Autonomous Movements in Appalachia
I: Introduction to Organizing for Autonomy
Appalachia has a long history of grassroots organizing. Beginning with labor unions whose aim was to advocate for better working conditions in coal mines, a new wave of organizing has now swept the region. The new wave encompasses a range of labor, economic, identity, and environmental issues and is led by a young and diverse cohort of activists. Appalachia faces a set of deep-seated problems, but at the core of every organization’s narrative is a desire to reclaim autonomy.
I will call these new grassroots organizations “Focused Autonomy” groups. At the core of these groups’ narratives is a desire to reclaim and redirect ownership (autonomy), but tackling more focused issues is a means to that end. Take, for example, The Stay Project, a grassroots organization of Appalachian youth. Its focus is on generating collective imaginations of alternative futures for Appalachia as a way to grow interest in long-term residence and improve population retention. I see the tool of collective imagination as a way to reclaim Appalachia from the corporations that have exploited the region’s labor and environment and swiftly morphed it into a place that youth want to escape.
Organizing for autonomy in Appalachia has taken various forms. The region’s rich ecological landscape has long been the impetus for serious environmental exploitation. Harvesting of the region’s environmental resources — namely coal and timber — has been orchestrated via a suite of neoliberal policies and practices. The timeline of Central Appalachia’s exploitation has followed a process which David Harvey termed “accumulation by dispossession” and Marx called “primitive accumulation”. In the iteration of this process that has unraveled in Appalachia, resources and local labor were first harnessed by national and international conglomerates. The region’s raw extracts were transferred elsewhere for processing and distribution, which then spawned capital accumulation. Locals were left reliant on meager labor opportunities afforded by this system, while regional infrastructure was upgraded to facilitate a new level of industrialization. Work opportunities provided increasingly vital wages to locals (primarily young white males) and industry-focused infrastructure enclosed residents, further limiting their opportunities for intra-regional mobility.
Because the machine of environmental exploitation in Appalachia has been heavily reliant on low-wage, high-risk, local labor, labor unions coalesced to address issues affecting workers’ rights. As I will discuss in more detail later, the region’s labor unions were largely one-sided, resulting in the surfacing of solely pro-coal, pro-(white male) worker narratives. In response to labor unions’ hyper-focused trajectories, environmental movements emerged to address the perils of a pro-coal agenda. The new wave of Appalachian grassroots organizing is a response to the tension between past movements that calls for the dismantling of the supremacy of resource extraction industries in order to reclaim and restore regional autonomy. Here’s the history of organizing narratives in Appalachia in a distilled format:
“Old guard” corporations exploit environment and laborers for centuries.
Laborers organize and resist using health-focused narrative.
Contemporary environmental and political movements prompt narrative shift.
I interpret Central Appalachia’s history of labor unionization and environmental advocacy is evidence of a broader desire to reclaim regional autonomy. I will argue that the underlying theme of Central Appalachia’s contemporary grassroots organizing, no matter the group’s specific focus, is regional autonomy.
II: History of Labor Organizing in Appalachia
Appalachian labor union action was has been active long before the heyday of company towns in Central Appalachia in the 1920s. Coal worker union organizing peaked alongside the national height of Appalachia-mined coal consumption in the 1990s (Schifflett, 1991). Labor unions secured wage and retirement protections for miners as the industry mechanized. They also advocated for a safer and healthier workplace in response to the Black Lung disease epidemic, which still plagues the region today. Grassroots organizations, like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, have complemented the work of organized laborers by broadening their narratives to include all members of the region, not just employed miners who tend to be young, white and male. The ways that grassroots groups have supplemented organized laborers’ narratives in Central Appalachia is a clear sign of the catalytic potential of grassroots organizing.
Smith (2015) highlights this potential in a piece on gendered resistance to the coal industry in Central Appalachia. Coal workers’ labor movements have historically been one-sided, focusing only on securing protections for miners. Smith describes this shortcoming in more detail:
“Exclusion of women from underground mining, coupled with extremely limited employment opportunities elsewhere in this monoeconomy, exaggerated gendered divisions of labor, space and identity. This historical imbrication of gender and class facilitated working-class solidarity and resistance, but its legacy today carries quite different political implications.”
Smith’s characterization of the work of miners and their unions introduces a gendered dimension to the story. In Appalachia, class solidarity has been built by and for members of “the brotherhood of mining”. It wasn’t until recently that more inclusive narratives have taken center stage. The work of Central Appalachian miner unions has without a doubt translated to significant wins for laborers around the country. But separate grassroots organizing has ditched the hyper-masculine themes embraced and promoted by the labor unions and begun conversations about how to pivot away from coal.
