Book Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Appalachia, as an “energy sacrifice zone,” has long been devastated by the coal industry and related negative actors, and environmental law has comprehensively failed to protect the region from such industry-produced harms.[1] Environmental law’s failure emanates from its essential supportive role within liberal capitalism’s ecologically unsustainable paradigm. This paradigm, however, has reached its limit in a world of finite resources, as illustrated by the destruction of niche sacrifice zones such as Appalachia, and more broadly, by the global ecological crisis.[2] Consequently, Appalachia does not require further environmental law reform within this unsustainable and deeply exploitative paradigm. Rather, Appalachia requires truly transformative beyond the liberal order. Remaking Appalachia further contends that such transformative change should be steeped in certain strains of ecofeminism, which focus on economic degrowth, critical justice (along lines of class, gender, race, indigenous status, etc.), local-to-global connections, and deep intersections with ecosocialist approaches.[3] In this way, Remaking Appalachia is fundamentally concerned with the pursuit of transformative economic and socio-legal change for a region that has long been subordinated. At the same time, however, this book is concerned with how such regional change can both inform and be informed by coordinated radical transformations at the broader national and global levels.

Since the late nineteenth century, Appalachia’s environment and citizenry have indeed been profoundly exploited by the fossil fuel hegemony. This fossil fuel hegemony consists principally of natural resource extractive industries—namely, the coal and oil and gas industries—as allied with complicit Appalachian elites that have facilitated and otherwise benefited from this hegemony.[4] The coal industry, in particular, has constituted the prime negative actor in the prior century and half, as it has wrought extensive (and intertwined) ecological, social, cultural, and economic devastation on the region. In the prior three decades, this phenomenon has been perhaps best exemplified by the rise of mountaintop removal mining, which has obliterated, to date, five hundred mountains and two thousand miles of ecologically crucial headwater streams, all while Central Appalachia remains among the most impoverished regions in the nation. What is more, despite the fact that coal has declined precipitously, the industry persists, and its harmful vestiges, such as unreclaimed mining sites, will long linger—even while new industrial onslaughts emerge in Appalachia; these include, among other things, the natural gas boom and a related chemical sector resurgence.[5]

The fossil fuel hegemony achieved such preeminence in part due to its historically central role within the dominant U.S. economic paradigm. Liberal capitalism—which, per the critical account, in fact drove the formation of liberal political and legal structures—is marked by the drive for ceaseless capital accumulation through multidimensional forms of oppression (i.e., of labor and nature) and a structural growth imperative.[6] Significant for Appalachia, fossil fuels have long driven the liberal capitalist paradigm.[7] Appalachian coal, in particular, helped fire the Industrial Revolution and thereafter much of the nation’s twentieth-century economic “progress.”[8] Other dimensions of capitalist development, however, also decimated Appalachia, such as the timber industry;[9] so, too, were even earlier development modes often ecologically problematic, with nascent transitions towards a capitalist agroecosystem in the region constituting a prime example.[10] While such phenomena are discussed in the opening chapters of Remaking Appalachia, the fossil fuel hegemony and coal, in particular, is indeed the overarching focal point of this book, as for the past century and a half, the fossil fuel hegemony has proven uniquely destructive in Appalachia.

Indeed, liberalism, through its various iterations—or late classical liberalism (latter 1800s–1900s), welfare state liberalism (1930s–1970s), and neoliberalism (1980s–present)—has been characterized by the state providing direct and indirect support to the fossil fuel industry. Law and policy have long constituted a core mechanism through which this phenomenon has been accomplished. As Michael M’Gonigle and Louise Takeda chronicle in “The Liberal Limits of Environmental Law,” a productionist orientation has long undergirded U.S. energy policy, as it is “framed by the overriding commitment to economic development and growth based on access to cheap energy resources.”[11] So, too, would environmental law, as enacted in the 1970s and subsequently refined, support economic liberalism because, while environmental regulations “mitigate some of the negative impacts of growth, they do not challenge the broad goal of expanding production” and, more broadly, of maximizing capital accumulation among elite interests.[12] Consequently, because environmental law exists as a mere internal supplement to the unsustainable liberal capitalist paradigm, the legal regime has failed utterly to halt ecological destruction in Appalachia and worldwide.

