Fighting back from Trump Country: Religion and Environmentalism in Appalachia

From Joe Witt: At first glance, the southern Appalachian areas of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee might appear to be prototypical “Trump country.” Rural, religiously conservative, predominantly white, and economically depressed, the region seems like fertile ground for Trump’s so-called populist revolt.  Indeed, Trump won the Appalachian states of West Virginia and Kentucky with 68% and 63% of the vote, respectively, largely on a promise to “legalize coal.”  Taking his cues from local politicians, Trump deployed a familiar narrative:  the ongoing decline in the coal industry was not due to international market forces, competition from cheaper forms of energy such as natural gas, or a general reduction of reserves following a century of intensive mining. Instead, the “war on coal” was caused by excessive environmental regulation foisted upon an unwilling people by distant and aloof political elites.  In Appalachia, where many claim that “coal is king,” such narratives have become commonplace and many still see a revival of the coal industry through the removal of environmental protections as Appalachia’s only hope for revival.

Despite this high level of support for coal in the region, though, there remains a strong, local resistance movement to the industry. It may be tempting to see Trump’s victory in Appalachia as reflecting a broader disconnect between rural, working class whites and a broader nation that misunderstands their needs and concerns. While certainly worthy of further investigation, such accounts might also uncritically support a conservative narrative equating the working class with anti-regulation, anti-environment and xenophobic policies, masking the times that the poor and working class have forged complex alliances with other stakeholders to fight for environmental justice, worker’s rights, and against corporate power.  Appalachia may indeed be “coal country” for some, but it has also been the site of do-it-yourself style community organizing and long-lived resistance to economic and environmental exploitation. The radical spirit of organizers and educators like Mother Jones, Myles Horton, and Don West lives on in the work of Judy Bonds, Maria Gunnoe, Larry Gibson, and numerous others who continue to fight for environmental and social justice.  Against a seemingly overwhelming emphasis on coal as the key for Appalachia’s future, these activists and numerous other community members work toward more equitable, just, and environmentally-sound futures for the region.

This spirit of resistance is particularly evident in the 21st century movement against mountaintop removal surface mining.  Appalachians have opposed the social, economic, and environmental damages of surface mining for decades; but in the early 2000s, this long-lived resistance entered into a new phase, particularly with the instigation of the Mountain Justice Summer direct action campaign.  The anti-mountaintop removal movement brought together many diverse stakeholders—retired miners, clergy, educators, youth, elders, scientists, and activists—who, through their tensions, negotiations, and collaborations helped to bring mountaintop removal to international attention, revive civil disobedience and direct action tactics in a post-9/11 political environment, and forge a strong, creative, community-based movement for justice and economic revitalization.

Before starting as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the Middlebury School of the Environment, I was fortunate to be able to engage in this movement, both as a participant and a scholar. As I observed the movement grow and change over about a decade, I discovered that these activist efforts were frequently grounded in specific religious and ethical commitments to the place and people of Appalachia.  Evangelical Christians, Catholic social justice activists, American Indian religious practitioners, and numerous other advocates of nature-revering spiritualities worked together to develop and advocate for a collective vision of the region, rejecting utilitarian economic arguments supporting coal mining in favor of the affective spiritual and ethical values of place.  In their critiques of the coal industry, Appalachian activists deployed what Indian environmental historian Ramachandra Guha called a “vocabulary of protest.”  They not only challenged a specific mining practice, but also the ethical systems in which that practice was based, offering new visions of a post-coal Appalachia that moved beyond capitalist exploitation toward more localized, just economies and ecological sustainability.

While the struggle against coal and its damages in Appalachia is ongoing, the case of the 21st century anti-mountaintop removal movement provides important lessons about effective community-based collaboration to address pollution, injustice, and climate change.  Despite internal tensions and conflicts, the story of the movement demonstrates the power that local communities can harness against seemingly indestructible corporate forces. In an age of unprecedented threats to the environment, to the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised, and to democracy itself, stories like these of resistance, dissent, and resilience in light of oppression, exploitation, and totalitarianism have become all-the-more important.

