Interrupting the Monologue: On Nicholas Stump's "Remaking Appalachia"
Nicholas Stump | Remaking Appalachia: Ecosocialism, Ecofeminism, and Law | West Virginia University Press | 2021 | 288 Pages
A sacrifice zone is a wasted place, or a place deemed worth wasting. Matthew Henry describes them as “landscapes considered expendable in pursuit of what government and industry stakeholders perceive as a ‘greater good.’” Appalachia, as Nicholas Stump writes in Remaking Appalachia: Ecosocialism, Ecofeminism and Law, is such a place, experiencing the ongoing plunder of the fossil fuel industries.
But for those restoring the streams polluted by abandoned mines in southeast Ohio, a sacrifice zone means something else. It’s the stretch downstream of a treatment system rendered uninhabitable. Restoration of stream water quality requires some of the stream be given up to permanent toxicity—it’s not ideal, but beyond the sacrifice zone is a clean stream and a restored ecosystem. There is a superficially unsettling parallel between the two uses of the phrase “sacrifice zone” as a spot worthy of destruction so someplace else can thrive. Where one permits corporate looting, though, the other permits ecological health and remediates toxicity.
The accidental detournement of “sacrifice zones” by restoration ecologists is emblematic of Stump’s detournement of parts of the law toward remediating the toxicity of hegemonic liberalism in Remaking Appalachia. To be clear, liberalism here refers to a conglomerate of economic and political liberalism. Under political liberalism, individuals are free to pursue their own conception of the good life and to maximize their personal utility. Under economic liberalism, the market economy is central in producing the goods and services that undergird an individual’s “good life.” The intersection of these systems produces a system meant to benefit society as a whole with the assumption that society is composed of an aggregate of atomized individuals.
“Perpetual economic growth is also central to the liberal economic paradigm,” Stump notes. Rather than equitable wealth distribution, liberalism values a growing economy, with the thought that this growth will eventually benefit all of society. Ceaseless capital accumulation through the commodification of everything, as Stump puts it, is core to liberalism.
Stump constantly refers to hegemonic liberalism and its commodification of everything—this is the core issue that’s depredated Appalachia and myriad other places, and as long as environmental laws remain embedded in this paradigm, he contends, environmental catastrophe will continue unabated.
Appalachia’s Beginnings
Late 19th-century writers created a portrait of Appalachia as isolated, culturally backward, and untouched by the modern world—a “land that time forgot.” This image of Appalachia became the nation’s image of Appalachia, an image that stubbornly persists in the national consciousness.
This “myth of Appalachia,” as the Appalachian Studies scholar Henry Shapiro termed it, served to mold the region into an othered place whose premodern character permitted its pillaging. Stump writes that the timber and coal industries deployed the myth of Appalachia to achieve their subordination of the region.
In a similar vein, many commentators romanticized the region, describing it as a sort of agrarian utopia. According to an account by the historian Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, prior to the industrial transition at the turn of the 20th century, “few areas of the United States more closely exemplified Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a democratic society.” Through a system of family-owned farms and household self-sufficiency, according to Eller, Appalachians avoided dependence on the market economy. They constituted a classless society of yeoman farmers. Stump argues that this account must be at least partly true, with the caveat that from its inception following Euro-American conquest of the region, Appalachia was immediately capitalistic. It was a region founded on settler-colonialism, composed of people who came from and were molded by capitalist systems. Capitalist ideology laid the foundational groundwork of Appalachia, and with it, other structural violences like slavery and patriarchy.
These myths of Appalachia homogenize the region, either as yeoman farmers or culturally deviant hillbillies, obfuscating the reality of cultural diversity in the region. If there is any unifying element to Appalachia, Stump argues, it is the idea that it entails capitalist-produced class subordination, in which local elites exploit the rest of the region’s citizenry. Rather than outside interests exploiting the region as if it were an “internal colony,” it is the likes of Joe Manchin that are responsible for Appalachia’s ongoing exploitation.
