Religion, Extraction, and Just Transition in Appalachia

Abstract

This paper employs approaches from religious studies and Appalachian studies to examine the history, influence, and future of a multifaceted ethos of extraction, particularly as it influences the coal industry, in the Appalachian region of the United States. While many studies of extraction and the coal industry focus on their economic and political dimensions, by examining a broader ethos of extraction, this paper highlights multiple religious influences, including the entanglements between religious communities and extraction-based industries, the powerful moral narratives that serve to interpret and justify extraction, and the dynamics involved in shaping local identities and perceptions of place that enable this ethos to influence post-coal transition efforts. The result is a broad survey of the influences and impacts of resource extraction in Appalachia that challenges many of the longstanding stereotypes that can still be commonly found deployed about the region. In examining these influences, the paper also describes how academic interpreters have helped to shape popular conceptions of the Appalachian region that ultimately support ongoing extractive practices. Building upon insights from grassroots, anti-extractive activist communities in the region, the paper concludes by suggesting some ways that academics might adopt restorative ethics and practices in their work to address the entanglements between extractive scholarship and exploitation and devise alternative paths for just futures.

1. Introduction

The Appalachian region of the United States has long been associated with coal in many popular and scholarly portrayals. While only certain areas of Appalachia contain coal deposits, “King Coal” has nonetheless exerted significant political and economic control as well as profound influence over social institutions and cultural practices in the region (Eller 1982; Bell and York 2010). Despite this influence, the Appalachian coal industry is undeniably in decline as the 21st century progresses, surpassed in total production by other energy sectors, facing decreasing employment due to mechanization, and yielding reduced returns for investors (Bowen et al. 2023). This reality has pitted many Appalachian residents, politicians, activists, and industry leaders against each other in their efforts to devise new economic directions for the region. Some environmental groups propose advancements in renewable and nuclear technologies to shift the region into a producer of “green energy”, other investors fund natural gas fracking and pipeline efforts (such as the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline), and still others promote new forms of tourism, agriculture, industrial development, or even for-profit private prisons as economic alternatives to energy production (Hess et al. 2021; Taylor et al. 2017; Tarus et al. 2017). Significant challenges remain in determining the post-coal future of Appalachia, and how Appalachian citizens and other stakeholders choose (or are allowed) to address them can have significant ramifications for U.S. energy policies as well as the global climate and all of those living beings who depend upon it.

On one level, these debates about energy and economic transition appear to center on whether the region will continue its history of fossil fuel extraction or move toward alternative models of production. However, taking a longer view, many proposals for economic transition, despite their apparent differences, continue to perpetuate a more fundamental common “ethos of economic exploitation” that drives many of the development schemes through Appalachian history (Rowe 2023, p. 64). As the editors of this Special Issue note, this exploitative ethos may be understood as both an outcome and influence on practices of extractivism. Most specifically, “extractivism” describes high-intensity practices that remove great volumes of resources, generally employing little on-site processing, predominantly for export to other regions (Gudynas 2020, p. 6). For biologist Eduardo Gudynas, such a specific definition is necessary to distinguish uniquely exploitative practices and political–economic relationships from other forms of resource use. However, Gudynas continued that these extractivist practices also frequently include “spillover effects” such as “changes to public policy and even shared understandings of ideas such as justice and democracy, so as to maintain and promote extractivisms” (Gudynas 2020, p. 17). These spillover effects identified by Gudynas may also be described as elements of an “ethos of extraction” that includes moral frameworks, explanatory narratives of history, cultural symbols, and embodied practices that serve to interpret, justify, and promote continued extractivism. Rather than identifying a singular phenomenon, the concept of an “ethos of extraction” points analysis toward the multiple historical, ethical, political, religious, and moral narratives, symbols, affects, and practices that both shape and are shaped by extractive practices. By establishing structures and meanings to support continued extractivism, Gudynas continued, through these spillover effects or ethos of extraction, “extractivisms are defended as an act of faith, which explains the inability of many to accept their impacts and to think about alternatives” (Gudynas 2020, p. 23). In other words, this ethos of extraction, produced to justify and support specific instances of extractivism, becomes an interpretive framework for both local communities and industry representatives that extends beyond specific extraction-based industries and constrains options for alternative developments. Situating contemporary debates regarding post-coal transition in Appalachia within an analysis of an ethos of extraction illuminates how contemporary extractivism is tied to much longer trajectories of exploitation, destruction, and disenfranchisement that originate in the earliest years of colonial influence and extend into visions of the region’s future. Even efforts to develop alternative energies, when examined through this lens, “continue to carry the same energy values, assumptions, and desires that led to this moment of energy crisis and continue to function in ways that consolidate power, disenfranchise local—often Indigenous—populations, and create or perpetuate social and economic inequalities” (Rowe 2023, p. 159). As Appalachian residents struggle among themselves and with external corporate and political interests to guide the region’s post-coal transition, their debates thus do not only center on choices between fossil fuels or renewable energies, but on the perpetuation or discontinuation of extractive narratives, ethics, and practices that have shaped the region for centuries.

This paper applies approaches from religious studies to survey the influence of a multifaceted ethos of extraction in Appalachia as it manifests in the contemporary coal industry and proposals for economic transition following coal’s decline. The influence of this ethos is particularly evident in themes of sacrifice that are often used to explain labor and ongoing extraction in the region. While religious institutions have directly influenced extractive practices in Appalachia through both support and critiques of coal and related industries (see Callahan 2009; Witt 2016), this paper also employs religious studies lenses to interpret the ongoing meaning- and place-making practices tied to extractivism and resistance movements against it. Taking such an approach helps to illuminate the moral logics at contest between diverse stakeholders in extractive practices and points toward alternative avenues for promoting anti-extractive opportunities in the region. A first goal of this paper is thus to utilize religious studies lenses to provide a more robust analysis of the longer patterns of extraction that can help other scholars and observers better understand the Appalachian coal industry and move beyond the misunderstandings and stereotypes that are still common in external accounts of the region (Catte 2018).

Confronting common misunderstandings leads to a second goal of this essay. Along with the specific practices of extraction-based industries, the wider ethos of extraction tied to Appalachian coal has often been promoted and justified by journalists, authors, and academics whose work has shaped a national perception of the region as incapable of guiding its own future and in need of economic salvation from outside investments. As Gudynas argued, such portrayals can serve to defend extractivism and limit alternatives. However, despite some popular portrayals, Appalachians are not merely passive victims of extractive forces; Appalachian residents have resisted extraction in the region for generations, although these stories of resistance may be less well known. Appalachian residents are generally well aware of the influence of extractivism in their region along with the tensions and paradoxes it creates in their lives, and many are working tirelessly to develop alternatives that account for the experiences and needs of locals. These community organizers tend not to need new forms of scholarly analysis to interpret their work but instead need solidarity from others to help disrupt the interconnected institutions and discourses that support continued exploitation (Rowe 2023, p. 19). Learning from activists opposing for-profit prisons in the region as well as scholars of Appalachian studies, this paper concludes by briefly reflecting on how academics might incorporate restorative values and practices in their research, teaching, and administrative structures to help intervene in extraction—including its physical, political, ethical, and religious dimensions—and support grassroots alternatives in Appalachia and elsewhere.