This preliminary overview of Remaking Appalachia’s central themes demonstrates aptly the sheer magnitude of the region’s complex past and contemporary forms of subordination—and of the corresponding need for truly transformative change beyond the liberal order. Unfortunately, however, throughout the twentieth century and beyond, many reformist-minded commentators, policymakers, attorneys, and mainstream change agents, while typically acting in good faith, have nevertheless failed to identify such crucial structural issues as Appalachia’s core dilemma. Rather, Appalachia has been characterized as a “land that time forgot” that has merely lagged behind the broader United States due to both infrastructural and cultural deficiencies (i.e., Appalachians having been long homogenized as a backwards, lazy, and “deviant” population)—which therefore merely requires liberal-steeped development or “uplift.”[13]

The Appalachian-focused 1960s War on Poverty constitutes an exemplar of such a liberal-steeped development model. While certainly well-intentioned and humane—having been characterized as the “high point in the realization of the welfare state in the United States”—the War on Poverty ultimately failed to challenge the structurally subordinating conditions wrought by liberal capitalism (and the fossil fuel hegemony, in particular).[14] Thus, following the War on Poverty, Appalachia continued to suffer from the multidimensional destruction wrought by the fossil fuel hegemony, as exemplified by the rise of mountaintop removal, and more recently, the natural gas boom.

Like the War on Poverty, an additional example of critically flawed reform—which is of particular significance to Remaking Appalachia—involves longstanding efforts at environmental law reform. As broached above, environmental law is merely part and parcel of hegemonic liberalism. However, because we live in a world of bounded resources, the paradigm of ceaseless capital accumulation and “progressive commodification of everything,” in addition to the growth imperative, has proven wholly unsustainable.[15] Thus, so long as environmental law remains embedded within the liberal paradigm, no amount of law reform will avert continued environmental degradation—and through phenomena such as climate change, potentially total ecological and social collapse.[16]

Remaking Appalachia will also detail more specific dimensions through which the environmental law regime has failed Appalachia. These include environmental law’s disjointed nature, its reliance on non-democratic administrative agencies (which are subject to “industry capture”), legislative “outs” that explicitly facilitate continued industry-produced destruction through permit-to-pollute legal regimes; and its ultimate reliance on all branches of government, which results in the regime resisting rapid development or correction. (In this way, environmental law does not halt, but rather organizes and marginally mitigates liberal capitalist-produced ecological destruction.) Therefore, environmental law’s deficient technical design—and more broadly, its overarching liberal character—have facilitated the fossil fuel hegemony in continuously devastating Appalachia’s environment and citizenry.[17]

The central thesis of Remaking Appalachia, then, is that the region should eschew further incremental legal change, or “intra-systemic reform,” within the critically flawed liberal capitalist paradigm—environmental law reform or otherwise. Rather, what is required is truly radical structural change—or “systemic re-formations”—beyond the liberal order.[18] Appalachian systemic re-formations would involve, by necessity, eliminating and transcending the fossil fuel hegemony in addition to the broader Appalachian neoliberal ecological political economy (of which the fossil fuel hegemony is just a cornerstone)—i.e., as necessarily interlinked with broader national and global efforts. In its place, Appalachian citizens can collectively reconstruct an Appalachian ecological political economy that is both critically just and strongly ecologically sustainable.

Remaking Appalachia further contends that certain strains of the ecofeminist school as intertwined with ecosocialism should closely inform such systemic re-formations in Appalachia and beyond. Ecofeminism posits that the same hegemonic patriarchal capitalist forces driving global ecological destruction are also responsible for subordination along lines of gender, race, class, indigenous status, the Global South-North divide, etc.; therefore, transformative change requires combating such forces holistically.[19] Ecofeminist strains utilized in Remaking Appalachia also posit that a degrowth model is required, as potentially steeped in solidarity economy, subsistence, and related approaches furthered through a bottom-up, grassroots approach. Moreover, such transformations are usefully situated in the context of closely related ecosocialist approaches, which involve, among other things, broader collective ownership of the means of production and democratic economic planning at all geographic levels (i.e., as is required to, most immediately, eliminate global use of fossil fuels).

Proposals for such radical ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped transformations typically raise questions as to “political practicality” in the U.S. context—as such transitions supposedly would degrade the high quality of life that modernity has provided for many citizens; therefore, from the very outset of Remaking Appalachia, a response to such concerns seems necessary.