The Liberal Roots of Environmental Law
Stump argues that the very forces producing ecological crises lie at the foundation of environmental law. “Despite superficial appearances,” Stump writes, “environmental law is essentially concerned with organizing natural resource exploitation only (e.g. through permitting schemes)—rather than in halting ecological destruction in any meaningful sense.”
Marx’s framework of base and superstructure provides an idea of the matrix in which environmental laws form. Rather than assuming a mechanistic relationship between the economic base and the sprouting of legal and political superstructures, Stump relies on a critical reading that does not rely on a “strict binary between the economic base and superstructure.” In this reading, classical liberalism becomes the philosophy of a nascent class whose political and economic structures arise simultaneously based on need. The emergence of environmental law reflects an additional need produced by liberalism and geared toward its preservation.
Laws passed in the environmental decade like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act were deficient in a technical sense. They were subject to institutional capture because regulatory functions were delegated to administrative agencies full of careerist professionals; they were full of legislative “outs” that permitted industry to circumvent the law; they were intensely technocratic and repelled direct citizen participation in environmental regulation while giving industry experts a leg up.
Environmental professionals, ostensibly the “middlemen of democracy,” who could counter these industry experts on behalf of the broader citizenry, instead co-opt environmental movements and re-direct them towards ends that are ultimately self-serving. Large environmental organizations “become dedicated to incremental, intra-systemic reform only—instead of pursuing wholesale systemic re-formations targeting the liberal capitalist paradigm at large.” “Broad-based environment groups do not represent the diverse needs of communities or regions,” Stump writes. Instead, they’re concerned only with the elements that guarantee their own survival: organizational sustainability, fundraising, and tepid compromises masquerading as “results” they can flaunt to funders.
In the early 1970s, the spectacle of blasted landscapes left in the wake of strip mining in Appalachia provided, in the wake of the country’s recent environmental awakening, an opportunity to enact meaningful mining legislation. Many Appalachian grassroots organizations and citizens favored abolition of surface mining while large organizations like the Sierra Club (the “Big Greens”) sought compromise. The resulting legislation, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, was a victory for compromise. The Big Greens used their (relatively) large capacity for lobbying and their sway with politicians and influential Appalachian activists to commandeer the negotiations for the bill, producing regulations rather than abolition. The bill, characterized as a waste of time, watered down, and a betrayal by its critics, later helped legitimate mountaintop removal. This is the character of environmental law under liberal hegemony—the spectacle of protection veiling immense harm.
Beyond Liberal Hegemony
Stump constantly harps on the importance of transcending liberal capitalism and its incessant commodification of everything. Traveling to an elsewhere beyond liberalism, for Stump, won’t involve legal reform, but rather a complete transformation of the logics underlying systems of oppression—the logics that undergird ‘legal law’ and inform its spirit.
Remaking Appalachia has a vision of what this elsewhere beyond liberal capitalism could look like—solidarity economies that demand a radically democratic reorganization of the economy towards community-wide decision-making; subsistence modes of living that prioritize use value rather than exchange value—but what’s most interesting is the path Stump proposes to get there.
He advocates for what he terms “systemic stepping stone measures.” These are, as he describes them, “a potential bridge towards systemic re-formations.” I see them as hijackings of particularly promising parts of liberal law. He focuses in particular on two legal principles: environmental human rights and the public trust doctrine. Environmental human rights, which guarantee a healthy and ecologically sound environment and the right to engage in environmental regulatory processes, are already included in many nations’ constitutions (though notably not the United States), and in many U.S. states’ constitutions (most notably Pennsylvania). The public trust doctrine, on the other hand, “requires that the state hold natural resources in trust for the public.” As with environmental human rights, many U.S. states have codified the public trust doctrine either in their constitution or as laws, and unlike environmental human rights, the United States established the public trust doctrine in its federal law.