2. Religious Studies and Place Perspectives on Appalachian Extraction

Appalachian extraction-based industries are most frequently framed, in both scholarly and popular accounts, through political economy perspectives that often neglect analyses of religion. This may be due in part to a contemporary Western assumption that religions only engage with supernatural and emotional issues and are thus epiphenomenal or irrelevant to the rational material relations that drive economic exchanges (see Wilkins 2021). However, evaluating the extractive ethos surrounding the Appalachian coal industry illuminates the entanglements of religious concepts in shaping, maintaining, interpreting, and justifying extractive practices. Perspectives from religious studies also demonstrate how an extractive ethos can function religiously in a society, helping to account for ongoing commitment (or devotion) to extraction and related industries despite their histories of labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Finally, because religions are never only conceptual but also engaged through material realities, approaches from place studies demonstrate how these various religious influences shape and are shaped by ongoing material relationships with wider environments in the region.

2.1. Religious History

One of the most useful frameworks for interpreting the religious dimensions of extractivism is Terra Schwerin Rowe’s “critical petro-theology”, presented in her work Of Modern Extraction (Rowe 2023). Building upon the insights of environmental and energy humanities scholars and other diverse disciplines, critical petro-theology engages with the intellectual and material tributaries that have supported contemporary fossil fuel extraction and continue to make such practices morally legible. Rowe writes, “in order to understand the emergence of the concept of extraction—much less how it functions today—we need to focus not just on the extraction of minerals and natural resources, but also on the ways the extraction of natural resources resonated with and amplified similar concepts of divine and human extraction” (Rowe 2023, pp. 63–64). Rejecting simplistic dichotomies between sacred and secular, Rowe traces the influence of Greek and Christian concepts of energy, divine sovereignty, and soteriology into the ostensibly secular efforts of physicists, geoscientists, chemists, and engineers to develop, understand, and value fossil fuels. The religious concepts that inform extractivism and its spillover effects are also entangled in other identity formations and power dynamics in a society. As Rowe writes, “far from a purely technoscientific construct, extractivism inscribes itself in anthropo-geologic formations, resonates through constructs of race, and reverberates within political theologies of creation, sovereignty, and modern master masculinity” (Rowe 2023, p. 63). A focus on extractive practices through a lens of critical petro-theology, then, points toward a network of entangled and ever-evolving values and practices that “resonate” (Connolly 2005) to shape and maintain social inequalities and environmental exploitation.

In Appalachia, these entangled, extractive values become evident in the ways that the coal industry and its supporters construct white, heteronormative, patriarchal coal miner identities and narrate local history with this as the prototypical agential figure. In this process, the body-crushing, suffocating work of coal mining is interpreted as a uniquely masculine sacrifice that is maligned by the ungrateful publics who depend upon mine labor but will nonetheless be seen and rewarded by divine agents. Such perceptions of an unjust but necessary personal sacrifice have clear connections to certain visions of Christian soteriology, which provides a moral framework within which to explain the miner’s worldly hardships (Juskus 2023). In his study of religion among Kentucky coal miners in the early 20th century, Richard Callahan tied the physicality and sacrifice of mine labor and the precarity of life and safety due to powerful external forces (whether the tons of rock above a working miner’s head or the fickle forces of absentee mine bosses and international economies) to a local affinity with Holiness-Pentecostal religious expression which “emerged and resonated with the life experiences of this place, drawing much of its energy and urgency from the structure of feeling of mining life” (Callahan 2009, p. 143). Of course, as Callahan is aware, such an affinity does not equate to an essential connection between a monolithic Appalachian culture and Holiness-Pentecostal religion. While tied to Appalachian tent revivals of the 19th century, the Holiness-Pentecostal movement emerged in many diverse global contexts and is not simply a product of rural Appalachian life (see Wacker 2001). Furthermore, not all miners or Appalachians are or have been Pentecostal. Nonetheless, as Rowe’s critical petro-theology suggests, these kinds of theological influences can still resonate with other forces and exert broader impacts over a larger population captured within an extractive ethos.1

The religiously coded symbol of the white, masculine miner informs national socio-political discourses as well. Like the patterns observed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2016) in the Cancer Alley region of Louisiana, this miner identity is articulated by contemporary conservatives (both within and outside of Appalachia) as an alternative to the diverse groups that, from their perspectives, threaten “traditional” American culture and values. As the coal industry declines, these observers fear, so too does a fundamental way of being American. Environmental regulations that constrain the coal industry, from this perspective, become moral threats rather than simply economic, environmental, and ethical necessities. The ethos of extraction centered on coal thus connects to contemporary conservative constructions of gender, race, nation, and labor through the religiously interpreted symbols of coal miners and extractive work. However, as Appalachian studies scholars have shown, this monolithic image of coal miner identity masks the cultural diversity that has always been present through Appalachian history as well as the alternative lifeways that have often co-existed alongside extraction-based industries in the region (Callahan 2009; Scott 2010; Trotter 2022; Schwartzman 2024). Confronting the local impacts of an extractive ethos, then, also entails amplifying and reclaiming the diverse identities and practices that are masked by narratives of place and history that have developed specifically to support ongoing extractivism.

2.2. Myth, Power, and the Coal Industry

Anti-extractive efforts and counterhegemonic lifeways in Appalachia are often ignored or suppressed because they challenge the status and preferred narratives of the coal industry itself. In her work, along with the distinct lineages of religious epistemologies and axiologies that inform extractivism, Rowe notes that Western energy culture has remained “enchanted” throughout North American history and thus takes on religious significance of its own (Rowe 2023, p. 11). Many established theoretical approaches to religious studies allow for this expansion of analysis beyond the confines of discretely bounded “world religions” into more complex social dynamics of power, discourse, and authenticity claims. For example, religious studies theorist Russell McCutcheon outlined an approach to the study of religion as a social formation, or “a specific and coordinated system of rhetorical acts and institutions that constructs the necessary conditions for shared identities” (McCutcheon 2001, p. 25). The systems that are conventionally termed “religions”, then, can be redescribed as social formations that participate in a process of “mythmaking”, or making contingent formations seem universal and inevitable. The work of the religious studies scholar, in this approach, becomes analyzing and critiquing those narratives of authenticity that serve to legitimate and mythologize emergent social formations and power dynamics. McCutcheon noted, as religious studies scholars, “our data are the all too ordinary mechanisms whereby social groups authorize, reproduce, and contest the limits of the meaningful, the thinkable, and the doable” (McCutcheon 2001, p. 166). Through their perpetuation of extractivism and its supporting ethos, energy industries can be analyzed as performing these same kinds of power-laden rhetorical acts.

