From War on Poverty to War on Coal: nature, capital, and work in Appalachia

Abstract

The world-ecological framework has recently made innovations in the field of environmental and historical sociology. World-ecology seeks to transcend modernity’s dualism of nature and society in favor of humanity in nature. This paper seeks to contribute to the world-ecology framework by incorporating economic theories of development as a capital-state environment-making project. In doing so, I reveal the centrality of the role of experts in the production of knowledge, ideas as material force, and the control over people and places. I argue that a world-ecological reading of the modernization of Appalachia reveals three important relations. First is the contradictory relation between ideas of development and the political economy of the coal industry. Second, by placing nature at the center of analysis, I seek to illustrate how the developmental and neoliberal states were each environment-making projects with marked differences and overlapping similarities. Last, economic experts were central during periods of crisis and thereafter. The paper examines the historical development of Appalachia from the War on Poverty to the War on Coal.

Keywords:

• environmental sociology
• world-ecology
• nature–society
• Appalachia
• coal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Environment making refers to both human and extra-human activities in which the socio-ecological relations between and among them reconstitute the environment in historically concrete ways (Moore 2015). See Parenti (forthcoming) on the environment-making state.

2. According to the ARC, central Appalachia includes Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

3. This conceptualization of value relations builds upon the work of Marxist feminists (Mies 1986; Federici 2004).

4. This entails an ever-shifting configuration of organic life and inorganic environments, including, but not limited to, plate tectonics, geological formations, and climatic change.

5. Today, women around the world do the majority of unpaid work that is never calculated into the commercial economy. Safri and Graham (2010, 111) estimated that world gross household product was $40 trillion for 2006, whereas the world GDP for that year was $50 trillion. The world’s ecosystem services amount to $33 trillion a year, ‘exceeding the global gross national product of $25 trillion’ (McMichael 2012, 184).

6. The ARC is made up of 14 members: 13 governors of the Appalachian states and 1 appointed federal co-chair.

7. By 1990, over $5.7 billion in federal funds and almost the equivalent to that in other public sources had been directed into the ARC program (Widner 1990, 291).

8. Regional agriculture was primitive in form partly because of its mountainous topography and lack of adequate flatland that could utilize modern-day farm equipment on economies of scale (ARC 1964).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Marley

Ben Marley is a Ph.D. Candidate in sociology at Binghamton University. He studies energy and agriculture in the United States from a global perspective.