. The grandparents were farmers and lost the land and their occupations to development. If the grandparents did not have a child they would be homeless. Ironically, the same development that took his home now supports their daughter, Ding, who works in the industrial park occupying the land that was once the father’s farm.
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  • Framed portraits are displayed on the family organ in the living room of the Caudill-Miller homestead.
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  • The Ferme family plays traditional music on their Steirische Harmonikas, commonly known as accordions. The patriarch of the family directs the brothers and sister as they rehearse for a competition. Slovenian culture celebrates folk music as part of the Alpine culture.
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  • On the edge of the PanAmerican highway, a Huastec Indian family plays soccer kicking the ball under a clothes line in the front courtyard. The family still follows the old ways in the mountains of Mexico, living in a thatched adobe house and surviving on farming.
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  • The Protiva family enjoys the relaxing virtues of a cart full of hay.
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  • A teenage girl plays piano for her family that gathers around to listen in their apartment.
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  • Father and daughter share a tender moment on their boat which is home for the family during fishing season off the coast of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska’s Southeast. When not the fishing for salmon, the family lives on nearby Marble Island and the children are home schooled.<br />
Alaska’s largest and most valuable fisheries target salmon, pollock, crab, herring, halibut, shrimp, sablefish, and Pacific cod.<br />
The total value of Alaska’s commercial fisheries is $1.5 billion for the fishermen, with a wholesale value of $3.6 billion. Economists estimate the commercial seafood industry contributes $5.8 billion and 78,500 jobs to the Alaskan economy. Fisheries management in Alaska is based on scientific assessments and monitoring of harvested populations and is regarded as a model of successful natural resource stewardship.
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  • An Ecuadorian family eats breakfast together in their home in a Quito suburb. It is a tradition before family members go to school or work.
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  • A young girl is part of a typical fishing family enjoying a meal of mussels and other seafood.<br />
<br />
Spain continues to be the European country that consumes the most fish, with 92% of Spanishs consuming fish and aquaculture products every month.
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  • A family meal in Gandiol. Senegal’s national dish is thieboudienne.  Eaten from the salty coast to the arid heartland, thieboudienne literally means rice & fish and is a staple.  For a country known to produce some of the tallest and strongest people on earth, fish is an essential source of protein.
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  • A typical fishing family enjoys a meal of Spanish paella with rice mussels and other seafood. One of the world's busiest seafood ports, Vigo, auctions half a million tons of fish daily contributing to pressures on marine life with fish stocks in decline.
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  • A farming family travels by horse and sled.
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  • A family serves dinner to guests in the kitchen of their float house on the water. Their home is made from scavenged wood then tied up with ropes in a quiet bay near Prince of Wales Island. These homes are characteristic of the region and only accessible by boat or float plane.
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  • A Native Alaskan family crosses a stream while hiking with their dog through the woods. They are headed back to their fish camp on Lisianski Peninsula on the west coast of Baranof Island.
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  • A young girl wears a hair net at lunchtime outside a family take-out restaurant in the small fishing village of Petersburg. Located on Mitkof Island, the community attracted immigrants of Scandinavian origin to the Native Alaskan Tlingit settlement in Alaska's Southeast.
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  • Family and friends build a bonfire on a secluded beach on Prince of Wales Island.<br />
The main island includes hundreds of adjacent smaller islands—a total of more than 2,600 square miles with 990 miles of coastline and countless bays coves, inlets, and points.<br />
The landscape is characterized by steep, forested mountains and deep U-shaped valleys, streams, lakes, saltwater straits, and bays that were carved by the glacial ice that once covered the entire area. The spruce-hemlock forest covered land is full of muskegs, or bogs. Most of the mountains on the island are 2,000 to 3,000 feet tall.
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  • A farm family heads home after working in the fields in LaVal under the vista of the Dolomites.  The mountain cliffs are so steep that no glaciers formed on them. The Alps thrust up when tectonic plates collided between Africa and Eurasia.  The Ladin people living in the mountain region have a close bond with nature and the outdoors.
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  • A family frolics in the surf on a beach with sea stacks.
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  • A family wait out a storm to return to harvesting their taro fields.
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  • A family tending their taro fields, threatened by apple snails.
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  • Kanoa family tending their taro fields, threatened by apple snails.
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  • A brother and two sisters weed a corn patch in the garden at the family homestead.
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  • The Miller and Caudill family sit at a picnic table preparing string beans from the summer garden for canning in Mud Creek.
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  • Young girls playing with silly string at a family reunion where it's all fun and games and great pitch in dinners.