In Appalachia, as Richard Callahan described, “…the coal industry is more than a source of employment. It structures a sense of place and orientation” (Callahan 2009, p. 19). Following Callahan’s discussion of religion as structing “orientation”, the coal industry can be understood as providing a symbolic center, shaping views of authentic and acceptable Appalachian identities and casting the lives of laborers within its own historical narrative of sacrifice and progress. These themes are particularly evident in industry-sponsored commemorations and memorials to miners, such as the memorial for the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in Raleigh County, West Virginia. In 2010, gases ignited in the underground mine, killing twenty-nine people in what became the deadliest U.S. mine accident since 1970. Massey Energy, then operator of the mine, had been issued numerous citations for safety violations and yet continued operations; while the former CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, was eventually charged with conspiring to violate safety standards, few other industry executives were punished.

The memorial sits on Route 3 in Whitesville, West Virginia and was completed in 2012 through public and private donations. Comprised of several polished stone slabs arranged into a single flat panel, the street-facing side of the memorial shows the etched silhouettes of twenty-nine men in recognizable mining attire. The reverse side provides an industry-approved narrative that frames the Upper Big Branch explosion within West Virginia coal history. The lengthy passage describes the development of the timber, railroad, and coal industries, including accounts of labor conflicts such as the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s—a series of armed skirmishes between miners and coal industry security forces that the memorial describes as “provoked” by union leaders (see Corbin 1981; Savage 1990). The memorial narrative concludes by highlighting that “coal mining has become a much safer industry than in the early days”, followed by a few statistics on the diminishing severity of mine disasters in the 20th century—facts that potentially matter little to the individuals and families that the memorial commemorates. The narrative concludes with a note of coal industry boosterism, making the debatable claim that “the coal industry has had more influence on West Virginia history than any other factor.”2 In all, this narrative casts the deaths of these twenty-nine miners as a regrettable sacrifice for a noble cause, namely, the coal industry and its role in U.S. energy independence and progress. Rather than emphasizing the particularities of the lives that were lost in the explosion, the industry-supported monument subsumes these miner’s deaths within its own moral narrative of sacrifice and progress, thus defining for the broader public an “authentic” means through which to interpret the violence of extractivism while simultaneously stifling dissent.3 In these ways and others, the coal industry engages in its own “mythmaking” that both promotes its narrative of history and remains open for religious studies analysis. Outlining the religion-like dimensions of the Appalachian coal industry, however, is not meant to suggest that those residents who accept elements of this narrative are somehow less rational than mine industry critics or that they have been fooled by the superior rhetorical power of the coal industry. Coal miners and their families are often forced by local circumstances to choose between many unfavorable options, and it is understandable that those who have struggled to maintain their livelihoods despite these challenges would want to celebrate positive framings of their experiences, particularly given the common negative stereotypes of Appalachia that pervade U.S. popular culture. The narratives and ethos of extraction maintained by the coal industry provide some among many options that residents draw upon to understand and interpret their experiences, a reality that also leaves open the possibility for elevating alternative, anti-extractive narratives in post-coal transition efforts.4

2.3. Placing Extraction

As the visceral struggles of mining labor and the bodily and environmental harms caused by mine pollution suggest, the ethos of extraction that supports the coal industry in Appalachia is not simply an abstract concept but a process that also engages with material experiences and landscapes. Building upon the works of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Rowe describes contemporary petroculture as composed of “material-discursive entanglements” (Rowe 2023, p. 4). Such an approach blurs simple dichotomies between religious beliefs and embodied practices and instead engages both as ongoing, co-creative relations. While many religious studies theorists have developed approaches that account for the material dimensions of religious and religion-like systems, in Appalachian studies, the entanglements of cultures and physical environments are often examined through the lens of place.

To simplify greatly, in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, place often signifies an interrelation between physical environments and their culturally or individually constructed meanings (see Cresswell 2015). Historically, many outside observers characterized Appalachia as a distinct place where a unique and monolithic culture developed in concert with an ecologically exceptional landscape. However, these approaches have been challenged by many Appalachian studies scholars as “exceptionalist” (Billings et al. 1995), masking the cultural diversity of Appalachian residents (both historical and contemporary) and maintaining harmful stereotypes about the region. As an alternative to these exceptionalist accounts, Dwight Billings and Ann Kingsolver outlined a “praxis of place” that approaches place as “action more than passive context. It is about what people do…as they try to make sense of and live with the nearby and distant forces in their lives” (Billings and Kingsolver 2018, p. 7; see also Reichert Powell 2007, p. 4). This approach to place also engages with the multiple groups that compete and collaborate to advance goals of social transformation by articulating their own “place-based political ecologies” (Escobar 2008, p. 33). As Appalachian studies scholars Barbara Ellen Smith and Stephen Fisher note, these processes are integral to the efforts of many 21st century grassroots activist movements in the region that are “able to harness [place’s] emotive and symbolic powers for progressive political organizing” (Smith and Fisher 2012, p. 267). These kinds of critical efforts are increasingly evident in emerging movements that celebrate queer, “Affrilachian”, and other BIPOC histories as alternatives to the white, heteronormative, patriarchal narratives of the extractive ethos maintained by the coal industry and its supporters (Walker 2000; Brown 2021; Avashia 2022; McNeill 2022; Grover 2023; McNeill and Scott 2024).

Focused on the relations between power, discourse, identities, and material environments, these examinations of contested constructions of place in Appalachia also lend themselves to religious studies analyses, particularly those that move beyond the realm of “officially sacred” locations toward power-laden processes of “distributing significance” across spaces (Kong 2001, p. 226; Ivakhiv 2006, p. 169). Kim Knott, for example, argued that religion must “exist and express itself in and through space, and must play its part in the constitution of spaces” (Knott 2005, p. 21). Religions, then, are lived and engaged with through physical environments, but they exert the added influence of shaping, defining, and interpreting those environments as well. Rowe’s critical petro-theology similarly engages with spatial relations but expands this analysis beyond uniquely religious spaces. She argued, “all types of spaces, whether ostensibly religious or secular, private or public, are deemed relevant for examination because they are all sites in which ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are, or have been, contested” (Rowe 2023, p. 84).

