Photo: Wikimedia Commons
On a freezing afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at a reclaimed strip mine that was shut down years ago and is part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that would house 1,300. They were there to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the footprint. It wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The penitentiary was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau cleared the way to begin buying land. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The Bureau of Prisons estimates the prison will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands.
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