Deep commoning: public folklore and environmental policy on a resource frontier

Abstract

This article explores the concept and practice of the commons as a holistic, multi-sectoral, cross-disciplinary framework for critical heritage work on resource frontiers. Drawing from my research on forest commoning in the Appalachian coalfields, I argue that land-based systems of commoning vital to communities in the path of resource extraction merit more attention from heritage workers. Commons tend to disappear through their atomization into siloed objects of study and stewardship. This disappearance, partly a function of reductionist, dualistic thinking, also signals a persistent colonialist myth of emptiness. I argue that the embodied, participatory field methods of public folklorists are particularly well-suited to the study and accreditation of land-based commons as heritage. Building on the idea of ‘deep ecology’, the notion of ‘deep commoning’ espouses our implication in worlds we bring into dialogue through the practice of public folklore as critical heritage work.

Keywords:

• Intangible cultural heritage
• folklore
• environmental policy
• resource frontiers

Notes

1. Reid and Taylor (2010) refer to such disorientation as an expression of “pluritemporality”.

2. For a list of published peer-reviewed studies on the social, cultural, ecological, and health impacts of mountaintop removal mining, see the Coal River Mountain Watch web page: http://www.crmw.net/about/impacts-of-mountaintop-removal.php. (Accessed 30 April 2016).

3. Within a few decades of its passage, the regulatory paradigm established by NEPA was replicated in nations across the world. The global legacy is, as Wood (2014, 6) writes, a ‘decision-making elite [that] includes thousands of environmental agencies […] Collectively, they rule over Earth’s natural resources’. Wood (2014, 50) cites mountaintop removal mining as a vivid illustration of the regulatory paradigm’s effects in Central Appalachia.

4. In Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice, Reid and Taylor (2010, 22) usefully define ‘commons’ as the ‘substantive grounds of social and ecological reproduction’. I have focused my definition around public folklore’s recognition of custom.

5. Interview with author, March 31, 1997.

6. Interview with author, April 18, 1997.

7. Interview with author, May 25, 1994. The practice was severely curtailed in the early decades of the twentieth century, when timber companies prohibited the cutting of ‘merchantable timber’.

8. Interview with author, April 22, 1995.

9. Interviews with author, April 22, 1995.

10. Interviews with author, April 22, 1995.

11. West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Surface Mining Application no. 3019-99.

12. Interview with author, June 29, 1995.

13. Conversation with author, March 15, 1996.

14. See https://www.loc.gov/collections/folklife-and-landscape-in-southern-west-virginia/ (Accessed 30 April 2016).