In the Appalachian context, these spatial accounts of religion and approaches to place allow investigations into the entanglements between practices of extraction, physical landscapes, and their social, cultural, and religious meanings. Extractivism is “rooted in a particular relation to land”, facilitated by perceptions of nature that justify certain forms of use and exploitation over others (Rowe 2023, p. 64). These forms of use and exploitation—clear cutting, strip mining, and damming of rivers—physically alter the landscape in ways that directly impact all beings who depend upon it. Once denuded, such altered landscapes are then used to justify ongoing extraction as the only economic option for the region. Just as laborers are expected to “sacrifice” their bodies for the benefit of the coal industry and those who depend upon it, so too the places of Appalachia become redefined as “sacrifice zones” for economic and industrial progress (Juskus 2023). Discussions of Appalachia as a sacrifice zone may thus, either intentionally or inadvertently, contribute to a sense of environmental fatalism. As literary critic Daniel Spoth argued, “if the land is always already doomed, there is little to be done beyond a blind execution of the fated decline” (Spoth 2023, p. 4). However, if this place-based theme of sacrifice highlights the “material-discursive” process of extraction, it also points to means of interrupting ongoing exploitation. Just as they amplify local identities and narratives that challenge the white, heteronormative, patriarchal ideal of extractivism, anti-extractivist Appalachians also shape and reclaim landscapes, forging alternative practices of place (Cresswell 2002) that foster more just social and environmental relations. Amid the decline of coal, these anti-extractive practices of place offer alternative pathways for regional economic transition, but they still face significant barriers due to the widespread influence of the ethos of extraction in Appalachia and the U.S. more broadly.

In all, critical petro-theology and other theoretical frameworks from religious studies and Appalachian studies help to account for the meaning and significance of the contemporary Appalachian coal industry as well as the broader social structures, cultural productions, and religious narratives and practices that contribute to a broader ethos of extraction that justifies it. The Appalachian coal industry does not simply create its extractive ethos from a vacuum, though, but taps into other narratives, symbols, and meanings that have been shaped by earlier practices and policies. To maintain their influence, extractive practices in Appalachia also depend upon narratives of place that present the region and its residents as stunted, ineffective, grotesque, and in need of external aid. Situating the coal industry and contemporary debates regarding economic transition in Appalachia within a longer history reveals the broader entanglements between various social institutions—including academia—and the ongoing influence of extraction in the region.

3. Extraction and the Making of Appalachia

The contemporary ethos of extraction surrounding the coal industry in Appalachia has taken shape through multiple events through colonial and settler history and has often been influenced by outside observers of the region, including scholars. As Terra Rowe explains, the extractive imaginary specifically entails “a reliance on displacement” and “the application of an external sovereign force” (Rowe 2023, p. 65). Furthermore, Macarena Gómez-Barris argues that these forces shape “extractive zones”, or the “colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion” (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xvi). In short, practices of displacement and the application of sovereign force have produced ongoing extractive zones in the Appalachian region; however, beyond naming the locations where these forces situate, for Gómez-Barris, extractive zones also entail “the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems” (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xix). Building upon these accounts, extraction is not only a force applied onto a physical geography but also a process of naming and conceptually defining a region and its inhabitants in terms conducive to extractive goals. Applying these theories demonstrates that Appalachia is not just a site of extractive practices, but the outcome of extractivism and its supporting ethos. Promoting anti-extractive alternatives in the region, then, requires also confronting the accounts and assumptions that have contributed to popular conceptions of Appalachia.

Displacement through external sovereign force has defined colonial and settler history that shaped Appalachia as a seemingly distinct region in the United States. The name “Appalachia” does not derive from any Indigenous language local to the mountainous area. Instead, members of the Spanish Narváez expedition of 1527, when shipwrecked on the Florida coast, encountered members of a Timucua community who held small quantities of gold. When the conquistadors asked about the origin of this gold, the Timucua indicated a place called “apalache”, a region of unclear location some distance away. This rumor of gold in a northern zone motivated the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1540. As accounts of local geography proliferated, derivations of the term “apalache” were applied to areas north of the Florida coast by Spanish, French, and German mapmakers and by 1569 came to name the interior mountainous areas of what would later be named Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee (Borchard 2021, pp. 2–3; Davis 2000, pp. 3–4). Thus began a centuries-long process of external observers imposing their own assumptions and extractive ambitions on this mountainous region.

The naming of Appalachia in the early colonial era corresponded with waves of violence against its Indigenous inhabitants. When members of the De Soto expedition moved through the southern Appalachian region in 1540, they found numerous communities with complex and interrelated political and cultural ties. These peoples inhabited villages in river valleys where they grew corn and other staple crops but also maintained hunting and foraging grounds in higher elevations through regular intentional burnings. Not finding the expected gold deposits, De Soto and later explorers instead lashed out at the region’s Native inhabitants, capturing many for the expanding Spanish slave trade (Davis 2000; Borchard 2021).5 As new colonial claims were made on the region over the centuries, colonial and settler violence against Indigenous peoples persisted. These patterns intensified after the American Revolutionary War, when veterans were given plots of Appalachian land as payment for their service and Euro-American settlers continued to enter the region and foster new pressures with Native inhabitants. Directly violating previous treaties, these tensions eventually led to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when thousands of Appalachian and Southeastern Native peoples were forced to move west of the Mississippi River. Significantly, and despite ongoing violence and disenfranchisement, not all Indigenous people moved west in this era. Several contemporary Indigenous groups, including the Cherokee, Shawnee, Tuscarora, and Choctaw (among many others), continue to maintain relations with their traditional lands, and while Indigenous people were perhaps the first victims of the displacement and external force that would define an ethos of extraction in Appalachia, they nonetheless persevered and continue to maintain their lifeways counter to the extractive practices and values that have since characterized settler activities in the area (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Loftin and Frey 2024).

Driven by a pioneer mentality exemplified by local figures such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Euro-American settlers continued to flock to the southeastern mountains through the 19th century. Significantly, many of these settlers did not understand themselves as inhabiting a distinct region called “Appalachia” that was characterized by its remoteness and exemption from the burgeoning industrial economies of the east coast. Instead, early settlers tended to identify themselves with more localized political boundaries, such as states, territories, and counties, as well as specific ecoregions, such as the Blue Ridge, Allegheny, or Cumberland Mountains (Davis 2000, pp. 4–5). Early settlers were also drawn to the region by its opportunities for engagement in national and international extractive economies. As historian Drew Swanson argued, “although it is true that mountains could form physical barriers against the outside world, those same mountains’ natural resources just as often encouraged economic, social, and cultural connections between people” (Swanson 2018, p. 4). Deer hides and medicinal plants such as ginseng were among the first products exported to European and Asian markets as early as the late 1700s, resulting in the collapse of local white-tailed deer and native plant populations (Swanson 2018, pp. 10–32; Manget 2022). Many Euro-American settlers also relied on the sale of cattle and sheep, timber, and other products such as whiskey and gathered herbs and nuts to supplement their livelihoods (Stoll 2017; Swanson 2018). Ties to national and international trade also facilitated Christian missionary activities as itinerant Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries—along with Catholic laity and clergy—established new churches and parishes across the region starting in the late 18th century (McCauley 1995; Boles 1976). In short, rather than an isolated and homogenous zone, the areas that comprised the broader Appalachian region in the colonial and early republic eras were initially defined by their engagement in national and international trade, economic development, and religious missions.