In the first place, transitions towards solidarity economy, subsistence, and related ecofeminist and ecosocialist modes aim to maintain the core, material-based quality of life provided by modernity. As Remaking Appalachia will discuss, community-owned clean energy systems—i.e., with “clean energy” in this book denoting renewable energy sources such as solar and wind in addition to energy efficiency modes—for instance, occupy a crucial role within such transformations. Consequently, such systemic re-formations would not qualitatively reduce the genuine benefits of modernity, including an intensively egalitarian provision of education, housing, and healthcare resources (e.g., modes of healthcare for all), as supported by a strongly ecologically sustainable and highly democratic reliance on technology.[20]

What is more, in sacrifice zone regions such as Central Appalachia—which currently is beset by severe poverty, acute environmental justice issues, crumbling infrastructure, food and healthcare deserts, and ever-diminishing social safety nets and public programs—ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped systemic re-formations would very likely result in a pronounced increase of material-based quality of life. To illustrate this point, in 2017, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights toured the United States— and reported that in the Appalachian states of West Virginia and Alabama, a “high proportion of the population . . . was not being served by public sewerage and water supply services,” and that neither state could proffer “figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any government plans to address the issues in the future.”[21] Ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped transformations, in focusing on meeting community needs in an exceedingly egalitarian manner, would redress such neoliberalism-associated failures and thus likely increase material-based quality of life.

Beyond such explicit sacrifice zones, ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped transformations would also likely increase material-based quality of life for vast swaths of the United States. In tandem with neoliberalism’s rise, wealth inequality has reached historic proportions: currently, just 1 percent of U.S. households own 40 percent of all wealth in the nation.[22] Forty million Americans are impoverished—which is equal to the population of twenty-two West Virginias combined.[23] So, too, are such neoliberal capitalism-associated issues as an ever-shrinking social safety net, declining infrastructure, the decimation of labor forces, and profound environmental justice–based harms endemic not just to Appalachia but also the nation as a whole. And communities of color, indigenous communities, and women—among other marginalized groups—are disproportionality impacted by such collective ills of late liberalism. Thus, like with Central Appalachia, much of the United States would likely materially benefit from such ecofeminist-steeped systemic re-formations.[24]

That said, such transformations away from the hegemonic liberal capitalist paradigm would, by very their nature, curtail hyper-production and hyper-consumption modes—as the focus is on meeting basic and authentic needs through an approach based on production for “use value” rather than for “exchange value” in the market.[25] This would indeed constitute a dramatic cultural shift for Western nations (and for the United States, especially). A pertinent question, however, is as follows: do hyper-consumption modes actually increase more subjective quality of life dimensions for citizens, such as happiness, satisfaction, or meaningfulness? Plain common sense suggests otherwise. Thus, while ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped systemic re-formations would require abandoning hyper-production and hyper-consumption modes, such transformations would increase those quality of life dimensions which likely many would consider to matter most (including a vast and vital increase in genuine free time).

What is more, late capitalist modes could very plausibly disappear as options altogether in the coming decades, as research on the projected impacts of the global ecological crisis indicate that the crisis constitutes a legitimate “civilizational issue.” As Mary Wood chronicles in Nature’s Trust, collective studies “project that the current trajectory of carbon dioxide pollution will trigger planetary heating on a scale that will send civilization into interminable distress” and that, further, “prevailing policies of exploitation threaten to leave ‘nothing but parched earth incapable of sustaining life.’”[26] Perhaps most significantly, the watershed 2018 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—now popularized as the “Doomsday” report—argues that “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are required.[27] Thus, the political practicality critique of ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped and related transformations appears increasingly out-of-touch—as mounting evidence suggests that degrowth-centered transitions are very likely required to avert total global catastrophe.

