Uneven Ground (45 page)

Thus, in an ironic way, Appalachia at the turn of the twenty-first century was a microcosm of the contradictions confronting modern American life. The flood of suburban tourists seeking to renew their relationship with the natural world passed young people along the highway leaving the mountains in search of better lives in the cities
from which the urban refugees had fled. Flatland exiles seeking to possess a piece of the mountains and to control the views from the ridgetops clashed with local families who resented fence lines and no-trespassing signs and who struggled to find work and adequate housing. Insiders and outsiders alike consumed the electricity generated by coal from surface mines that destroyed forests and decapitated the mountains forever. Everyone searched for some connection to place. Some hoped to find it in the new Appalachia. Others clung to the memory of the old.

On the morning of August 13, 2007, fifty demonstrators gathered outside the downtown Asheville, North Carolina, branch of the Bank of America to protest the bank's investment policies in Massey Energy and in Arch Coal, two of the largest producers of surface-mined coal in Appalachia. Protesters hoped to draw public attention to Bank of America energy investments that not only promoted the use of coal, the largest single contributor to global warming, but supported the destructive practice of mountaintop removal that was devastating the land and way of life in the heart of the mountains. In the weeks ahead, demonstrations would spread to other Bank of America branches and even to the bank's annual investors' conference in California, where protesters also criticized company support of Peabody Energy, whose Black Mesa mine in Arizona had damaged the land and water of indigenous Navajo and Hopi communities. Some of the same environmental activists who confronted the Bank of America had helped earlier to sideline plans for two coal-fired electricity-generating plants being proposed for western North Carolina, but at the time of the Asheville demonstration, plans were on the books for the construction of almost 160 more coal plants nationwide.
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The event in Asheville, however, symbolized an important change in the way America understood Appalachia. Asheville was an unlikely place to find demonstrations against the coal industry. That no coal was mined within a hundred miles of the old Blue Ridge town, which had become a prosperous cultural and recreational icon of the new southern highlands, signified both the acceptance of a broader regional identity since the 1960s and a shift in popular perceptions of regional distinctiveness. No longer was Appalachia defined primarily by poverty and cultural backwardness; the region now had become a
symbol of the larger dilemma of people's relationship to the land and responsibilities to each other. Appalachians and neo-Appalachians alike increasingly acknowledged that the quality of life in the mountains was inexorably tied to the use of the land and that Appalachia's problems were both systemic and universal. The Appalachian experience reflected the social, environmental, and cultural consequences of unrestrained growth, and it echoed the voices of powerless people struggling to survive in a changing world. Saving Appalachia now meant confronting the larger structures of global injustice as well as challenging local power brokers, corporate greed, and government apathy.

No one articulated more clearly the plight of the mountains and mountain people in the new era than Larry Gibson. The hero of activists in the heart of the region who were fighting mountaintop removal and the expansion of coal production that was destroying forests, streams, and the future of communities, Gibson spoke for another generation of mountain families who had witnessed progress, the coming of government programs to uplift mountain people, and the tapping of mountain resources to better connect Appalachia to the mainstream economy. Standing on the precipice of the three-hundred-foot cliff that marked the boundary between his farm and the strip mine that had destroyed his mountain, he lamented what had been lost. “We have a history here,” he told a group of visitors as he picked up a broken miner's lamp that he had discovered in his surviving woods.