As Euro-American settlers continued to move to often unceded Appalachian regions through the 18th century, they sometimes never formally purchased the lands upon which they settled (Newfont 2012). Instead, settlers staked claims to land and utilized its resources through a commons framework, while wealthy land investors developed legal property deeds to the vast Appalachian territories on which settlers squatted. This proliferation of absentee ownership was facilitated by the arrival of the railroad in the latter half of the 19th century and led to the rapid privatization and enclosure of common land (Newfont 2012; Lewis 1998; Williams 2002). The railroads allowed for dramatically increased exploitation of the region’s timber and mineral resources, fostering the birth of the Appalachian coal industry and building many industrialist fortunes on the east coast, and while Euro-American settlers initially took Indigenous lands with the backing of U.S. state power, their descendants soon found themselves the victims of the same economic and political forces that once benefitted them (Eller 2008). The extractive, sovereign power of displacement in the late 19th century was typified by the broad form deed, a legal instrument that allowed property investors to purchase mineral rights from settlers without also purchasing the land and built structures over those minerals. This likely seemed unproblematic to those settlers who sold their mineral rights in the early 20th century when mining was still predominantly conducted underground. However, by the mid-20th century, heavy machinery and surface mining practices had begun to dominate the industry. Rather than bringing picks and shovels, broad form deed holders came to collect their minerals with bulldozers, dynamite, and little regard for the farms, streams, built structures, or family cemeteries that might be in the way (Montrie 2003). The Appalachian coal industry thus rose to prominence following centuries of enclosure, displacement, and extraction, backed by the economic and legal power of banks that distributed and authenticated property deeds and interpreted through an emerging ethos of extraction that defined the purpose and acceptability of these actions.

The enclosing and extractive efforts of industrialists were further facilitated by emerging narratives about the region that shaped contemporary stereotypes and fostered ongoing economic and environmental exploitation. While Appalachian settlers may not have initially understood themselves as a singular population residing in a uniquely remote region of the U.S., the vision of “a strange land and peculiar people” was primarily developed by popular authors, missionaries, and scholars outside of the region (Harney 1873). “Local color” authors such as Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox, Jr. popularized the region to a broader American audience after the Civil War with their fictional stories set in the mountains. Portraying the lives of contemporary mountaineers as continuous with medieval European peasant traditions, these authors helped to define Appalachia as “a discrete region, in but not of America” (Shapiro 1978, p. 4). Such emerging stereotypes eventually shaped a paradoxical vision of Appalachian residents as both “our common ancestors” (Frost 1899) who maintained ancient European traditions against the onslaught of modernity and, conversely, as “the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it” (Toynbee 1947, p. 149). Together, these portrayals invented a monolithic, white “hillbilly” population whose isolation helped to preserve unique European cultural practices. Whether they were portrayed as naïve survivors of a simpler time or as grotesque outsiders of mainstream American culture, these accounts also defined Appalachian settlers as fundamentally incapable of engaging in modern society without outside assistance (Shapiro 1978; Batteau 1990).

The popularization of Appalachia due to local color literature contributed to a wave of missionary activities in the region in the early 20th century, sponsored largely by wealthy Protestant philanthropists from the eastern U.S. Organizations such as the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky and the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina were founded to promote mainline Protestant theology and “teach the growing swarms of children thought to be growing up in heathen illiteracy” (Whisnant 1994, p. 3). Building upon their assumptions about the cultural homogeneity of the region, founders of these settlement schools also promoted “traditional” crafts and music in their efforts to support tourism and economic growth. By highlighting certain practices and cultural forms from the region (including music, dance, and storytelling) and defining them as characteristic of an authentic European tradition, these settlement schools and local color authors effectively created Appalachia as it came to be understood through the 20th century, and by shaping a specific vision of Appalachia, these accounts simultaneously masked cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity as well as the ongoing national and international economic and cultural exchanges that continued to influence the region (Whisnant 1983; Catte 2018; Scott and McNeill 2024).

The invention of a monolithic, white, Appalachian culture in need of support from concerned outsiders coincided with the rise of the coal industry and thus served to legitimate the industry’s self-justifying narratives. As the 20th century progressed, however, and despite the record profits that the coal industry had generated for its investors, the residents of Appalachia seemed just as poor as ever. Stereotypes of Appalachian people as impoverished and desperate for help were thus reinvigorated in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty from the front porch of an unemployed miner in Letcher County, Kentucky. Corresponding photographs of the event and area were published in LIFE Magazine, displaying austere one-room cabins, barefoot children, and almost exclusively white residents.6 Following Johnson’s declaration, Congress funded the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to manage development funding and projects for the region. As an initial step, however, the ARC needed to define Appalachia. With assistance from scholars and public employees, the ARC ultimately defined Appalachia as a region of 423 counties spreading from southern New York southward to Mississippi.7 This map remains one of the most definitive of the Appalachian region. While it is generally anchored to mountainous areas along the eastern U.S., counties were also included due to their relative rates of poverty. Political pressures also helped to define the region, as Johnson hoped offering federal aid to southern counties featuring white poverty could help mollify southern Democrats who were threatening to abandon the party due to its emerging support of civil rights legislation. Finally, while maps dating back to the 1500s had applied the name “Appalachia” vaguely to the southern mountains, the ARC’s map solidified Appalachia’s borders and placed the concept of Appalachia within a physically recognizable territory. In all, rather than objectively describing a discrete ecological and cultural zone, the ARC continued in the long tradition of inventing Appalachia by emphasizing images of poverty, whiteness, and dependency over the more complex and diverse cultures, practices, and ecosystems in the region (Davis 2000; Catte 2018).

The War on Poverty also inspired new scholarly interest in Appalachia as researchers sought to better understand the distinctiveness that they assumed characterized the region. Some initial sociological interpretations of Appalachian poverty centered on a “culture of poverty” model that framed local poverty as the outcome of generational expectations (Harrington 1962). Some people had lived in poverty for so long, the arguments went, that they did not expect anything more and were not motivated to improve their circumstances. This argument was applied to Appalachia in Jack Weller’s (1965) best-selling text, Yesterday’s People. A Presbyterian minister and social worker, Weller pointed to local “folk religion” (which he contrasted with “Biblical Christianity”) as a main intellectual support for an ongoing regional culture of poverty. Grimly characterizing a stereotypical Appalachian person, Weller claimed, “because his hopes have so often been frustrated in this life and because he has never lived with real joy and satisfaction, his eyes and heart have turned to the promises of the future life” (Weller 1965, pp. 131–32). Mirroring the claims of wealthy Protestant missionaries from earlier in the 20th century, Weller argued that a mixture of social services and religious education could help overcome the powerful local culture of poverty and help mountaineers gradually enter “mainstream America” (Weller 1965).