In the specific context of political practicality in Appalachia, many commentators assert that the inherent conservativeness of the region forestalls the potential for transformative change. The so-called Appalachia-as-Trump- country phenomenon that emerged during the 2016 presidential election is certainly representative of this line of critique.[28] However, Appalachia is, in fact, a remarkably heterogeneous region (in terms of both culture and politics). Of particular importance to Remaking Appalachia, the region boasts a long, storied, and, at times, radical grassroots activism tradition, as exemplified by the early twentieth-century “coal wars” fought over labor issues and the rich environmental resistance tradition that has persisted since the 1960s. What is more, much contemporary Appalachian grassroots activism is steeped in critical intersectionality (along lines of gender, race, etc.) and thus combats compound oppressions.[29] For instance, the famed Highlander Research and Education Center—which “serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South”—has a mission to “develop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.”[30]

Similarly, Appalachian grassroots activism is marked by coalitional interlinking, as illustrated by the recent efforts towards melding the (often historically opposed) environmental and labor movements. For instance, the historic 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike—which catalyzed broader strikes across the United States—was extraordinary not only because such concerted progressive activism patently disproved the homogenized “Trump country” narrative, but also because the strikers explicitly targeted the fossil fuel hegemony. As Sarah Jones reports in the New Republic, a “recurring complaint during the strike [was] the state’s low severance tax of about 5 percent on coal and natural gas extraction,” because higher tax rates would have accounted for the teachers’ primary concern: a deteriorating state-provided health insurance system.[31] Thus, through coalition-building across dimensions of labor, the environment, and so forth, Appalachian grassroots activism continues to evolve as a potent force for social change—which can be tapped into in collectively exploring ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped systemic re-formations. (A follow-up 2019 teachers’ strike successfully defeated education-privatization legislation in West Virginia—which was notable not only for demonstrating the continued vitality of the movement, but also for what could be characterized as its multifaceted anti-neoliberalism underpinnings.)[32]

As Remaking Appalachia will discuss, beyond this grassroots base, the region also is, in many other ways, ideally suited for such systemic re-formations. As a prime example, due to the region’s vast and richly diverse agroecological base—e.g., studies indicate that Appalachia has the most diverse foodshed in North America—conditions are optimal for systemic re-formations involving community-based food systems.[33]

As a final point, while Appalachia is undoubtedly in need of systemic re-formations—and therefore constitutes an ideal exploratory case model for Remaking Appalachia—comparable transitions at the national and global levels are also required; consequently, Remaking Appalachia’s ultimate scope extends beyond Appalachia’s borders. As a baseline practical matter, for systemic re-formations to truly succeed in a region, such efforts must be intrinsically interlinked with broader transformations. As Stephen Fisher articulates in the influential Fighting Back in Appalachia: “Linking local fights to national and global struggles is a difficult and slow process, but it is the only approach that has a chance of bringing about fundamental change in Appalachia.”[34] A single region attempting to transition towards a more just and sustainable ecological political economy is certainly desirable; but geographically interlinked projects are required—and if comparable systemic re-formations are not essentially universalized, the global ecological crisis will persist as a collective “civilizational issue” imperiling us all. Similarly, to truly combat the other intertwined subordination dimensions of late capitalism—along lines of class, race, gender, indigenous status, the Global South-North divide, etc.—requires coordinated national and global re-formation efforts.

Ultimately, then, while all global regions, sub-regions, and communities are uniquely situated and thus require niche needs—as collectively and democratically determined at niche geographic levels per a materialist approach—meaningful and robust local-to- global approaches are, nevertheless, imperative for truly radical change.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF REMAKING APPALACHIA

The first chapter of Remaking Appalachia provides a brief overview of Appalachia’s basic geography and natural resource profile before turning to the history of human communities in the region—commencing with Native American populations. The Euro-American conquest and colonization of Appalachia are then chronicled, with a special emphasis placed on the critical role market forces occupied from the earliest days of the conquest. Next, the complex character of preindustrial Appalachia is discussed, before the chapter turns towards Appalachia’s late nineteenth-century period of rapid industrial growth. The coming of timber- and especially coal-based industrialization would constitute the most crucial era in the making of modern Appalachia; from this period onwards, the fossil fuel hegemony would prove remarkably successful in exploiting both the environment and citizenry in pursuing ceaseless capital accumulation. This chapter concludes, however, by tracing a more heartening phenomenon: the emergence of a robust resistance tradition in Appalachia through militant labor organizing activities.

