The Afterlives of Coal
Energy transitions without confronting the legacies of land ownership? [Landscapes Podcast 16]
Episode description
Even as efforts to transition Appalachia out of coal receive broad policy support, the fate of the landscape is ultimately driven by incumbent actors used to getting what they want. Dr Lindsay Shade and Dr Karen Rignall discuss their research about how legacies of land ownership frustrate equitable and effective transition strategies. While an "Abundance" argument suggests that "the Democratic fetish for legalistic procedure has in so many places, made it impossible to get stuff done," the afterlives of coal provides a stark reminder of the deeper powers that control what happens on the land. Confronting the legacies of landownership may be the only path to meaningful landscape transformation.
Introduction
The ending of the novel, The Heavens by Sandra Newman, has always stuck in my head. It's one of the interesting moments where a scene from fiction jumps over into your work life that is both meaningful and also slightly unsettling because the fiction you're reading to disconnect suddenly becomes real.
After an epic time travel and historical fictional encounter, we catch up with the heroine of the novel to learn how she plans to “save the world.” The final scene depicts Kate organizing an uncanny mutual aid movement somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia. It's clear the movement has legs—surrounded by activists from all walks of life and across cultural divides.
There's no political tint to their actions. It is simply about bringing all people together to care for one another. To offer each other survival in this broken world. The reader is left with a sense of “if there were to be a grassroots movement to reshape American politics, maybe it would happen that way.”
These details caught my attention because I think they represent a just-so-story about the political potential of the Appalachian region in the eyes of environmentalists like me. A key theory in environmental politics is that the ravages of extractive industries, like coal mining for example, are so clearly harmful to the people who work in or live near those industries that these constituencies will one day reject extraction and embrace alternative ways of living.
I think this idea gets placed on Appalachia and their “energy communities” without fully grasping what actually shapes the landscape. The problem here is imagining a green future for places seemingly hollowed out by legacies of extraction.
But if you look closer, the power to shape landscapes is not something so readily abandoned by those who have always had it. This episode of Landscapes features Lindsay Shade and Karen Rignall, who with co-authors have written an excellent article titled The Afterlives of Coal: Land and Transition Dynamics in Central Appalachia.
Their research warns that ambitions for a speedy green transition focused only on outcomes, but not process, doesn't deliver enough political power to contest the incumbent actors whose whole game has been to sit on the land and extract rents.
This is how, as the authors observe, we get prisons on top of old mines funded by transition grants instead of the many regenerative designs that local communities may wish for. I can't help but notice how the evidence from this paper directly confronts the present popular “Abundance” narrative , that argues it has been too much a focus on process that has destroyed the power to deliver on a green agenda and other social priorities. As Derek Thompson writes, “the Democratic fetish for legalistic procedure has in so many places, made it impossible to get stuff done.”
This paper raises important questions for this core claim. We hear the stories of how land use outcomes are determined, not by any legalistic procedure, but through power of who controls the land. In the coal region where landed interests lurk at every corner, without an attention to process, the outcomes observed become out of reach of democratic control.
But maybe the abundance agenda still counts any outcome—prisons on top of mines, for example—in the name of progress as preferable to stagnation.
I'm Adam Calo and you're listening to Landscapes.
Here is Lindsay Shade and Karen Rignall
Episode Links
Shade, L., Schwartzman, G., Rignall, K., Slovinsky, K., & Johnson, J. (2025). Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia. Environmental Research: Energy, 2(1), 015015.
Also see: Shade, L., Rignall, K., Tarus, L., & Starr, C. (2025). The role of land in a just transition: the Appalachian Land Study collective. Environmental Research: Energy, 2(2), 025010.
The ongoing Appalachian Land Study and the historic Appalachian Land Ownership Study
Martin County solar project on the former Martiki mine
The Cumberland Forest Project (The Nature Conservancy)
Carbon sequestration court case: Pocahontas Surface Interests and Forestland Group
The Heavens, by Sandra Newman
Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo.
Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
Podcast Guest Correction: "At minute 26.41 - 27.55 it is implied that The Nature Conservancy (TNC) acquired all 253,000 acres as a single parcel and that it all passed through Pocahontas Land Company and Heartwood Forestland Fund, and also that The Forestland Group "sold" land to the former. Heartwood Forestland Fund is managed by The Forestland Group and holds land under various subsidiaries. In the three states where TNC brokered land deals for the Cumberland Forest Project, the land is held by various LLC's that TNC controls, all of which purchased land from subsidiaries of either The Forestland Group or Molpus-Woodlands, two different timber investment management organizations (TIMO's). These TIMO's previously bought land and/or timber rights from various coal and natural resource landholding companies in the region, including Pocahontas. As we describe in our paper on p. 8, the trajectory of the land in our case study in East TN is as follows: the land was first consolidated by the 19th century British coal company and land speculation firm "The American Association Ltd," later sold to JM Huber Coal, and then to Molpus-Woodlands, before being acquired by Cumberland Forest LLC, which The Nature Conservancy has a controlling share and manages."