Culture of poverty arguments have persisted into the 21st century through texts such as J. D. Vance’s (2016) best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Appalachian culture, for Vance, was “remarkably cohesive” when compared to the wider American nation (Vance 2016, p. 4), and the root causes of local poverty lay with Appalachian people themselves, as he wrote, “our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith” (Vance 2016, p. 145). The cause of poverty was not decades of extraction and exploitation, Vance contended, but the weak wills of Appalachians themselves. Vance’s text was celebrated by both conservative and liberal commentators in large part because it presented a self-described cultural insider’s account that affirmed long-standing stereotypes of the region.8 Many scholars, writers, artists, and others with ties to Appalachia condemned it, however (Harkins and McCarroll 2019; Witt 2020). For example, historian Elizabeth Catte situated Hillbilly Elegy in the long-standing tradition of extractive narratives of the region, arguing that the text, like LIFE Magazine images decades before, “sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region” (Catte 2018, p. 59). Following the popularity of Vance’s work, many Appalachian residents found themselves once again struggling to articulate their own experiences to an outside audience that had accepted a stereotypical account of the region.

The reception of Vance’s work also revealed the deeper influence of extractive narratives of the region. Conscientious scholars and commentators may seek to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes of “ignorant hillbillies” in their accounts of Appalachian issues, but they may nonetheless inadvertently maintain more insidious assumptions about the region as culturally monolithic, isolated, and dependent. As the previous paragraphs have described, these assumptions have been built into the very construction of Appalachia itself, and by perpetuating these assumptions, scholars and commentators may support extractive narratives and contribute to the suppression of ongoing efforts to counter extractive practices. In this way, even sympathetic observers and researchers have contributed to the intellectual “extractive zone” through which value is extracted from communities and local agents are redefined and categorized counter to their own self-understanding (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xvi).

Counter to the narratives perpetuated by culture of poverty accounts, Appalachian residents never only passively accepted the activities of extraction-based industries in the region. From Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, to settler resistance against commons enclosure, to labor unionization and opposition to strip mining, to contemporary prison abolition and harm reduction efforts, protest movements at various scales often emerged as various industries continued to exploit resources and people in Appalachia. While some institutions, such as the settlement schools, helped to perpetuate Appalachian stereotypes, others like the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee (initially called the Highlander Folk School) focused on community-based resistance to economic exploitation and racial segregation (Glen 1993). Religious organizations, such as the Glenmary Sisters, also contributed to grassroots antipoverty efforts in the region. Utilizing Catholic principles to challenge what they perceived as unjust social systems, the Glenmary Sisters broke from many other War on Poverty-era mission groups and helped coordinate more radical, grassroots activism in the region (Lewis and Appleby 2004). The academic field of Appalachian studies emerged out of these and other activist campaigns and organizations, and while different scholars have maintained various motivations, the field has generally remained closely connected with activist efforts to oppose extractivism and other forms of exploitation in the region (Scott et al. 2015).

A particularly influential scholar–community partnership emerged with the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force (ALOTF) in 1979. Grassroots activists who sought to overturn the broad form deed in the 1960s and 70s immediately recognized a need for more information about land ownership. This task force brought together members of the public and scholars from six Appalachian states to investigate land ownership in the region. Scouring public records, reports, and deeds held at county courthouses across the region, the task force found widespread patterns of external corporate land and resource ownership—nearly 50% of the land surveyed was owned by absentee corporations—that deprived municipalities of valuable tax revenue and prevented alternative development in communities. Rather than outlining a local culture of poverty and blaming poor Appalachians for their own suffering, the study provided data to prove that absentee corporate land ownership had been a prime shaper of poverty and economic depression in the region for generations (ALOTF 1983). Beyond its findings, the study was unique in centering community members as co-producers of knowledge and developing research questions out of the immediate needs of community groups, rather than simply the interests of academic researchers (Scott 2012).9

Contemporary Appalachian studies scholars have continued to develop similar anti-extractive methodologies and research. Grounded in the grassroots experiences of communities and activists, anti-extractive research in Appalachia facilitates partnerships between scholars and communities to achieve specific goals and amplify the knowledge and expertise of residents. Rather than centering the scholar or theorist who presumably holds a unique ability to critique and interpret data, theorize, and analyze events, this research model centers community members as experts on the main issues confronting them with professional scholars often service in roles of support. These efforts also help to amplify the diverse, anti-extractive perspectives and practices that have often been suppressed by dominant portrayals of the region (McSpirit et al. 2012; Fletcher et al. 2023; McNeill and Scott 2024).

The Appalachian region has been shaped by extractivism. This includes the physical practices of extraction-based industries that have transformed landscapes and ecosystems, as well as “spillover effects” such as the socially constructed narratives that explain and justify these practices while simultaneously suppressing alternatives. As frequent participants in these practices of mythmaking (McCutcheon 2001), scholars have also helped to promote an ethos of extraction in the region, even if unintentionally. Academia is thus implicated in the extractive zones that have supported the coal industry’s activities and that constrain alternative views for transition in the region. However, as La paperson (2017) has argued regarding the potential for universities to engage in decolonial work, the very academic institutions that serve to maintain extractivism might also offer opportunities for subverting those patterns. Alternatives to dominant extractive practices and perspectives often already exist in impacted communities and “have persisted through histories of colonization, enslavement, misogyny, homophobia, and extractive globalization” (Rowe 2023, p. 171). Instead of discovery and invention, as Terra Rowe argues, these anti-extractive alternatives need support and space to flourish (Rowe 2023, p. 171). Combining these insights from critical petro-theology and Appalachian studies, then, points toward ways that scholars might utilize their analytical efforts to also support grassroots alternatives. Given the entanglements between academia and other extraction-based industries, confronting extractive tendencies in academic practices might also help to intervene in forces of extraction more broadly. Insights for addressing academic approaches to better confront and disrupt their contributions to the ethos and practices of extraction in Appalachia are particularly evident in contemporary post-coal transition efforts.