Chapter 2 chronicles environmental law’s distant historical foundations in addition to its essential liberalism underpinnings. Numerous modes of production have engendered pronounced ecological despoliation throughout history. However, as chapter 2 details, the capitalist mode of production, in particular, has produced the current global ecological crisis, due to the scope and scale of environmental destruction wrought by capitalism. While Western ideological views largely supported such devastation from the Greco-Roman periods onwards, the Enlightenment and Romantic movements would eventually introduce new cultural modes that vitally shaped environmental law. This chapter also examines two important precursors to environmental law: the conservation- and preservation-related legal regimes. That said, the common law (or judge-made law) constituted prime “proto-environmental law” in the United States, including in Appalachia. Unfortunately, as chapter 2 demonstrates, common law—namely, tort actions such as nuisance and negligence—failed utterly to protect Appalachia from industry-based harms during the period of rapid industrialization, and indeed such doctrines were explicitly transformed to support favored industries. Chapter 2 also provides an overview of economic and political liberalism—including classical liberalism’s character, as historically operationalized by exploitative actors. As noted above, both proto- and modern environmental law are embedded within the (ecologically unsustainable) liberal paradigm, and thus the regimes have failed to halt the global ecological crisis.

Appalachia at the early-to-mid-twentieth-century point—particularly in the context of liberal development models and coal’s continued hegemony—is explored in chapter 3. The initial Appalachian coal boom waned by the 1920s (due to, among other factors, overproduction and increased market competition). While the region retained a largely fossil fuel–based mono-economy, it would thereafter be beset by boom-and-bust cycles. Chapter 3 chronicles coal’s progression throughout this period and particularly focuses on the mid-cen- tury transition to mechanization-intensive surface mining. Such a transition rapidly accelerated ecological destruction in the region and related negative human community impacts. Consequently, a rich environmental grassroots movement arose in the region that persists—in robust and multidimensional formulations—in the present era. This chapter also details the well-intentioned, if ultimately flawed, liberal development models implemented in Appalachia during this period (broadly characterized as the liberal welfare state era). Specifically, New Deal–related reforms and the Appalachian-focused 1960s War on Poverty are covered. As this chapter demonstrates, such models failed Appalachia in involving intra-systemic reform only (or mere course corrections within the liberal paradigm)—transformative change beyond the exploitative status quo, or systemic re-formations beyond liberal capitalism, were not effectuated.

Chapter 4 provides an intensive analysis of environmental law and unpacks the intersecting dimensions through which the legal regime has failed. First, the immediate social and political factors leading to environmental law’s (remarkably swift) rise are discussed: the most notable direct cause was the 1960s “environmental revolution.” Environmental law’s essential character is then outlined: a constellation of statutes constituting the core of environmental law was enacted in the 1970s and further refined in subsequent decades. The regime predominantly relies on executive branch–related administrative agencies—to which Congress delegated extensive rulemaking authority. Environmental law’s critical flaws include its overarching disjointedness; that industry and complicit lawmakers embedded nascent environmental law with legislative “outs” (thus facilitating the very industry-produced harms the regime was designed to curtail, largely through permit-to-pollute schemes); the non-democratic nature of administrative agencies, which facilitated widespread “industry capture” (or industry co-opting those agencies charged with their regulation); and environmental law’s ultimate reliance on different governmental branches, thus slowing doctrinal development or course corrections. However, more fundamentally, environmental law failed due to its essential embeddedness within the liberal paradigm. That is, for over a century, the cornerstone of U.S. energy law and policy has been to support maximally cheap energy production (i.e., historically fossil fuel–driven) to the benefit of large capital interests; environmental law, which emerged long after such policy ossified, was merely designed to support and to otherwise mitigate the most egregious aspects of this paradigm. Environmental law, then, is wholly incapable of stemming the global ecological destruction wrought by liberal capitalism.

Environmental law’s failures in the explicit Appalachian context are chronicled at length in chapter 5. Special exploratory treatment is provided to mountaintop removal (MTR). MTR arose as major force in the early 1990s and has continued, as an extraordinarily destructive practice, into the present era; environmental law (e.g., the Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act) failed utterly to halt MTR’s ravages. What is more, elements of MTR governance might indeed be characterized as the outright failure of the rule of law in the environmental governance context (i.e., as even traditionally conceived under liberalism)—which was facilitated by Appalachia’s long status as a culturally marginalized energy sacrifice zone. Chapter 5 also chronicles Appalachia’s more recent industry-based harms. Coal has declined precipitously in recent years due primarily to the rise of low-priced natural gas, but the Marcellus shale gas boom (and a related chemical industry resurgence) has engendered new ecological and human community-based harms in Appalachia. Beyond Appalachia, this chapter also unpacks the various dimensions of the global ecological crisis, including climate change, other pollution-based harms, and renewable resource overuse (now associated with notions of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene).