Interview transcript
[00:03:28] Karen Rignall: I'm Karen Rignall. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Community and Leadership Development at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, and I'm a cultural anthropologist.
I work on issues relating to land and rural life.
[00:03:45] Lindsay Shade: I am Lindsay Shade. I'm an assistant professor of environmental sociology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I am a rural and public sociologist, also with a background in human geography, and I focus on extraction and regenerative economies.
The legacy of coal mining in the Appalachian region is a very long one. It goes back more than 200 years, and so as of today, more than 1 million acres of land in Central Appalachia have been disturbed specifically for surface mining for coal, so that's not even considering all of the underground mining that's happened over the centuries.
Coal mining was extremely important to the emergence of a labor identity and to labor unions in Appalachia and also in the US more broadly. From about the late 18th century up to the 1990s, I would say the relationship between coal companies and workers was often antagonistic. So very different from the kind of politics that we see around coal today in the region.
And part of that has to do with the trajectory of how coal employment changed over time. So it began declining pretty seriously in the 1950s with mechanization and coal employment really never recovered. It was further decimated with the advent of mountaintop removal coal mining, which became common after the 1970s and really intensified after the 1990s.
And so at various times, coal mining was a highly exploitive industry, but then later became a good source of quality union jobs that paid pretty well. But then later on offered very little employment. And so in conjunction with the anti-labor policies from the 1980s onward, that really weakened labor unions, the loss of all those jobs.
But that also has a profound impact on the social fabric of rural life unions were the countervailing force to extractive capital's influence on politics. So there are all these long-term consequences in addition to the environmental and health impacts, like black lung disease, polluted water that immediately affect people every day.
[00:06:00] Karen Rignall: Some of the most trenchant legacies of coal are pretty tough to pin down for just your regular person. And those are the policy and revenue tax dimensions, and that's something that Lindsay's worked on a lot. And that this article also addresses an entire governance structure regionally was set up around coal extraction.
Important work that has been done for about 50 years now, especially around the Appalachian Land Ownership Study that we discuss in the article have documented the ways in which the coal. Complex coal companies, but also landholding companies, railroad, the entire value chain, put their pressure to bear also on reducing property taxes, not paying property taxes, getting around many of the regulations, and that is an important legacy of coal that we've been exploring as well.
[00:07:00] Adam Calo: In the paper you write: “success or failure of broad-based transition policies depends largely on place-based dynamics rooted in land, who controls the land, who has access to land, who benefits from investments in land, and how public revenues flow from land.”
Why does transition environmental transitions depend on these dimensions of land ownership and control?
If we know the new land uses, we need to reduce carbon or to improve the environment, why can't we just change those and invest money in those? Why does these dynamics of land tenure and ownership potentially defeat that idea?
[00:07:34] Karen Rignall: Renewable energy transitions and economic diversification efforts in these post coal regions all depend on land use change, acquiring land, and putting it to new uses.
Solar in particular is land extensive. We know the requirements for solar as a replacement for petroleum are extensive and will involve a systemic reconfiguration of land tenure. So what's happening in Appalachia really prefigures the broader discussion around energy transition that we will have globally.
[00:08:14] Adam Calo: Who controls the land that's associated with coal mining and Appalachia? What is the land tenure context that this ownership produces?
[00:08:22] Lindsay Shade: Land has long been controlled by land companies associated with resource extraction in the region. And a lot of these land companies were actually started by the so-called founders of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, George Mason, lots of recognizable names from the early period of the United States founding. There was also a later wave of land companies that was started by railroad corporations. Many railroad corporations were given land grants to encourage westward expansion and industrial development. And so they had huge swaths of land and started their own land companies.
And there were also folks who had been successful in the railroad industry, who became investors in land. So land was also one of the first speculative kind of investments to create financial markets in the United States and globally. In 1977, a group of grassroots stakeholders came together in the Appalachian region to try to understand who owns land and how land tenure affects them.
They produced a study called the Appalachian Land Ownership Survey. They themselves were called the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force because they saw that issues with land ownership were affecting every dimension of their lives, particularly after some historic floods happened in 1977 that were exacerbated by strip mining.
And so what they found by going into their local courthouses and just looking at the documents available to them, was that around 75 to 80% of land in the 80 counties that they looked at across the central Appalachian region covering six states was owned by companies associated with the coal industry, and that's just talking about the surface.