We have a conversation with the land here. The land will talk to us. It will tell us things. Nothing comes easy for people in the mountains. This is a symbol of what the history of the mountains is about. We are a little worn. We are a little bent. We are a little broken. But we are real, and we are here. And we are tired of being collateral damage, a sacrificial zone for rich people and other people to be comfortable in their life. . . . This is life for us. We don't have a choice here in the coalfields. We are either going to be an activist or we are going to be annihilated. And I am tired of seeing my people being annihilated. So we are fighting back. It's the only thing that we have.
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In his lifetime, Gibson had witnessed the rediscovery of the mountains by the national media, the arrival of idealistic poverty warriors, and the enactment of a special program to promote economic development in the region. He had traveled the new highways, visited the new hospitals, and placed his children on the buses that carried them to the new consolidated schools. Many of his neighbors had left for jobs in the new urban centers, where they could find shopping centers, housing developments, and all of the material goods of modern life. For Gibson and many others, growth had indeed come to the mountains, with its uneven benefits and hidden inequalities. But whether or not that growth had fulfilled the promise of the Great Society was a matter of debate. In that respect, the uneven ground of Appalachia was no longer the other America. It
was
America, and the region's uncertain destiny stood as a warning to the rest of the nation.

In the years since the first publication of this book, little has changed to improve economic conditions in Appalachia. If anything, inequalities in the region have grown. In
Uneven Ground
I documented the failure of free-market capitalism and Keynesian public development strategies since World War II to address the structural problems that have historically burdened Appalachia: specifically, land distribution and use, political corruption, environmental exploitation, income inequality, and economic dependency.

In spite of material improvements, persistent socioeconomic inequalities continue to make the region one of the poorest places in the United States. Rising unemployment and the absence of hope for the future still drive young people from rural areas. Tourism and second-home construction in the Blue Ridge dropped off dramatically during the 2008 recession, and county budget cuts produced layoffs of teachers and public employees throughout the region. The national media have persisted in stereotyping Appalachia as a place of need, concentrating increasingly on the despair of the region's young people. In 2009, for example, Diane Sawyer focused on the epidemic of drug abuse and the challenges facing the “Children of the Mountains” in her ABC documentary of that name, while the following year at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia, twenty-nine miners lost their lives as a result of corporate greed and regulatory neglect. A new kind of coal war has erupted in central Appalachia between environmentalists and the coal industry over mountaintop-removal mining. In many ways mountain communities are more intensely divided today than at any other time since the era of labor conflicts in the
early part of the twentieth century. Even with the emergence of a more prosperous “New Appalachia” in some middle-class growth centers across the region, rural communities and working-class families continue to suffer from economic and social decline. As it has in the rest of America, the gap between the rich and the poor keeps on growing in Appalachia, and in the mountains that gap is made even more apparent by the physical destruction of the land itself.

Once again Appalachians find themselves at a crossroads. Do we follow the patterns of the past and continue to struggle toward the values of mainstream America, while witnessing the slow death of our culture and landscape, or do we draw from the lessons of history and find an alternative path to a new economy, one that provides an adequate and meaningful livelihood for all our people and a balanced, sustainable relationship to the environment around us? Do we accept the assumptions of economic development that have dominated American life for the last century and that have produced the challenges that we currently face, or do we reconsider the meaning of the good life and build an economy and society that are based on a different set of values? Earlier in our history we witnessed two great transitions that promised progress and prosperity for the region, first at the turn of the twentieth century, when industrialization came to the mountains, and then after World War II, when government programs promised to bring Appalachia into a Great Society. Neither unregulated, free-market growth nor federal social engineering has eliminated the persistent problems of the region. This is because Appalachia's problems are systemic, and reform policies to uplift the region's people and integrate the region's economy into the mainstream have failed to address these systemic problems. Our current social and environmental challenges will not yield to the incremental reform politics of the past century if we approach them with the same assumptions that have guided past efforts. The problems facing Appalachia today require a fundamental rethinking of our political economy and a deeper reexamination of our values and culture.

These challenges, of course, are not limited to Appalachia. A growing number of our deepest thinkers (economists, scientists, historians, and philosophers worldwide) have questioned the direction of contemporary life and challenged the ethics and sustainability of consumer
capitalism. Writers such as Bill McKibben, Gus Speth, David Korten, Wendell Berry, Jim Wallis, David Shi, and a host of others have called for a kind of cultural revolution that redefines our American economy, society, civic life, and relationship to the natural world.
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At the heart of the systemic changes that must occur if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe, global violence, and widespread despair, they suggest, is a “new consciousness,” or as Gus Speth has argued, “a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.”
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These modern-day critics call for a cultural turn away from a received value system in which progress equals growth at any cost, wealth is measured only in terms of money, people and communities are expendable, and greed is good.

