The mountains themselves are the main character of an upcoming PBS documentary

PBS will air “Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People” in April, 2009. The four-part documentary series is being touted by PBS as the first ever to chronicle the environmental history of a particular region.

It features commentary from an impressive array of University of Tennessee scientists and preeminent Harvard biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. O. Wilson, as well as from regional writers and historians including Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Lee Settle, Ron Eller, and the late Wilma Dykeman, among others. Sissy Spacek narrates the documentary. 

“Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People” is an Agee Films project, directed by Johnson City, Tenn., native and award-winning filmmaker Ross Spears, produced by Jamie Ross, and co-written by each. Ross is a transplanted Appalachian, living for some 17 years in Asheville, N.C., and now based in Charlottesville, Va. 

SML spoke briefly with the two filmmakers after the documentary’s September world premiere at McClung Museum on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. 

SML: How did the idea develop to focus more specifically on an environmental perspective for your Appalachia documentary? 

Spears: Jamie had the idea to make the mountains the main character. Thinking of it in that way, we felt we had a fresh insight on how to go about doing this series. 

Ross: Well, Ross was really intrigued by geology and so that was part of it. It did become clear fairly early in the project that the way to tell the story of the region was to start with the geology and tie the story all together with the mountains as the main character. 

SML: After going through this whole process of documenting the Appalachian mountain environment, how are you feeling about its future? Are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic? 

Spears: You can’t help but feel a little of both. On the pessimistic side, the tools of industrialization have become so large that they affect mountain systems as a whole. It’s not just small, localized impacts, it’s systemic impact. Whether you’re talking about mountaintop removal mining, which use these huge machines that are almost beyond your imagination to behold, or you’re talking about the effects of acid rain and air pollution, which is affecting trees at the highest elevations as well as the waterways, or other concerns, there is this serious environmental impact going on that has to be addressed. The mountains of Appalachia are endangered. 

On the optimistic side, there are people and organizations that are able to address these issues in a way they weren’t a hundred years ago. We have a lot of experience to draw on. We know, for instance, that clear-cutting forests is really a bad idea. We’ve seen what happens when you clear-cut a forest. There’s plenty of evidence from the past and the present to guide us. We know what to do in most cases. It’s just a matter of getting other people to come along and getting the political will to make the changes necessary to protect this precious place. 

Ross: People are coming to the sense that we have to take care of the natural world we live in and not just take from it. There are more people watching now than ever before. Also, Appalachian values are getting another look. What Ron Eller talks about in the film — rethinking what progress is, [means] the rethinking of our relationship to the land. We’ve already got the story we need to save the things we value, and that’s part of what we try to say in the film. It’s about restoring, using the values we have that we brought along with us. One such value is community, responsibility of your neighbor. We’ve got to revive neighborliness in an old-fashioned, fundamental way. 

SML: What do you want people to take away from the documentary?

Ross: Awe. Wonder. Hope.

Spears: And one of the things we wanted to do was broaden the sense of what history really is. It’s not just the story of the actions of humans but of humans within this natural environment. It’s much broader than just the human story and much deeper in time. We wanted to end the series on a note of hope, which is why we ended it with the story of the probable revival of the American chestnut tree.

Ross: We also want people watching this in the region to feel a sense of pride. We wanted to give a picture of the region that was honest but that Appalachian people could feel proud of because there is so much here that they should take pride in.