More information about these issues can be found in Religion and Resistance in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky, 2016). See also: http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3878#.WIuJQ9IrKUk.

 

 

Seeking Beauty, and Expressing Struggle

Today’s post comes from Joan Grossman, filmmaker and producer, who most of you know as one of the key faculty members of the Middlebury School of the Environment:

As a documentary filmmaker, traveling for work is often the most authentic way to experience a place, if not the most pleasurable. Sometimes, as filmmakers we may be seeking beauty, but often we’re looking for something else that expresses the strange, unexpected struggles that underly our survival on this planet. This last year I traveled across the continent, from New York to Alaska, on a series of trips, as the American producer on an Austrian film about a Russian woman in New York, trying to walk home, heading for the Bering Strait.*  The film is an unusual hybrid of unscripted fiction and documentary, and was inspired by a true story from the 1920s. Our version is contemporary and takes much poetic license. Along with being a story about a lone woman on an epic, existential journey, it is also a story that slices through North America at this particular juncture in time. We were not making an “environmental” film per se, but we were working in some extraordinary places that also happen to be environmental flashpoints. 

A facility owned by Syncrude Canada north of Fort MacMurray, Alberta, where tar sands – also known as oil sands – are refined into synthetic crude oil. The emissions are so severe they can create localized weather systems. Photo: Joan Grossman

One of the most striking places we filmed at was the encampment at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where Native Americans and their allies are resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, slated to carry oil across the Missouri River just north of the reservation.The river is the main source of drinking water for the reservation and millions more downstream. It had been deemed too risky for the pipeline to cross the river at the state capital, Bismarck, 40 miles north, where the population is largely white.

The encampment had established a site where ceremony, music and organizing were taking place all day and into the night, along with an ad hoc infrastructure to care for and feed hundreds – soon to be thousands – of people every day. We were at Standing Rock in August, just as it was becoming a big international story. Among other things, we filmed statements by tribal leaders as they arrived in a steady stream of support, bringing together the largest number of tribes ever. For Native American cultures, respect for the natural environment is a guiding principle, and that was a powerful message to hear over and over again. I became acutely aware of how Standing Rock was tying together the crucial issues of our times – racial injustice, climate change, and the influence of corporate interests on our politics and economy.

Native American reservations are some of the poorest communities in the United States. Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses parts of the Badlands, where we also filmed, has a per capita income under $4,000 per year, and 60 percent of the people do not have electricity and running water. Life expectancy is the second lowest in the Western hemisphere, after Haiti. While these statistics are bleak, the gathering at Standing Rock has energized an indigenous environmental justice movement that is gaining global support, although they clearly have a big hurdle ahead with the Trump administration determined to go forward with the pipeline.

Later, in Canada, we went to Fort MacMurray in Northern Alberta, to film at the tar sands, or oil sands, as they are referred to locally. Last year, Fort MacMurray was engulfed in a devastating wildfire that was fueled by a hotter, drier climate. The fires spread dangerously close to the oil sands operations and shut everything down. As we approached Fort MacMurray we drove through miles of burnt trees that stretched as far as the eye could see. The oil sands region in Alberta has one of the largest oil deposits in the world. It is also one of the dirtiest energy sites anywhere. The extraction of oil from the thick mixture of bitumen-covered sand requires enormous inputs of natural gas and chemicals. The controversial Keystone XL Pipeline was built to carry the synthetic crude that is produced in the oil sands, and while the pipeline was halted by an opposition movement, it is now also getting revived under the Trump administration. The area is one of the most dystopian places I have ever seen. Driving north of Fort MacMurray toward the mining operations, we were hit by a pungent, acrid smell among massive installations that produce a level of emissions so high they can create their own weather system. We experienced a strange artificial snowfall there.

We ended the production in Anchorage, Alaska, where we intended to film wintery scenes. It was November, when snow and ice can be expected. But snowfall has diminished considerably in recent years. With climate change, Alaska and the Arctic are warming at a faster rate than other parts of the world. The first few days we were there it was warm and sunny. The sunshine turned to drenching rains, and we filmed our character walking through heavy, foggy rainfall, which could have been almost anywhere.

