Uneven Ground (46 page)

The history of Appalachia, therefore, informs our emerging national and regional conversations about what Robert Bellah once called our “habits of the heart,” and the lessons of that past provide insight for building a new society and political economy in the mountains.
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Over the last four decades Appalachian scholars have gathered important lessons from the region's historic journey that provide a framework for these conversations.

First, Appalachia is not the “other America” that the national stereotypes would have us believe; instead, it may be more of a bellwether of the challenges facing our larger society. Despite more than a century of the media's stereotyping the mountains as a “strange land inhabited by a peculiar people,” Appalachia has consistently reflected the struggles, trends, and value conflicts of the larger society, sometimes with agonizing intensity. For more than a century the stereotypes created about Appalachia have obscured the reality of political and economic life in the region and have hidden the exploitation of land and people for the benefit of the rest of the country and for the enrichment of the few. Popular stereotypes have tended to blame the land or the culture of Appalachia for regional disparities, but the real uneven ground of Appalachia has been the consequence of structural inequalities based on class, race, and gender, and on political corruption, land abuse, and greed.

Second, growth and development are not the same thing, despite more than a century of equating any change in the name of modernization
with progress. Appalachia has experienced growth without development that has left the region modernized and altered but lacking the improved public resources needed to support the new lifestyles. Job creation does not necessarily produce security, wealth, and happiness. Increased consumption doesn't equal economic independence, and more consumption doesn't necessarily produce meaning in life.

Third, urban and national models of growth are not always appropriate for rural places. The consolidation of public services in one place can cause the decline and neglect of other places. Public resource expenditures in Appalachia have nurtured the development of some growth centers in the mountains, but that strategy has facilitated the decline of many rural and remote communities. Rural places usually play catch-up to urban trends, and Appalachia has often tried to copy strategies that have already been abandoned by urban areas. The sad failure of industrial recruitment and the disappointing outcomes of school consolidation are but two examples.

Fourth, land use matters. Extractive economies tend to produce social and economic inequality, environmental destruction, and short-term growth rather than sustainable incomes and lifestyles. Wherever extractive economies have dominated around the world, they have produced inequality; they often confine an area to single-industry dependence and inhibit diversification. Extractive economies and the extractive elites who thrive on them are inconsistent with long-term thinking.

Fifth, environment and culture are inextricably connected. How we use the land affects how we see ourselves, how we relate to each other, the values that we pass on to our children, and the meanings that we give to life. Rich, vibrant landscapes can give us hope and confidence for tomorrow; desolate landscapes limit future possibilities and can leave us constrained by hopelessness and despair. Preserving the Appalachian biosystem is at the very core of preserving an Appalachian identity for our children.

Sixth, development is a political act that requires democratic community engagement and open public debate. Visionary leadership and civic participation are essential for successful communities. Effective civic leadership involves thinking beyond self-interest and specialinterest
politics. Civic leadership requires us to act collectively and to think creatively. Good leadership learns from the past and uses the lessons of the past to embrace change; blindly implementing the policies that have failed in the past will produce the same failed outcomes.

And finally, community-based economies produce more sustainable and equitable development than those based solely on national and global market priorities. Local and regional markets are important because they foster diversity; disperse wealth more evenly; foster cultural pride and connection to place; encourage cooperation, creativity, and entrepreneurship; and provide greater freedom from the vagaries of international crises.

As Appalachia enters another critical period of transition, the lessons of its past suggest the need for fundamental change, not just in public policy, but in the values and priorities that shape the way we understand the land, the way we conceive of our economy, and what we expect from our democracy. History tells us how to avoid the mistakes of the past, but it also teaches us that fundamental value change is possible and that we need only to look at some of our own cultural stories for alternative traditions. For too long Appalachians have been branded as deficient and backward by powerful national stories that define the good life in terms of material wealth and consumption. For too long we have ignored or rejected values within our own communities that have resisted rampant individualism, greed, and inequality. Indeed, throughout our history as a nation and a region, countervailing value systems have always competed for control of our institutions and economy. Perhaps it is time for us to construct new cultural stories that redefine the good life for our times, stories based on a kind of “new old value system,” as Jim Wallis calls it, that neither romanticizes the past nor ignores the present.
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One of those stories, for example, would redefine the meaning of land in the mountains and reclaim a land ethic that survived among some residents of the region even while other natives and outsiders accumulated and abused the land for private gain. Indeed, one of the dominant images of Appalachia is that of a rich land inhabited by a poor people, a place that gave up its natural wealth to careless exploitation and greed. This has certainly been one story. But there has always
been an alternative story in the mountains that has tied individuals to place and that has connected human happiness and survival to the ecosystem around them. Individualism and the market economy have always been buffeted in the region by opposing values of family survival, collectivity, and spirituality. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, private landownership was frequently constrained by collective practice of the “commons,” in which community use of the woodlands was regulated for mutual benefit. The idea of the commons in Appalachia survived into the late twentieth century, as the historian Kathryn Newfont recently argued, and it continues to influence attitudes toward water quality and forest management.
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Even our religious traditions in the mountains, which have too often been replaced by a modern gospel of wealth, call on us to rethink our relationships to the land. My preacher-grandfather would have quoted Leviticus 25:23 proudly: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.” Not only is the land not ours to possess and destroy, but as tenants we have a special responsibility to care for God's land.