4. Anti-Extraction and Restorative Research

Numerous stakeholders continue to offer their visions for economic transition as coal declines in Appalachia. While many proposals have emerged from grassroots voices in coal-impacted communities (see Taylor et al. 2017; and Tarus et al. 2017), the proposals of more powerful corporations and political actors often receive greater attention and investment. Additionally, in many cases, these proposals continue patterns of extraction, even when they emphasize alternatives to fossil fuels such as nuclear and wind energy development. As Terra Rowe explains, “All too often, ‘alternative’ energies emerge merely as new inputs for established patterns of energy inequality, domination, extraction, consolidation of power, and exuberance” (Rowe 2023, p. 160). Even transition proposals that move away from energy development, such as proposals for all terrain vehicle trails on former mine lands or game species introduction to promote hunting and tourism, are frequently grounded in capitalist concepts of perpetual growth and an ethos of extraction (Schwartzman 2024). In these frameworks, simply allowing the land to rest and recover becomes an unthinkable waste of potential resources, and economic productivity becomes the only metric with which to measure land’s value (Rowe 2023, p. 54). Through the extractive ethos that it supports, among other avenues, “sovereign energy presents itself as the only option, uncontestable, unquestionable, of ultimate value and immeasurable worth” (Rowe 2023, p. 162). These patterns are visible in one of the more controversial proposals for economic transition on former mine lands, namely, the construction of for-profit private prisons. With human beings as their primary resource, these prisons become “extractive zones” by transforming lives into capital gains for an elite group of investors. The grassroots abolition activists who have emerged in opposition to these prisons, however, offer alternative visions of post-coal Appalachian communities. Their efforts draw upon generations of anti-extractive resistance in Appalachia and demonstrate new insights for intervening in extractivism and the broader systems that support it, including academia.

Private prisons in Appalachia perpetuate extractive logics and narratives because, among many other reasons, they exploit visions of the region as desperate and devoid of alternatives and because, in many cases, they are located on the remains of abandoned surface mines. In 1977, following years of grassroots organization against strip mining, congress passed the Surface Mines Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) to help regulate some of the strip mine industry’s most egregious practices. Rather than banning surface mining altogether, though, the act declared that surface mined lands must be restored to their “approximate original contour” unless some “higher and better use” could be planned for them. The loopholes embedded within SMCRA allowed for intensification of surface mine practices, such as mountaintop removal (MTR). A controversial practice, MTR involves the use of explosives and machinery to remove all plants, soil, and rock (called “overburden”) above a coal seam. Once exposed, the coal can be extracted with excavating machines and, when that process is complete, the overburden can then be returned to rebuild the mountain according to its “approximate original contour” unless some alternative economic purpose has been declared for the flattened land (see Burns 2007; Witt 2016, pp. 15–35). By the first decade of the 21st century, it was estimated that this practice had directly impacted over 1.1 million acres of land in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee (Appalachian Voices 2024).

Building upon the “higher and better use” clause of SMCRA, some politicians and developers have focused on former mine land as prime sites for the construction of private prisons. Already remote, flattened, and with access to power due to previous mining activities, former MTR sites present ideal locations for the profit-based incarceration of state and federal prisoners. Prison boosters draw upon extractive narratives of Appalachian land as a sacrifice zone, citing opportunities for economic growth in a depressed and desperate region as motivation for further investment (although the local economic benefits of Appalachian prisons have proven negligible) (Perdue and Sanchagrin 2016; Perdue 2023). Twenty-nine new prisons were built across the Appalachian region between 1990 and 2020, with at least seven of them built on former MTR land (Kelly 2021). Much like coal and timber booms of previous decades, the for-profit prison industry exploits a national increase in incarcerations and is rapidly developing across Appalachia, but not without some challenges. In 2013, Kentucky Congressman Harold “Hal” Rogers and others finalized a proposal for USP Letcher, what would be the most expensive prison ever built on an MTR site. This proposal was immediately opposed by prison abolition activists and concerned community members. Citing the environmental injustices associated with prisons, these activists used the federally required public commentary period to stall the environmental impact statement necessary for gaining final approval for construction (Perdue 2018; Pellow 2018). By 2019, due in large part to these delaying tactics, federal funding was withdrawn from the USP Letcher project, giving a rare victory for grassroots opponents of the prison (Schept 2022). However, in 2022, Congressman Rogers revived the proposal for USP Letcher and by mid-2024, the proposal had passed an environmental impact review, a necessary step toward its eventual construction (Estep 2024).

For many activists and scholars of the region, the development of prisons on MTR land is a direct extension of histories of extraction and exploitation. The promotion of prisons perpetuates coal industry ties to longer patterns of racism and violence. Immediately following the Civil War, many southern states expanded their carceral systems and initiated a process of convict leasing. In this system, black men and women could be arrested for trivial matters and then forced to work on plantations (as with Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Farm) or in other industries, such as coal mines (Blackmon 2008). These convict miners were regularly utilized in the Appalachian coal industry, particularly in periods of labor disputes (Schept 2022, pp. 94–96). Although obscured by coal industry-supported narratives that emphasize images of the white miner and mountaineer, African American and other racial and ethnic groups have always been engaged in Appalachian industries, frequently suffering unique inequalities and injustices in the process (Trotter 2022). Prison construction plans thus directly perpetuate the disenfranchisement, exploitation, and racial injustices that are typically ignored by dominant extractive narratives of the region. As Judah Schept argues, “the story of both the dominance of the coal industry and the eventual rise of prisons in Central Appalachia must be understood within the broader historical developments of racial capitalism, which established the political-economic and spatial conditions of possibility for mineral rights to be sold to speculators and, eventually, for prisons to be imagined for and built on top of flattened mountains” (Schept 2022, p. 10). From a lens of critical petro-theology, these localized expressions of racial capitalism are also connected to a broader ethos of extraction that both depends upon and maintains racial, gender, and class inequalities (Rowe 2023, p. 8). Rather than providing an economic alternative to the declining coal industry, then, prison development is a direct extension of ongoing extractive material–discursive entanglements that emerged with the onset of settler colonialism in Appalachia.

Through their “praxis of place”, these prison abolition activists also articulate alternative visions for anti-extractive Appalachian communities of the future (Billings and Kingsolver 2018). While a critical petro-theology lens can help illuminate the elements of an ethos of extraction that connects coal mining and prison development, the fenceline communities and activists who directly confront extractivism do not only need assistance with analyzing their situations. As Terra Rowe argues, and as many Appalachian Studies scholars have emphasized, these community stakeholders also need solidarity to support the alternative visions that they have already shaped. Because “true alternatives [to extractivism] need not be ‘discovered’ but require time/space to remain”, one avenue for building solidarity is for others to amplify and support the efforts of those locals who offer anti-extractive alternatives that are consistently suppressed or ignored by more powerful stakeholders (Rowe 2023, p. 19).

