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ABSTRACT
Central Appalachia's historical dependence on natural resource extraction industries has contributed to a long history of under- and uneven development, including trends of persistent poverty, cycles of unemployment, weakened local governance, environmental degradation, and severe social inequalities relative to the rest of the nation. Though these trends have been well documented at structural and community-levels, scholarship is more limited in assessing how the conditions of natural resource dependency may shape the everyday experiences of those who live in such regions and how those everyday experiences may illuminate challenges for future development. Employing an embedded case study design, this study examines how everyday environmental injustices may be experienced via community gardening activities, a sustainable development-oriented activity celebrated in urban locations but largely unexplored in rural environments. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 43 gardening programme coordinators and participants, the findings demonstrate that everyday environmental injustices are experienced across four distinct, yet overlapping and mutually reinforcing, dimensions: natural, built, human health, and socioeconomic environments. These factors in turn constrain programme participation and beneficial programme outcomes, particularly for more disadvantaged households that are affected by chronic illness, geographic isolation, and environmental hazards. Although the interviewees viewed many of these challenges as further justification for pursuing grassroots initiatives like community gardening programmes, these constraints also interacted in a way that limited the success of these locally-oriented sustainable development efforts, particularly for individuals who are the most socially, economically, and environmentally marginalised.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the people of Grow Appalachia for their participation in and support of this research project. The author is also grateful to Dr.'s Clare Hinrichs, Kathryn Brasier, Carolyn Sachs, Kai Schafft, and Ted Alter as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 A common measure of natural resource dependency comes from the United States Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, which has identified 221 total counties (184 of which are nonmetropolitan) as mining-dependent because 13% or more of the county's average annual labour and proprietors’ earnings were derived from or 8% or more of total employment during 2010–2012 was based in mineral, oil, and/or gas extraction (USDA Citation2019). These areas are largely concentrated in the central Appalachian Mountains, Texas and Oklahoma, and the Intermountain West (Krannich et al. Citation2014; USDA Citation2019).
2 A Grow Appalachia programme site was designated a high coal-impact partner site if the counties they served were designated as a coal production county by the Kentucky Center for Business and Economic Research (Roenker Citation2002) and/or a mining-dependent county by the USDA ERS 2015/2004/ and/or 1989 county typologies (USDA ERS Citation2016).