Additionally, chapter 5 provides a broader overview of Appalachia’s modern social, political, and economic landscape, as perversely shaped by the coal industry’s efforts to reconstruct ideological-based bonds with many Appalachian communities—i.e., following the diminishment of coal employment-based relationships. Such deeply problematic bonds have been steeped in unjust gender regimes, white supremacy, and xenophobic nationalism; and in more recent years, the Trump phenomenon and related forces have leveraged such cultural manipulation tactics in the region. Unfortunately, such collective forces likely have helped forestall efforts at grassroots-driven transformative change in Appalachia. Chapter 5 concludes, however, by discussing potential countermovements to such far-right forces; namely, the latest iterations of Appalachian grassroots movements are detailed, which, in the environmental context, arose in tandem with MTR and have been reinvigorated in the natural gas era—and which are marked by a focus on both critical intersectionality and multi-coalitional interlinking.

Chapter 6 pivots towards the prime prescriptive recommendations put forth in Remaking Appalachia, in focusing on the theory, practice, and praxis of pursuing transformative economic and socio-legal change. Specifically, as undergirded by critical legal theory, chapter 6 argues not for traditional environmental law reform—but rather for truly radically conceived systemic re-formations beyond the existing liberal order. This chapter further argues that contemporary ecofeminism as entwined with ecosocialism can deeply inform such systemic re-formations. Ecofeminist strains relied on in Remaking Appalachia focus on radical degrowth; bottom-up, grassroots approaches to solidarity economy, subsistence, and related modes; local-to-global connections; strong ecological sustainability; recommoning precepts; critical intersectionality along lines of gender, the environment, class, race, indigenous status, etc.; and deep intersections with ecosocialism (e.g., broader collective ownership modes of the means of production and democratic economic planning at all geographic levels). A materialist ecofeminist approach also is utilized, focusing on actual, lived realities within communities and regions (and which similarly eschews essentialist or homogenized notions of gender, race, etc.).

Chapter 6 also argues that, while ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped systemic re-formations are required, critical legal theory–informed approaches to select environmental doctrines can nevertheless assist in effectuating, expediting, and deeply informing such re-formations. Specifically, two outliers to the environmental law regime, environmental human rights and the public trust doctrine—as radically reconceived beyond liberalism—are discussed as such “systemic stepping stone measures.” Through an infusion of critical legal theory (e.g., community lawyering and radical cause lawyering precepts) such doctrines can explicitly support the movement towards systemic re-formations in Appalachia and beyond. To effectuate such post-liberalism ends, however, such systemic stepping stone measures must indeed be radically re-envisioned beyond their current paradigms—and furthered through the mass political mobilization modes that radical cause lawyering and related organizing mechanisms can help engender.

Lastly, chapter 7 applies the theoretical and praxis-based framework outlined in chapter 6 to the Appalachian region (while also drawing on pertinent Appalachian-related economic, political, cultural, and legal analyses from prior chapters). Specifically, an exploration of systemic re-formations in Appalachia is undertaken: to achieve such re-formations, the contemporary Appalachian neoliberal ecological political economy—in which the fossil fuel hegemony persists as a cornerstone—must be transcended; in its place, Appalachians can collectively reconstruct an ecological political economy along potentially ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-related lines, as interlinked with comparable re-formation efforts at other local, regional, national, and international levels. Community-based clean energy systems and local food systems are then discussed as two concrete examples of, in fact, preexisting reform sites—which, through further radical conceptualizations along ecofeminist and ecosocialist lines, are ideally suited for systemic re-formations in Appalachia.

To help effectuate, expedite, and deeply inform these and other systemic re-formations, chapter 7 then examines the systemic stepping stone measures of environmental human rights and the public trust doctrine in the Appalachian context. As infused with critical legal theory, such measures would be steeped in non-hierarchical lawyering approaches (e.g., radical cause lawyering)—and also would be truly radically reconceived, in explicitly recognizing that such measures must, through a radical “frame transformation” of the doctrines, have an overarching aim of transcending hegemonic liberalism. More specifically, a radically re-envisioned approach to the public trust doctrine as entwined with critically informed environmental human rights is explored as a novel means to help catalyze ecofeminist- and ecosocialist-steeped ecological recommoning in Appalachia as conceived of and furthered beyond the liberal capitalist paradigm.

