The Role of Drones in Anti-Mountaintop Removal Activism

This research project examines the usefulness of drones in environmental activism, especially within the fight against mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The paper examines the tactics of Coal River Mountain Watch and the Appalachian Mountain Patrol, anti-MTR activists that use drone surveillance to enhance their fight against this destructive practice. The use of drones increases the complexity of strategies employed by Appalachian activists and challenges many of the traditionally held, but continually critiqued, stereotypes present in Appalachian research. Beyond a deeper understanding of Appalachian activism, this paper investigates the ways in which knowledge production and epistemological assumptions are challenged by less costly and more accessible technologies such as drones.

Mountaintop Removal Mining Threatens the Survival and Recovery of Imperiled Species

Environmental laws need sound data to protect species and ecosystems. In 1996, a proliferation of mountaintop removal coal mines in a region home to over 50 federally protected species was approved under the Endangered Species Act. Although this type of mining can degrade terrestrial and aquatic habitats, the available data and tools limited the ability to analyze spatially extensive, aggregate effects of such a program. We used two large, public datasets to evaluate the aggregate effects of mountaintop removal coal mining on water quality over 15 years across Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. We combined an annual map of the extent of surface mines in this region from 1985 to 2015 generated from Landsat satellite imagery with public water quality data collected over the same time period from 4,260 monitoring stations within the same area. We used linear mixed models to estimate the relationship between the proportion of the area draining into a monitoring station that was mined and measures of water quality relevant to standards for sustaining aquatic life. Chronic and acute thresholds for aquatic life were exceeded thousands of times between 1985 and 2015 in streams that were important to the survival and recovery of species on the Endangered Species List. We found that mined area was positively related to increases in conductivity, manganese, sulfate, sulfur, total dissolved solids, total suspended solids, and zinc. The likelihood that chronic thresholds for copper, lead, and zinc were exceeded also increased with mined area. Finally, the proportion of a watershed that was mined was positively related to the likelihood that a waterway would be designated as impaired under the Clean Water Act. Our results demonstrate that mining has downstream effects that must be considered under environmental law. These findings and the public data used in our analyses are pertinent to an upcoming re-evaluation of the effects of current mine permitting regulations to the recovery and survival of federally protected species.

Anne Shelby

Teacher, activist, poet, and singer/songwriter Anne Shelby was born in Berea, Kentucky. Throughout her life, she has defined herself by her connection to home—and against that connection as well. Though she acknowledges the beauty of her rural Kentucky farmhouse and the historical roots that characterize her home, she does not shy away from writing about Appalachia’s problems, past and present, including methamphetamine use, divisive politics, endemic poverty, and mountaintop removal coal mining....

Writing Appalachia

From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. Yet, locating an anthology that offers a representative selection of authors and texts from the earliest days to the present can be difficult. Katherine Ledford and Theresa Lloyd have produced an anthology to meet this need. Simultaneously representing, complicating, and furthering the discourse on the Appalachian region and its cultures, this anthology works to provides the historical depth and range of Appalachian literature that contemporary readers and scholars seek, from Cherokee oral narratives to fiction and drama about mountaintop removal and prescription drug abuse. It also aims to challenge the common stereotypes of Appalachian life and values by including stories of multiple, often less heard, viewpoints of Appalachian life: mountain and valley, rural and urban, folkloric and postmodern, traditional and contemporary, Northern and Southern, white people and people of color, straight and gay, insiders and outsiders—though, on some level, these dualisms are less concrete than previously imagined.

“A cancer on the planet”: Mountaintop Removal and Environmental Crime in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

The American novelist Jonathan Franzen has always shown a great interest for the environmental problems, mainly in his masterpiece Freedom (2011) and in the essay “My Bird Problem” (2005). Freedom, which recounts three decades of the Berglund family, sees its main character dealing with the environmental themes for his work. Walter is a lawyer who is actively engaged in environmental causes, but the one that occupies most of the novel, is the support of an organization called “Cerulean Mountain Trust”, which aims at saving the cerulean warblers, a small species of songbird, creating a “birds’ sanctuary” in West Virginia. The honorable cause is actually moved by Vin Haven, a Texan millionaire tycoon who wants to implement an extractive coal strip mining operation and afterwards build the birds’ sanctuary as a remedial move. The aim of this paper is to analyze the novel to extract Franzen’s fictional depiction of actual environmental crimes in order to shed light on harmful practices such as the mountaintop removal.