Reclaiming a more appropriate land ethic (a new story about the land), then, will require us to rekindle old conversations about landownership, the environment, and community health. It will demand that we accept personal responsibility for the land and that we think beyond the extractive economies of the past and toward an economy that returns value to the land and services local needs rather than faroff investors. In the short term, a new land ethic would demand the abolition of the controversial practice of surface mining, including the radically destructive application of mountaintop removal, but in the long run it would force us to reconsider how we alter the land for housing, public buildings, retail services, and other forms of development. Whether we are concerned about global climate change, the loss of species habitat, or the health of those who live in communities polluted by mining, mountaintop removal is not ethical. Nor is the practice necessary in a new regional or national economy; it is just cheaper if one ignores external costs to people and the environment. With the decline of easily accessible coal reserves in Appalachia and rising opposition
to coal-fired electric-generating facilities, the consumption of coal for electricity has dropped from more than 50 percent to 40 percent of our energy needs in the United States in the past decade. Employment in the mountains from coal has declined steadily over the years, and it is expected that coal production in central Appalachia will decline by 70 percent in the next eight years.
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It simply does not make economic sense to build a future on such an environmentally destructive and declining industry. Initially, a new land ethic might actually sustain existing jobs in underground mines while the nation moves increasingly to other sources of energy, but ultimately the region must move away from its primary dependence on an extractive economy.

Effective land stewardship does not mean, however, that we abandon our use of the land for productive purposes, only that we conceive of job creation in new and different ways. As community-based organizations throughout the region have demonstrated in recent years, land—mountain land—can become the source of new and greener jobs, managing the forests for sustainable production and carbon recovery, for eco-sensitive recreation, and for localized energy production in the form of wind, solar, biofuel, hydro, and other power for local homes and businesses. A new expansion of national forests in the region, for example, after the pattern established earlier in the twentieth century, would open large areas of the coalfields to alternative economic development as it has in noncoal areas of Appalachia. In addition, federal acquisition of mountaintop removal sites would create reforestation and restoration jobs for workers displaced by the loss of surface mining. These publicly owned lands could be developed as a new “Appalachian commons” managed for multiple-use purposes and leased to private entrepreneurs for alternative energy production, agriculture, timber, recreation, and other small businesses where appropriate.

Indeed, developing a new philosophy of land use will also encourage us to reconsider the goals and purpose of the economy itself. For too long Appalachians, like other Americans, have measured economic success by the amount of timber cut, coal mined, or products manufactured for distant markets—our regional equivalent of GDP. We have measured social success in financial terms. Those with the most
money have the most power, and the rest of us struggle to become good consumers because Wall Street has convinced us that more things will make us happy. This system has rewarded a few in the mountains, but for larger numbers of people it has produced hardship and disappointment. Psychologists now tell us that the growth-centered economy has contributed to rising unhappiness and stress across America.
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It should not surprise us that Appalachia suffers from one of the highest rates of prescription drug dependency, anxiety, distrust, and depression in the country. Despite the constant claims by political and corporate leaders that we just need more growth, an economy that fails to create sustainable jobs, hollows out communities, ravages the environment, and leaves residents dependent on a manufactured consumerism fails in its fundamental goal of providing for the well-being and happiness of its people.

Redefining the goals of the economy more broadly to meet local and regional needs rather than the market demands of distant places would involve a major paradigm shift. Rather than recruiting outside industries to manufacture and ship widgets to China, an agenda for a new Appalachian economy might seek to revive old regional and local markets in which urbanized growth centers and rim communities become the consumers of goods and services produced in nearby rural areas (food, ornamentals, recreation, entertainment, cultural amenities, and digital services, among others). Such a community-based economy would not only provide greater security for families, encourage collaboration and entrepreneurship, and revive community pride, but also integrate urban places with rural mountain communities in ways that would liberate both communities from the destructive competition of a growth-focused economy. The resources of government and educational institutions, moreover, would be called on to support local markets, small businesses, and worker-owned enterprises rather than the corporate-favored public expenditures designed for the global marketplace. Economic policy that supported stronger local and regional markets would also encourage the decentralization of education and health services, putting schools and health providers back into smaller communities, especially rural ones, where they could provide not only jobs but also community cohesion, cooperation, identity, and shared responsibility.

Finally, rethinking the nature of our economy and redefining our relationship to the environment will force us to reconsider our civic life and our responsibilities to each other. To a great degree the crisis of our economy and environment is a crisis of our democracy. By accepting the ideas of progress manufactured on Wall Street and Main Street by individuals, corporations, and institutions that had much to gain from growth and consumption, we abandoned some of our own democratic traditions that fostered cooperation, leveling, and responsibility to our neighbors and to future generations. By giving over to values of individualism, self-interest, power, and status, we allowed those who controlled the economy to shape the direction of public life and to narrow the goals for our common wealth. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, reclaiming that democratic tradition will require the engagement of all of us in an effort to apply social values that are nobler than mere moneymaking.

Once again our own stories can provide us with models to counter the dominant stories of mainstream culture and powerful media. For every story of private greed and public corruption in Appalachian history, there are stories of positive human values: the importance of family loyalty and survival, the disparagement of position, respect for diversity, compassion, fairness, equality, human dignity, social justice, and community. Such values can be found in the farm families of the nineteenth century who shared labor and the products of the land so that everyone in the community could survive; in the quiet endurance of black and white abolitionists who struggled to move slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad; and in the solidarity of mine workers who fought for better working conditions and civil rights in early twentieth-century mine wars. These values drove hundreds of young people to fight poverty and injustice in the War on Poverty. They inspired Uncle Dan Gibson, a mountain preacher, to organize his neighbors against the encroachment of strip miners at the head of the hollow. They motivated Eula Hall, a young welfare mother, to challenge discrimination by local education authorities and to establish a primary health clinic in her rural community. They moved disabled miners and their families to confront state and federal authorities in order to gain benefits for black lung disease, and they inspired Marie Cirillo, a former nun, to spend her life organizing health clinics, educational programs,
and land trusts in a remote and impoverished Tennessee mountain valley.