"Too Special to Drill"

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell writes that "some areas are ‘too special to drill,’ and some areas are not. Some ecosystems we plunder with impunity, and some ecosystems lead us to pause and reflect on repercussions" (Farrell, 238-39).  

I couldn't get my mind off this idea that in the history of industry in Appalachia, there was no place "too special to drill" - no place that shouldn't be logged, mined, or stripped. In Appalachia, no place was treated as "special." There were no sacred places, no sacred mountains. Every landscape, every mountain was devalued as "overburden."  

For instance Harry M. Caudill writes about the passivity, negligence, and complicity of local officials who handed over the rich Appalachian landscape to the rapacious machines of the logging and mining industries. "Kentucky mountaineers . . . transferred legal title to [the land] to 'furriners,' [foreigners] then routinely elected judges and legislators who steadfastly sided with the coal owners in all clashes between their rights and those of the resident population. These officials stood by while mining mangled mountains, ruined streams, and made broad areas into wastelands" (Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn, 46)

He further notes that "Appalachia's absentee landlords have had many willing helpers within the region. Their greed has been more than matched by that of local entrepreneurs who were, and are, all too willing to plunder their homeland and impoverish their kinsmen for profit" (Caudill, Darkness, 31)

Chad Montrie notes that some local Appalachian people supported and defended the destruction of the Appalachian environment, perpetuating the falsehood that Appalachia was a poor land, "not worth a plug nickel." As Caudill writes, all powerholders from legislators to educators "continued to spread the worn myth that Appalachian people are poor because their land is poor and, by implication at least, that the wisest course is to leave. Thus indifference on [college] campuses combined with greed in boardrooms to work the ruin of one of the fairest and most promising parts of the globe" (Caudill, Darkness, 43)

In a perverse logic, those complicit with the mining industry actually argued that Appalachia was improved by strip mining. They "defended surface coal mining as good for miners, the local economy, and even the land" saying, "it gives people work and the land that we strip is in 50 percent and a lot of times 100 percent better condition that it was when we came in there." Montrie writes "On one job they paid a man to mine a part of his property that ‘wasn’t worth a plug nickel,’ leveled it off flat and sowed grass all over, ‘'and now he’s got a pasture out there.’’ Other operations had created flat land for a college and an airport, which [was] believed to be a better use of the land" (Montrie, Making a Living, 89). 

Farrell asks “But what makes something more ‘special' than something else? Where do those moral boundaries come from?” His answer is "the stories we tell about a place"--pointing to the role of sacred story and myth, both personal and communal, that instills certain places with a sense of the sacred. People, individuals, and communities construct sacred places through these narratives that create attachment to places. “We rarely think about them explicitly, but these deep narrative and commitments that are inscribed in our identities and cultures inform what we judge to be more ‘special'" (Farrell, Battle, 238).

So where are the sacred stories of the Appalachian landscape? This is the chilling line from Caudill, "The lack of an Appalachian land epic made the hill people willing collaborators in the destruction of their own region" (Caudill, Darkness, 31, emphasis added). 

What are the sacred stories, myths, narratives, and folktales that enchant or re-chant the Appalachian hills? That's what I am looking for.  

Sources

Caudill, Harry M. A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future. University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Farrell, Justin. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Montrie, Chad. “Degrees of Separation: Nature and the Shift from Farmer to Miner to Factory Hand in Southern West Virginia.” In Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, 71–90. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.