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  • Family gathers around the table at the homestead for a summer lunch with corn and tomatoes from the garden.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023684.jpg
  • A father and sons react to the polluted orange/black water in their bathroom. It smells bad, has an oily residue and is mixed with coal soot. The man fears for his sons because his own health is effected. He suffers from rashes and red eyes when he showers and he tells the kids, “Don’t brush teeth in water. Don’t drink the water.”<br />
<br />
When he moved in his home, he thought the only problem was that the water was discolored by iron. At 38 years old, he has since developed gallstones, breathing problems, memory loss, and his hair is falling out. He has anxiety, nervousness, and his pancreas is at two percent function. All of this occurred after he moved to this trailer. Scared for his family, he asks, “What have I done to them?”<br />
A November 4, 2003 Associated Press article by Michelle Saxton of the Williamson Daily News entitled “Water in Mingo Communities Contains Manganese” stated that some security guards quit opening valves on Massey pumps when they realized they were poisoning the community. In a later court hearing it was shown that Massey Coal Company had, indeed, Illegally injected slurry from the Rawls Sales Processing Company (Massey Coal Company subsidiary) impoundment into abandoned underground mines for at least eight years.<br />
<br />
As of the fall of 2011, some 500 West Virginia residents are still in limbo over a suit brought against Massey energy over claims that it and Rawls Sales poisoned hundreds of drinking water wells with coal slurry.
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  • It's playtime before bedtime for a family in Clovis. They are one of 30 homes who have a a dry well because of heavy agricultural and industrial use. They all share a need for water from the Ogallala Aquifer.
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  • A family parks an RV in the field during the harvest so they can escape the elements and the bugs while they eat together. Generational farming is more rare as it is hard to make ends meet, especially during a drought. The farm grows drylands wheat which is a variety more drought tolerant.
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  • A family parks an RV in the field during the harvest so they can escape the elements and the bugs while they eat together. Generational farming is more rare as it is hard to make ends meet, especially during a drought. The farm grows drylands wheat which is a variety more drought tolerant.
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  • A family parks an RV in the field during the harvest so they can escape the heat and other elements like bugs while they eat. They are harvesting drylands wheat which is more drought tolerant.
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  • The family that supplied the bulls for the Nyicheriesee ceremony have the stomach contents of the bulls smeared onto them as a sign of respect.
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  • The family that supplied the bulls for the Nyicheriesee ceremony have the stomach contents of the bulls smeared onto them as a sign of respect.
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  • The family that supplied the bulls for the Nyicheriesee ceremony have the stomach contents of the bulls smeared onto them as a sign of respect.
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  • An El Molo fishing family returns to their village from the shore of Lake Turkana.
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  • Fishing family on Ferguson Gulf in the Lake Turkana area of Kenya.
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  • The family that supplied the bulls for the Nyicheriesee ceremony have the stomach contents of the bulls smeared onto them as a sign of respect.
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  • An Aborigine family sitting outside. Two are painting a pukamani pole.
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  • A family gulps water from an overflow tank during the monsoon.
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  • Five generations of the Walker family pose for a group photo at the Curry Count y Fair rodeo.
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  • Members of the singing Heygood family get dressed prior to a performance in Bra nson.
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  • Family and friends clean crabs to prepare for dinner at their float house on Piggy Cove in Southeast Alaska.
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  • Kara family doing flood recession agriculture on the banks of the Omo.
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  • Lu, left, pushing a baby carriage, lives with his daughter-in-law and son in an apartment in Shenzhen. The son has a start up GPS business and often works from home. Lu was sent to prison during the Cultural Revolution and tries to keep pace with today’s values, but still has questions about his son’s world. <br />
The “little capitalists” that live with their Cultural Revolution parents often have conflicts of ideology. The older generation thinks in a more Confucian way—never rise above your teacher, never rise above your father, others’ needs are more important than your own.
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  • Lu  lives with his son and daughter-in-law and their baby in a small apartment.  Lu was sent to prison during the Cultural Revolution and tries to keep pace with today’s values but still has questions about his son’s world. The “little capitalists” that live with their Cultural Revolution parents often have conflicts of ideology. The older generation thinks in a more Confucian way—never rise above your teacher, never rise above your father, others’ needs are more important than your own.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176312.jpg
  • A family of musicians walk along the banks of the Suwannee River. Elroyce Makley strums her Autoharp, while she and her daughters stroll through the Stephen Foster State Folk Culture Center, located in Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida.
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  • A woman holds her child safely during a domestic dispute incident amon Pygmy family members.
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  • A Rapa Nui impresario takes a break at home with his family while waiting for tourists to arrive at his restaurant.
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  • A man gently holds his great granddaughter in the living room of the Wyoming family ranch.
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  • Cradling his puppy, “Meatball,” a youth hangs out on the dock of the float house. The family built their home off the coast of Prince of Wales Island which is only accessible by float plane or by boat. The houses are characteristic of Southeast Alaska, tied down with ropes and floating on the water in an isolated bay.<br />
Life in remote Alaska offers adventures and an atypical lifestyle rich in experiences.
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  • The McCLean family anxiously watch bidding while selling colt at Keeneland auction. Hard work in breeding and raising foals and investment in a horse sometimes culminates in a minute of frantic bidding. The father and his two sons wait to see if their year of effort pays off.
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  • Pygmies travel the dusty trans-African highway in Epulu carrying supplies and family members too small to walk.
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  • Walking in Lummus Park along Ocean Drive in South Beach.
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  • A father and son skip rocks along Lake Michigan south of the Loop.