Advanced via strategies like community lawyering and cause lawyering, Stump argues that these are openings in the liberal legal regime that present an opportunity for grassroots political mobilization. Cause lawyering entails “transcending traditional law practice hierarchies and aims—including towards truly transformative objectives.” Community lawyering (according to Stump one of the most radical varieties of cause lawyering) entails a non-hierarchical collaboration between attorneys and clients characterized by shared authority and a focus on methods to achieve the clients’ aim beyond litigation, such as political mobilization or community development. The spirit common to all the strategies that Stump proposes involves, what the folklorist Mary Hufford would characterize as interrupting the monologue. Rather than elites (whether insiders or outsiders) dictating the issues to be addressed and how to solve them, these strategies entail sharing power between lawyers, activists, or whomever and the broader citizenry.
Between the two legal principles, however, Stump seems to have the most hope for the public trust doctrine. He envisions using it towards the designation of vast swaths of land in Appalachia—including those currently owned by absentee corporations—as commons “held in trust for the Appalachian people and future generations.”
Current Political Realities
Remaking Appalachia puts so much stock in these systemic stepping-stone measures because “in the short-term, we seemingly lack the critical mass of political will required to achieve a complete paradigm shift.”
A pervasive strand of conservatism and pro-coal sentiments in the region is partly responsible for this absence. In the face of the decline of coal production, Stump writes, the coal industry has deployed strategies of cultural manipulation to mold a regional identity economically and culturally defined by coal. The industry’s degradation of the region pries open the opportunity for this deception. On Appalachians in Raleigh County, West Virginia navigating the collapse in the first half of the 20th century of the local coal economy, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart writes, “by inscribing the ruined and trashed landscape with allegorical ruins that embody the history of the place, that history, painful as it is, surrounds, overwhelms, becomes a living world to act in rather than a world of fixed objects and contents to act on.” The “ruins” left by mining stimulate the nostalgic romanticization of coal as much as the coal companies’ deception—at least coal offered the promise of something at one point. What does environmentalism offer, so long as it’s the environmentalism of the Big Greens?
Which is not to fall into the trap of the Myth of Appalachia—Stump: “a homogenization of Appalachia-as-Trump-country merely constitutes yet another dimension of the Appalachian myth.” Appalachia has a strong tradition of grassroots resistance to the fossil fuel hegemony, most recently revitalized in opposition to mountaintop removal in the mid-2000s. Stump also traces a progressive element in Appalachia through the presence of micro-scale solidarity economies realized by nonprofits like renewable energy cooperatives such as Appalachian Electric Cooperative and the BARC Electric Cooperative, and community-owned food systems like the Appalachian Staple Food Collaborative and Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture.
Reading about the way forward that Stump proposes and seeing him tout the work of these nonprofits makes me think of southeast Ohio, where I grew up. The region is honeycombed by abandoned mines and dotted by the impoverished communities left in their wake. Its streams are polluted by an acidic and heavy metal-rich seepage that has devastated their ecologies. In the wake of these slow catastrophes, myriad nonprofits have emerged to remediate the situation, like the ones Stump talks about.
One, Rural Action, has developed a business called True Pigments, which uses iron from acid mine-impaired streams to make paint pigments to sell, turning pollution into profit. In an article I once glanced at covering this project, called “From Pollution to Paint,” one of Rural Action’s employees, a watershed restoration coordinator, described the project as making acid mine drainage into a commodity. It also quotes an engineer: “If we can convert this into a commodity, we can change this from a problem to something that can enrich the community.”
To me, this reads like a neoliberal development strategy much like the War on Poverty of the 1960s that Stump critiques: “a central notion of the War on Poverty was that by better incorporating Appalachia into the liberal capitalist mainstream—vis-à-vis stimulating and supporting economic development and growth—the “War on Poverty” could be won.” How is this different? Matthew Henry describes the pigment project as a “postextraction futurism” offering a restorative vision of the future. So maybe the neoliberal jargon deployed by Rural Action (and other organizations like it) is just a strategy to remain camouflaged in the midst of danger—but maybe not. Stump’s vision for a path beyond liberal hegemony and ecological crisis is hopeful. Traversing that path will be treacherous.