These writers don't ignore the need for political action and institutional change, but they recognize that changing public policy and structures in our time requires a more radical transformation of our values and culture, a deep change that stirs people to act in both private and public ways. This transformational change, notes the economist David Korten, requires the building of “a powerful social movement based upon a shared understanding of the roots of the problem and a shared vision of the path to its resolution.”
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Distinguishing between deep, ideological change within the dominant culture and behavioral change of those on the margins of the system separates these social prophets from other critics. The libertarian Charles Murray, for example, has recently blamed America's “coming apart” on the degeneration of white, working-class culture from the supposed “founding virtues” of hard work, marriage, and religion. Murray blames the working poor themselves for rising unemployment, neighborhood crime, and illegitimacy.
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Ironically, the assumptions about culture in Murray's analysis are not far removed from those of the socialist Michael Harrington whose 1962 book,
The Other America
, helped rediscover American poverty and Appalachia.
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Harrington saw America's poor in general and Appalachians in particular as constituting a nation within a nation, people who represented a different way of life from that of the middle-class mainstream. Both authors based their views on the idea of a “culture of poverty” and assumed that it was the values of the poor that were deficient. Harrington's arguments led to much of the social engineering associated with the War on Poverty; Murray's relies more on individual
conversion to save the poor. He certainly assumes that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the system; it is the poor and working classes that must change their values and expectations to match those of the more successful.

But crime, drug abuse, intolerance, laziness, illegitimacy, and family violence are not confined to the poor. If anything, educated elites have a special responsibility for setting cultural norms as a result of their greater access to media, education, the church, and other institutions of social power. If our current system has left us in a social, economic, political, and environmental wasteland, then the crisis is not one of a single class or region but is a problem that cuts across traditional divisions of class, race, and gender. It is culturally systemic. History tells us that transformational change seldom comes from within institutions of power. Real change comes from a broad-based social movement grounded in a shared understanding of the issues and a common vision of the path forward. Populism, the civil rights movement, and the movement for gender equality all began with a common identity and a familiar history, including the telling of cultural stories that differed from the dominant stories being told by the powerful, and with a willingness to act locally before linking with others to effect national political change. Permanent change in the political and economic structures that limit us is contingent on a cultural transformation that begins locally and unites people across class lines through a new consciousness.

Appalachia has much to contribute to this growing global conversation about a new economy and a new social consciousness. Indeed, the future of the region depends not so much on any short-term fix but on the outcome of that broader conversation. Over a century of experience with unfettered markets, corporate greed, land and labor exploitation, consumerism, and unbalanced growth has left a burned-out shell of a once verdant place and a once proud people. Reempowering Appalachia will require a fundamental change in our deepest assumptions. One of the central themes that emerges from our history, for example, is the fallacy of the prevailing assumption that economic growth equals progress. No economic value is more pervasive in our culture today, but at least since the late nineteenth century it has been an illusion in the mountains that simply expanding markets, building infrastructure, and extracting natural resources produces “development.”
In Appalachia economic growth produced material wealth for some (both insiders and outsiders), but it also fueled poverty and inequality within the region and between Appalachia and the rest of the nation. An increasing number of global economists have begun to question the importance of growth to economic security and happiness, and they have started to define wealth as more than just gross domestic product (GDP). If we specify the goals of development more broadly as increasing the well-being, happiness, security, health, and democratic traditions of a place, then certainly the growth-based market economy has failed to bring development to Appalachia. Building a future on the failed assumptions of the past will only perpetuate policies that have failed and that are destructive to the land, to community, and to democratic relationships.