Excerpt from Appalachia: A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964: 

“In the future, Appalachia’s potential of timberland, fossil energy and recreational water and wilderness will be required for the satisfaction of our national goals. But further resource activity in the region if uncoordinated in its timing or its relationship to human and social capital could repeat the pattern and make little more than a piecemeal improvement of the Appalachian social and economic infrastructure.”

“Appalachia’s millions of people, whose material and social betterment the focus and end of all development effort, are also the region’s prime resource. Their individual distress is today a national liability: but their pooled personal hopes, talents and resourcefulness is a reservoir of creative energy the Nation can no longer afford to ignore.”

“The Appalachian people have no desire to abandon their traditional home, but whether they leave or stay, their continuing distress compounds a double loss for both the region and the Nation — the cost of welfare maintenance and the loss of productive vigor.”