Poverty and environmental destruction have many things in common, including this: They’re frequently hidden in plain sight.

 I thought about this last month, when I wrote about Latino neighborhoods in my blog Finding Your Way, and on a recent drive through West Virginia, when I saw a series of high, utterly flat ridges. Nature didn’t create perfect table tops in West Virginia. The mountain peaks that used to sit on top of them were blasted away by coal companies.

THE WOMAN SAT on a rolled-out sleeping bag beneath the protective awning of an office building, just barely out of the cold winter rain. Her hair, brown and curly, seemed bouncy in a way that she did not. She was perhaps 30, dressed in jeans and a pretty, if frayed, pink fleece jacket. She might have been a backpacker ready to embark on a weekend camping trip—except that she wasn’t. An array of plastic bottles holding water and GatorAde sat next to her on the sidewalk. As I watched from the window of my dry, warm car, she rooted through a large backpack and pulled out an extra pair of socks.