Chapter 7 concludes by examining the recently reinvigorated Green New Deal through the lens of Remaking Appalachia’s prime prescriptive recommendations. Specifically, a Green New Deal will fail if formulated within liberal capitalism—but a radicalized Green New Deal could, in the alternative, help effectuate the broader collective ownership modes and democratic economic planning required for a revolutionary conversion of energy production (i.e., beyond fossil fuels) and other key sectors at all geographic levels.

Remaking Appalachia is ultimately imbued with a cautious and pragmatic sense of hope. That is, that through a collective re-envisioning of Appalachia’s ecological political economy—as effectuated through mass mobilization and in conjunction with broader national and global re-formations—the region can emerge as more just and as better positioned to face the profound perils of the Capitalocene. As Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva articulate in their classic work Ecofeminism, all of us must endeavor to “search for an ecologically sound, non-exploitative, just, non-patriarchal, self-sustaining society.”[35]

NOTES

[1] Rebecca R. Scott, Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 31.

[2] Scott, 31.

[3] Leigh Brownhill and Terisa E. Turner, “Ecofeminism at the Heart of Ecosocialism,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 30, no. 1 (2019): 5.

[4] John R. Burch, Owsley County, Kentucky, and the Perpetuation of Poverty (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008), 11–14.

[5] William Schumann, “Introduction: Place and Place-Making in Appalachia,” in Appalachia Revisited: New Perspectives on Place, Tradition, and Progress, ed. William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 7.

[6] Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 152.

[7] Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016), 319.

[8] Geoffrey L. Buckley, “History of Coal Mining in Appalachia,” in Concise Encyclopedia of the History of Energy, ed. Cutler J. Cleveland (San Diego, CA: Elsevier, 2009), 17–18.

[9] Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3.

[10] Wilma A. Dunaway, “The Incorporation of Mountain Ecosystems into the Capitalist World-System,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 19, no. 4 (1996): 379.

[11] Michael M’Gonigle and Louise Takeda, “The Liberal Limits of Environmental Law: A Green Legal Critique,” Pace Environmental Law Review 30, no. 3 (2013): 1022.

[12] M’Gonigle and Louise Takeda, 1022, 1066.

[13] Ronald D. Eller, “Foreward,” in Back Talk From Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), ix–x; Mary K. Anglin, “Engendering the Struggle: Women’s Labor and Traditions of Resistance in Rural Southern Appalachia,” in Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, ed. Stephen L. Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 275.

[14] Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 179.

[15] Longo, Clausen, and Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity, 32.

[16] M’Gonigle and Takeda, “The Liberal Limits of Environmental Law,” 1028–29.

[17] Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 57–60.

[18] M’Gonigle and Takeda, “The Liberal Limits of Environmental Law,” 1006.

[19] Ellen O’Loughlin, “Questioning Sour Grapes: Ecofeminism and the United Farm Workers Grape Boycott,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Greta Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 148.

[20] Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993), 320.

[21] Philip Alston, “Statement on Visit to the USA,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, December 15, 2017, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533.

[22] Edward N. Wolff, “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered?,” Working Paper 24085, National Bureau of Economic Research (2017): 68.

[23] Alston, “Statement on Visit to the USA.”

[24] Alston.

[25] Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 319.

[26] Oposa v. Factoran, C.R. No. 101083 (1993), quoted in Wood, Nature’s Trust, 156.

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[28] Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2017), 22–26.

[29] Nicholas F. Stump and Anne Marie Lofaso, “De-Essentializing Appalachia: Transformative Socio-Legal Change Requires Unmasking Regional Myths,” West Virginia Law Review 120, no. 3 (2018), 823.

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[32] Valeria Strauss, “This Time, It Wasn’t about Pay: West Virginia Teachers Go on Strike over the Privatization of Public Education (And They Won’t Be the Last),” Washington Post, February 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/20/this-time-it-wasnt-about-pay-west-virginia-teachers-go-strike-over-privatization-public-education-they-wont-be-last/?utm_term=.7534fb5f0739.

[33] Jean Haskell, “Assessing the Landscape of Local Food in Appalachia,” Report, Appalachian Regional Commission (2012), https://www.arc.gov/images/programs /entrep/AssessingLandscapeofLocalFoodinAppalachia.pdf.

[34] Stephen L. Fisher, “Introduction,” in Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, ed. Stephen L. Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 12.

[35] Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 297.