To accomplish this, some Appalachian grassroots groups sought collaboration with counterparts in the Global South. Smith outlines an example of how Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) has exchanged knowledge with indigenous groups in mining regions in Colombia. “KFTC members’ travels to Colombia have exposed them to potent political alliances between radical trade unionists and indigenous people who contest the coal industry’s power”, Smith writes. Building solidarity across different scales is a radical approach to change-making, termed by scholars as “situated solidarity”. Rice and Burke (2018) describe one iteration of situated solidarity in which cosmopolitan-based anti-fracking groups turned to environmental activists in western North Carolina for movement-building inspiration. Smith describes situated solidarity as an instance of “exchange between two distant sites of struggle against the corporate power of the global coal industry in order to enable the creation of a “countertopography”. By using a transnational and inclusive approach to thread the needle between labor rights, health, and environment, grassroots organizing in Appalachia has transformed conversations and expanded opportunities for regional autonomy.
III: Environmental Advocacy as a Pathway To Regional Autonomy
Appalachia’s environmental movement is often portrayed as standing in opposition to the region’s organized labor groups. As I explained earlier, mine worker union narratives have often failed to advocate for whole-community and whole-region benefits of improved labor conditions. Additionally, they’ve formed bold demands aimed at preserving the coal industry. Despite some evidence of cooperation between unions and anti-mountaintop removal activists in the past, the coal industry’s economic control over the region has put environmental goals at odds with the prospect for economic prosperity under the status quo system.
The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) is an example of a grassroots environmental group whose potential to heal Appalachian land has been minimized because of the coal industry’s fabrication of a “choice” between economy and environment. By emphasizing their opposition to mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) and advocating for renewable energy to replace coal, the organization has established itself as arguably the premier environmental advocacy group in Central Appalachia. However, the forces of neoliberalism have instigated a dichotomy between authentic environmentalism and economic success, which has rendered the goals of OVEC incompatible with those of Appalachian labor unions. Can an autonomy-focused narrative bridge the gap between the plight of coal workers and the goals of land-based movements?
IV: A Modern Grassroots Suite
Rice and Burke (2017), who conducted a longitudinal participatory-action project in Southern Appalachia, describe the region’s relationship with land as a “commons environmentalism”. However, they point out that the meaning of this relationship to Appalachian residents might differ from a more cosmopolitan-environmentalist interpretation:
“The disenfranchisement of people in Southern Appalachia is deeply tied to place-based politics of extraction, exploitation, neglect, and stigmatization and [people here] are unlikely to see a communist future as a viable ambition. Put simply, we argue that the mainstream environmental community must work harder to reach marginalized communities with very different political orientations.”
I disagree with Rice and Burke’s assumption that knowledge flows primarily from cosmopolitan centers to rural regions or, more generally, regions with pressing socio-environmental tensions such as Southern or Central Appalachia. But I agree with the overarching theme of their argument, which is that characteristics and priorities of environmental advocacy solidarities differ based on the social and geographical contexts in which they’re situated. As globalization intensifies, there’s a growing need to draw connections between solidarities of varying scales and settings. “Appalachian exceptionalism” is not the right lens through which to approach environmental advocacy in the region.
The work of the Highlander Research and Education Center is an excellent example of how success can emerge from comparing and connecting solidarities across scales and settings. Highlander’s ‘Beautiful Solutions’ project (which has grown into a book by Elandria Williams), creates a channel for knowledge exchange between collectives Central Appalachia, cosmopolitan/mainstream political movements, and grassroots cooperatives in the Global South. This work also exemplifies Appalachian residents’ familiarity with and openness to more radical economic and political systems. I think Appalachia’s new wave of grassroots organizing is evidence of the region’s openness to alternative futures. By articulating and demanding the power of autonomy, these groups dismantle the historical incompatibility between economy and environment.
V: Coalescence on the Horizon
The emergence of Focused Autonomy groups — and collaboration between them — is evidence of a new organizing ideology in Central Appalachia. These groups have built upon the work and struggles of previous regional movements. They also have the flexibility to scale solidarities between varying settings and exchange knowledge between rural and cosmopolitan, Global North and Global South. By incorporating environmentalism and economic success in an anti-capitalist framework, Focused Autonomy groups’ narratives are resistant to the fractioning effect that neoliberal forces have imposed on the Appalachian grassroots in the past. Maintaining an “intra-regional situated solidarity” will be key to reclaiming and redirecting power in the face of destructive industrial corporatism. I use the phrase “reclaim and redirect power” to describe the process of restoring autonomy. Smith and Fisher (2016), in the following quote, use the word “reinvention” to describe what I think is the same process: “The central political question in Appalachia today, we would argue, is reinvention–of our economy, democratic life, social relations, and cultural representations of the region”.
