MORGANTOWN — West Virginia University Libraries hosted a virtual conversation with the author of “Remaking Appalachia” Thursday afternoon as part of its Art in the Libraries initiative.
Nicholas Stump is the author of “Remaking Appalachia,” which was recently published by WVU Press. In addition to his title as an author, he is also a WVU faculty member and head of reference and access services with the George R. Farmer Jr. Law Library at WVU College of Law. Additionally, Stump researches environmental law, critical legal theory, social movements and law, Appalachian studies and rural studies.
In “Remaking Appalachia,” Stump rehashes more than a century’s worth of history to evaluate the laws constructed to control the power of coal and other industries and the ways in which those laws failed the Appalachian region, resulting in the exploitation of the area and its natural resources. He then proposes ways in which the state could reclaim its autonomy and property through the implementation of eco-socialist and ecofeminist policies and behaviors.
During Thursday’s virtual event, Stump was interviewed by former colleague Priya Baskaran, who is now an assistant professor at the American University College of Law, about the research and proposals reflected in his book.
Defining Appalachia
Scholars and activists have long contested a universal definition of Appalachia, but Stump defined the region based on the mainstream and influential definition of Appalachia employed by the Appalachian Regional Commission, which indicates that Appalachia stretches across 13 states from the top of Mississippi to New York. ARC also divides Appalachia into five sub-regions. Stump mostly refers to the central and north-central Appalachian regions in his work.
In his book, Stump uses Appalachia as an important example of the broader failures of environmental law. He argues that Appalachia has uniquely been devastated by the fossil fuel industry for more than a century and continues to suffer the effects of the industry today, through the prevalence of the coal and natural gas industries.
Stump said he wrote “Remaking Appalachia” because he believed there was room in the literature for the perspective that he brought — a radical, legal left ecological position.
A systemic failure
According to Stump, the main takeaway from his literature should be that environmental law and the broader liberal paradigm that is embedded within has failed Appalachia.
“In the end, we don’t need more environmental law reform alone. We instead need true transformative change, or systemic reparations as I call them in the book, beyond our current paradigm, which is a paradigm of liberal capitalism. A bit more specifically, beyond the paradigm of white, patriarchal capitalism,” he said.
Environmental law is a unique legal regime compared to many others and constitutes a constellation of statutes that were rapidly passed after the environmental awakening of the 1960s, Stump said. These statutes include the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
There are two levels of analysis of environmental law in Stump’s book. One is a technical, operational analysis of how environmental law has failed; the other is a broader system analysis that looks more toward liberal capitalism.
From a technical standpoint, Stump said there are a variety of interrelated operational flaws in environmental laws, one being that environmental laws were enacted in a fragmented way in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Environmental law tends not to work harmoniously. It’s not a mutually supportive set of statutes very often. Again, it’s a fragmented legal regime. They often say, ‘The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,’ ” he said.
Additionally, in creating environmental law, the federal legislature delegated immense authority to fundamentally non-democratic agencies — such as the Environmental Protection Agency — which very quickly became the victims of regulatory capture at the hands of industry.
Environmental law is infamously hyper-technical, complex and dense, which Stump said has prevented most of the public from engaging with it in a meaningful sense.
“On the other hand, this complexity has not at all harmed industry,” he said.
The victimization of a region
Appalachia fell victim to the flawed system when it became apparent that the region was packed with vast deposits of coal, oil and gas. The region became central to capitalist growth, which has historically been driven by the fossil fuel industry.
“Folks often say that it has been pillaged as … an energy sacrifice zone because both the land and the people have been exploited in order to keep energy prices low for the nation, again to drive economic growth, and ultimately … to facilitate capital accumulation among elite energy interests,” Stump said.
An example of the pillaging and exploitation that Appalachia has been subjected to is the act of mountaintop removal mining. This process involves cutting off the tops of mountains through explosives and heavy machinery, to access the coal seams beneath them
Stump referred to mountaintop removal mining as a “remarkably destructive” practice and said that it has destroyed more than 500 mountains and much more than 2,000 miles of crucial headwater streams. He said literature often compares it to volcanic eruptions rather than traditional mining practices or deforestation. Mountaintop removal mining has had direct, profound social and public health impacts on Appalachian residents, as well as many other indirect effects.
Remedial proposals
For all of the problems associated with environmental law, particularly in the Appalachian region, Stump proposed alternatives in his book.
Stump drew on the schools of eco-socialism, ecofeminism and the closely related school of de-growth to come up with solutions to the historically longstanding problems imposed on the Appalachian region.
In the book, this transformative ecological change is divided into two dimensions, the first being socio-legal transformative change.
“I propose bottom-up, mass mobilization alternatives to modern hyper-technical, environmental law,” Stump said.
He described these socio-legal ideas as being systemic, stepping stone measures that would slowly lead Appalachia toward a more transformative and ecologically sustainable future, as opposed to the continued deterioration of the region that would occur should Appalachians choose to accept the current, flawed system.
As compared to modern law that has served to lock out citizenry in favor of elite governance, the bottom-up approach would look to modify certain ecological doctrines.
The bottom-up method could provide a radically reconceived approach to the public trust doctrine, which dictates that the state holds certain natural resources in trust for the public at large with the public-at-large serving as trust beneficiaries.
“What I propose in the book is a critical approach … [it] breaks and remakes the public trust doctrine along more radical lines. I argue that, essentially, a bottom-up, mass mobilization, steeped public trust doctrine could, in a nutshell, help the people take back the land from absentee owners and so forth. Then the land, or the ecological commons, could thereafter be self-governed by the citizenry as a form of ecological commons,” Stump said.
This would benefit Appalachia because the region infamously has a mass absentee corporate land ownership and abandoned mining land problem.
The second dimension is radical economic transformation.
Again, Stump employs eco-socialist, ecofeminist and de-growth ideologies to examine the possible economic changes. He said, mostly, the book discusses nurturing post-capitalist solidarity economy modes in the region to steer it away from the fossil fuel-driven capitalist economic ideology it functions under.
First and foremost, Stump advises ending perpetual economic growth and moving away from the paradigm of the commodification of everything. Instead of generating items like Kim Kardashian’s lip gloss line, production would be based on use value and would focus on generating wares that people actually need in their communities — things like food, medicine, housing and infrastructure.
Eco-socialism fits into Stump’s proposals because it involves collective ownership — not private ownership — of the means of production as well as multi-scale democratic economic planning.
He said this is required to most-immediately eliminate fossil fuels and transition to a wholly clean, post-growth energy system.
“I and most critical ecological commentators think that this could only be accomplished, on the climate change time scale that we have, via a very swift transition to democratic economic planning modes,” Stump said.
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