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  • Three generations play in the home they share. Three young boy lies on the floor mesmerized by a toy train on a wooden track while two women, his mother an grandmother, watch him play.
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  • Reflection in the rear-view mirror of a teenage schoolgirl sitting behind her father in a car.
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  • A man plays with his daughter in their apartment in Guangzhou.
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  • A woman holds a baby while walking through the door of an adjoining room in a Chinese apartment.
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  • A man on a computer and two women with a baby on a bed in an adjoining room in a Chinese apartment in Shenzhen.
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  • The town of Kamikatsu keeps the primarily elderly population employed.
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  • Visitors view an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry.
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  • Young cowboys turn a ranch cattle chute into a homegrown playground on a ranch near Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon. The young cow pokes learn to ride horses when they are young, and help move cattle on the ranch.
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  • Headed to a Samoa church service with religious icons in the back of a pickup truck.
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  • A child is covered in herbs as part of a coming of age ritual.
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  • A child is covered in herbs as part of a coming of age ritual.
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  • Father and son play
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  • Father and son play in the bay.
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  • During church service, a child in its mother's arms is amused by a parishioner in the next pew.
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  • Father and son play in the bay.
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  • Samoa church service.
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  • With food ready on the table, a woman sweeps the floor cleaning an apartment before dinner while her husband watches their young child.
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  • A man is draped in a cape while he gets a haircut from his daughter-in-law in their high rise apartment.
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  • A young girl carries a heavy load as she cuts and plants asparagus shoots and buries them with sand in an agricultural area south of Lima. The plants are deeply covered with soil and remain white from lack of sun light, which some find a gourmet delicacy.
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  • Salmon return from the ocean to spawn in streams on Prince of Wales Island. Scientists believe the fish species navigates to where they were born by using the earth's magnetic field like a compass.
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  • Cannery workers suit up in gloves, masks, hairnets and protective suits to clean seafood. Petersburg, a fishing village in Southeast Alaska, is known for fishing fleets netting large catch for processing.
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  • Cannery workers take a break on the dock during the busiest part of the salmon season in Petersburg on Mitkof Island.  Hundreds of seasonal employees--some students trying to earn some quick money.<br />
Economists estimate the commercial seafood industry contributes $5.8 billion and 78,500 jobs to the Alaskan economy.
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  • Children help their mother unload the dishwasher in the kitchen of their home on Prince of Wales Island.
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  • Father and daugter kayak on still water near Moser Island which separates North and South Arms Hoonah Sound on Chichagof Island in Tongass National Forest.
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  • Hiking and exploring the wilderness in Tongass National Forest, conservationists playfully teach their daughters to whistle using blades of grass.
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  • Volunteers hold feral kittens waiting to be spayed and neutered.
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  • A boy begs his father for a pet leopard gecko at a breeder show.
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  • Mary Miller gives a warm hug and greets a young boy at a church ramps dinner.
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  • A man walks down the road in Tom Biggs Hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, while his great grandchildren play nearby.<br />
Lucious Thompson joined Kentuckians for the Commonwealth when he found his land disrupted from mining above them. “There’s good mining and there’s bad mining,” Mr. Thompson said. “Mountaintop removal takes the coal quick, 24 hours every day, making my streams disappear, with the blasting knocking a person out of bed and the giant ‘dozers beep-beeping all night so you cannot sleep.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Thompson spoke with the authority of a retired underground miner. Underground miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh, deep workplaces that were far out of sight. Now, the hollow dwellers have become witnesses more than miners as a fast-moving, high-volume process uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills.<br />
<br />
“They make monster funnels of our villages,” said Carroll Smith, judge-executive, the top elected official, here in Letcher County, the location of some of the worst flooded hollows adjoining mountaintop removal sites. “They haven’t been a real good neighbor at all.”<br />
<br />
With underground mining, coal miners led quieter, more pastoral lives above harsh workplaces deep in the ground and far out of sight. With mountaintop removal, a fast, high-volume process that uses mammoth machinery to decapitate the coal-rich hills that help define the hollows, the residents have become witnesses more than miners.<br />
<br />
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/national/11MINE.html
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  • Dust Buster environmental activist Mary Miller embraces her granddaugher while her grandson rides his bike near the elementary school in Sylvester.<br />
Miller helped document problems and joined a lawsuit when the community faced degradation from a coal processing plant that covered their town in soot.
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  • A mother and daughter worship during a church service.
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  • A farmer stands with his child in a cornfield.
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  • A proud father shows off his offspring in a backpack to a group of elderly admi rers during an evening concert at the Final Stretch Music Festival, an event ma rking the end of the horse racing season.
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  • Carolyn Rossi Copeland takes her twin daughters to her work in New York City fr om their home in Garrison, more than an hour's commute one way on the train. Th e route passes along the Hudson River.
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  • A grandmother and her granddaughter collect grasshoppers in a Oaxaca cornfield. Fried, the insects make a tasty dinner dish.
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  • The ritual killing, roasting and sharing of a bull that will feed dozens of the Daasanach tribe.
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  • A Turkana woman helps her El Molo husband with the fishing nets while caring for her child.
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