As introduced in the previous section, academics, “parasitic researchers”, (Cable 2012), and other commentators have been complicit in the damages of extraction by helping to construct and maintain narratives of the region that support extractivism. Given this connection of academia within the broader extractive zone of Appalachia, another potential avenue for their solidarity with anti-extractive movements might be learning from grassroots communities and confronting extractive practices in the academic industry. In Appalachia, grassroots alternatives to extractive development have tended to emphasize principles of restoration—restoring the land impacted by mines and restoring positive relations necessary to maintain just societies moving forward. The prison abolition movement and harm prevention efforts of Appalachia opioid response efforts also frequently emphasize restorative justice as an alternative to contemporary carceral practices (Ningard 2024). Most simply, restorative justice frameworks focus on repairing damaged relationships and preventing future harm following acts of violence and injustice. As Howard Zehr defined it, restorative justice “involves the victim, the offender, and the community in a search for solutions which promote repair, reconciliation, and reassurance” (Zehr 1990, p. 181). This is in opposition to the more common U.S. legal framework of retributive justice, which approaches crime as an offense against state power and applies punishment based on established rules and standards. Contemporary activists often cite Indigenous communities as originators of restorative approaches to justice (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, p. 26; White 2015), although others caution against overemphasizing the decolonial dimensions of restorative justice when it is still administered by a settler government (Tauri 2016). Along with these Indigenous roots, historian Howard Zehr also drew upon a Biblical “shalom vision” from his own Mennonite tradition to develop his influential restorative justice theories (Zehr 1990, p. 181). Beyond Zehr’s work, Jason Springs has also shown how religious values have influenced and enhanced restorative justice efforts around the United States (Springs 2024). While Zehr’s work initially focused on criminal justice systems, others have applied these principles toward “environmental restorative justice”, which often extends moral consideration to nonhuman others and emphasizes repairing and preventing damages from environmental exploitation generally conducted by extractive industries and corporations (Forsyth et al. 2022, pp. 3–4; see also Stark 2016; Minguet 2021). Although approaches to restorative justice are highly diverse and variable, and while there are valid critiques of its applicability in various circumstances (Zernova 2008), these models of restoration and restorative justice might also apply to academia.

Just as principles of restoration and restorative justice are used to repair damage caused by mining and prisons in Appalachia, so they may also offer useful frameworks for reforming individual practices and institutional barriers facing scholars who seek to conduct anti-extractive work. What if academic work emphasized repairing past harms, restoring good relations, and maintaining accountability with communities rather than just the scholarly production of knowledge as measured through grants and publications? How could academia as it currently exists accommodate, support, and perhaps even prioritize such restorative work? Scholars might be uniquely able to illuminate the powerful dynamics that have shaped extractive narratives, but alongside their analyses, they might also be able to intervene in those narratives and promote alternatives. A focus on restorative justice need not abandon scholarly production altogether, but could simply reform how that scholarship is produced, disseminated, and maintained in ways that avoid extractive practices and help to confront the impacts of previous extractive efforts. In Appalachia, this might entail intervening in stereotyped portrayals of the region that contribute to a local ethos of extraction and continue to justify new extraction-based industries in the decline of coal. Rowe’s work and other lenses from the academic study of religion, as described throughout this paper, also demonstrate the value of attending to the religious influences and dimensions of extraction. These approaches specifically highlight how the coal industry has built upon previous exploitative practices and narratives to foster an ethos of extraction that has continued to influence possibilities in the region after the decline of coal. By drawing attention to the wider ethos of extraction infusing arguments about coal and transition in the region, religious studies perspectives may also illuminate new pathways for resistance to these forces.

Further useful insights for developing useful approaches to restorative research come from scholars and activists working on decolonial projects. For example, Dr. Kisha Supernant, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta, uses ground-penetrating radar to help locate unmarked graves of Indigenous children near religious boarding schools or similar institutions (Supernant 2022). This work directly employs scholarly tools to address historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous communities, returning the bodies of lost children and helping to set frameworks for restorative justice between Indigenous groups and state authorities. Another example is the “Landback Universities” project, a Mellon Foundation-funded research collective that focuses on decolonizing North American institutions of higher learning, including land grant (or “land grab” Lee and Ahtone 2020) universities that were founded on the sale of Indigenous lands. These examples, among others, demonstrate how scholars can lend their efforts toward restorative practices, but they also highlight some of the challenges facing this work within higher learning institutions. As Tuck and Yang (2012) have demonstrated, “decolonization” can be appropriated and misrepresented by university administrators. For some university officials, offering a formal land acknowledgment is often seen as fulfilling university obligations toward diversity and inclusion; but without backing by practices of healing, such land acknowledgements may become empty statements that do not reflect a change in the status quo (Stewart-Ambo and Yang 2021). In Appalachia, certain “self-indigenizing” narratives focusing on the land-based practices of Euro-American settlers have also inhibited decolonial efforts (Pearson 2013). Decolonial work is not the same as anti-extractive and restorative research, but the experiences of decolonial scholars can highlight parallel struggles that anti-extractive scholars might face.

While restorative justice may serve as a valuable framework for addressing extractive approaches to research, key challenges in the implementation of restorative justice remain. Just as prison abolition is often met with scorn from public commentators who deem it unrealistic, so too the idea of reforming academia is sometimes seen as unreasonably utopian. The potential difficulties of initiating these changes, though, should not serve as barriers against even attempting reform. The modern North American university is already undergoing changes largely driven by repressive political forces and economic interests that seek to increase numbers of workers and consumers (Hil et al. 2021). The university need not continue to be an instrument of extraction, though. Echoing the arguments of La paperson (2017), through restorative practices and research, the university may become more of a partner in transformation toward a more just society.

5. Conclusions

Exploitative extraction has taken many forms through Appalachian history beyond the familiar shape of the coal industry, and as many local citizens and activists are aware, confronting extraction entails not only attending to mining practices but also addressing the deeper social, economic, political, and religious relationships (elements of an ethos of extraction) that drive extractive practices and continue to define Appalachia as a culturally homogenous land of poverty and sacrifice. While the coal industry may be declining in the region, a multifaceted ethos of extraction still pervades many proposals for economic transition, such as the siting of for-profit prisons on former mine land. Perspectives from critical petro-theology, religious studies, and Appalachian studies help to illuminate the ethical, epistemological, and material elements of this extractive ethos that shape and justify ongoing extractivism in Appalachia. These perspectives are also useful in challenging the dominant narratives that frame popular and scholarly understandings of the region; however, rather than serving as neutral observers of these dynamics, scholars have also directly informed and perpetuated these dominant narratives. An exploration of the wider influences that shape an ethos of extraction in Appalachia inevitably points to academia, among other institutions. Emerging academic investigations of extraction in Appalachia, then, must entail both critical analysis and self-reflection. Fortunately, grassroots communities have already developed anti-extractive alternatives that can be adopted and modified for academic research ethics. Appalachian cases demonstrate specific ways that academic perspectives might help to interpret and address extractivism and its impacts, and while the unique details of these Appalachian examples matter, they can nonetheless provide “exemplarity”, or general guidance for understanding and challenging extraction, its spillover effects, and its supporting ethos in other contexts (Chakrabarty 2023, p. 105).