This last year was an interesting time to be crossing the country, particularly as the only American among a European film crew, partly seeing it through their eyes. The election was on everyone’s mind and we had many conversations with people along the way, whose politics we disagreed with, but with whom I sometimes found a surprising amount of common ground. Chances are I wouldn’t have had these kinds of encounters if I the work hadn’t taken me to places I might otherwise never had visited – such as former coal towns in Pennsylvania, or the prairies of rural Nebraska. In any case, I was reminded of how big the country is, and how little we talk to each other outside of our like-minded bubbles.

The project still has a long editing process ahead with almost 200 hours of material. It’s an enigmatic story; no one knows for sure if the original character made it back to Russia in the 1920s. In the film, too, there are more questions than answers. Stay tuned.

* The film, Lillian, is directed by Andreas Horvath, and will be completed sometime in 2018.

Noah Hutton, Director of “Deep Time”

This summer, the Middlebury School of the Environment will welcome director Noah Hutton for a public showing of his 2015 film, Deep Time.”

Deep TimeThe themes exposed in this acclaimed documentary perfectly blend with those of the MSoE: “Ancient oceans teeming with life, Norwegian settlers, Native Americans and multinational oil corporations find intimacy in deep time. Following up his 2009 feature Crude Independence (SXSW), Deep Time is director Noah Hutton’s ethereal portrait of the landowners, state officials, and oil workers at the center of the most prolific oil boom on the planet for the past six years. With a new focus on the relationship of the indigenous peoples of North Dakota to their surging fossil wealth, Deep Time casts the ongoing boom in the context of paleo-cycles, climate change, and the dark ecology of the future” (adapted from the film’s web site).

Deep Time has been well received by critics and audiences alike.  It won the Special Jury Award at the 2015 Environmental Film Festival at Yale, as well as the Jury Award for Documentary Features at the 2016 Wild and Scenic Film Festival.

We’re excited to have Noah Hutton join us for the screening, which will be followed by an open Q&A with the audience to explore both the subject of the film and the craft of film production.

The screening will be held on July 19th, 7:30 pm in Dana Auditorium on the Middlebury College campus.  The film is free and open to the public, and we hope you will be able to join us.

Faculty for 2015

I am extremely happy to introduce three of the faculty who will join the Middlebury School of the Environment this coming summer.  Each will participate in the core courses, either in the introductory track or the intermediate/advanced track, and each will offer an elective in their area of specialization.  I want to introduce each of them here briefly, and provide links to their full bios and course descriptions on the SoE web site.

Holly_PetersonDr. Holly Peterson joins the SoE as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science.  She is on the faculty of Guilford College in North Carolina in the Department of Geology and Environmental Studies.  With a specialization in hydrogeology, she is particularly interested in water quality and encouraging people to view their lives and societies through the lens of the watershed in which they live.  At the SoE this summer, she will teach an elective on Environmental Pollution (which will involve a mix of field, lab, and computer-based work) as well as team-teach the core course on Understanding Place, our interdisciplinary course the brings together the ecological and cultural narratives that are needed to understand the environmental present and potential futures of any place.

Joe WittDr. Joseph Witt will be the new Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities.  Joe comes to us from the faculty of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Mississippi State University, where he offers a curriculum that focuses on religion and nature.  His research includes the study of the place of religions in the Appalachian anti-mountaintop removal movement of the early 21st century.  He will join Holly Peterson in teaching Understanding Place and will offer his own elective on Religion, Nature, and Justice.

Curt GervichDr. Curt Gervich, from the Center for Earth and Environmental Science at SUNY Plattsburgh, joins us as the new Assistant Professor in Environmental Social Science.  At SUNY Plattsburgh, Curt teaches courses in environmental leadership, law and policy, and sustainability, and he is trained as an environmental planner, with expertise in decision-making and leadership.  This summer, he will teach the Systems Thinking Practicum and an elective on Wicked Environmental Problems.

We’re not done yet, however.  We plan on adding one more person to the faculty whose specialization is in the realm of the environmental arts.  Stay tuned for updates on this position!