The other thing that's important to understand about land tenure in central Appalachia is that we have what are called split estates, which means that whoever owns the surface can have a separate deed from someone who owns layers of earth underneath the surface. So there can be s separate rights to coal, to oil, to gas, and then of course, above the surface, also to timber and to other materials.
So all of this depends on how the deed is written, but that arrangement was made possible by these early land speculators who argued in the courts that in colonial context, the kings had the right to subsurface minerals, and so there was already a precedent to separate these resources from surface tenure, instead of it being the dominion of the state like it is in many other countries around the world. It became possible for private companies and private individuals to separately own subsurface resources, and that's created a lot of complexity and conflict in the region because as you can imagine, the use of the land on the surface for something like a home or a farm, conflicts with strip mining, right?
It conflicts with hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. And so there have been a lot of court cases and what the courts have held is that you can move your farm, you can move your home, but you can't move the natural resource. And so to best promote the intensification and use of all the resources possible when there's a conflict, it's the subsurface, a state that is given priority in a judicial ruling.
[00:11:47] Adam Calo: So that really gets to this relationship between concentration of economic activity and land ownership. I guess I'm wondering, you know, is isn't this always the case? Why don't we see kind of diversified ownership of the benefits of coal? Why would land consolidation necessarily result in what you call in the paper, this “mono economic activity?”
[00:12:09] Karen Rignall: One dimension of it is the capital intensity of coal mining when this important shift towards mechanization happens. So the idea that employment has fallen off as coal markets have declined in the recent past is not true, as Lindsay mentioned at the beginning. In fact, avoiding union mobilization was an important driver for mechanization. So as soon as coal becomes dominant, it also starts to try to eliminate labor.
Consolidation also happens in order to make mining more cost effective and more profitable. It also becomes a financial asset in an important sense that we explore in the article. So the idea that well, coal isn't being mined, so this land is sitting there is not in fact how it's played out. Even if there isn't mining going on that land, there are have become multiple ways in which capital accumulation can occur on that land. So there is no incentive, especially when property taxes are so low or not enforced. There's no reason to get rid of the land because there will be a new, a new opportunity to produce rents or somehow financialize the assets.
[00:13:29] Adam Calo: At the start of the paper, you introduced this term of energy community. What is this idea of energy community and how has it come to be that these are now sites for targets of green transition objectives?
[00:13:41] Lindsay Shade: You know, a lot of that just comes through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which made historic public investments in public infrastructure and in economic recovery.
And so that legislation defined three categories of energy communities, and those are brownfield sites, areas based on unemployment rates and census tracks where either a coal mine closed after 1999, or a coal-fired electric power plant was retired after 2009. And so these were areas that were designated as energy communities for strategic economic investments in new infrastructure.
And a lot of lobbying and compromise parts of the Inflation Reduction Act were really focused on green energy and reducing emissions.
[00:14:36] Karen Rignall: It's important also to distinguish between that pretty narrow definition and a more vernacular use of the term. So many of us who are writing on this, I think have started to throw around this term of energy community.
But it is a very narrow definition because a lot of mines closed before 1999. Many of the most severe impacts were significantly before that from mountaintop removal. The actual number of communities that would, you know, fall in this category are significantly smaller than the total number of communities that have been involved in energy production.
[00:15:16] Adam Calo: So I think this gets to this idea of transitions or sustainability transitions –broad environmental narratives that trickle down to policy that affects a real community somewhere. And so for the two of you who have been embedded in the political economy of Appalachia, why does Appalachia need to transition?
What does it transitioning out of and was it at transitioning to?
[00:15:37] Karen Rignall: The dominant idea of transition that policymakers are working with, as far as I can see right now in Central Appalachia is a replacement or a substitution approach. These were regions, counties that produced a lot of coal. They were energy communities.
Let's reinvigorate their economies by bringing in new energy jobs. There are a lot of problems associated with this. Energy production is not easily substitutable on purely technical grounds, but on larger structural political economy and justice grounds. There are significant problems with using the policy structures, revenue structures, land tenure systems that promoted consolidation and exploitation and environmental damage during coal, and then somehow assuming that they are going to equitably transition into a new form of energy production that does not produce the same effects. It is a fantasy that has not been borne out. And a lot of communities are seeing that this sort of substitution approach to transition is not bringing new jobs, nor is it in fact reducing carbon emissions.
[00:16:48] Lindsay Shade: To that point, I would just add that in contrast to this very technocratic approach to transition that we see both in policy circles, but also a lot of times in the literature, which is either focused on replacement as Karen emphasized, or how to get the public to accept new energy sources and new energy industries.
None of this really deals with what people's lives are like in an everyday sense. And so there are a number of grassroots and community organizations and policy organizations that are really rooted in the history of labor and community and environmental justice organizing in the region. For example, the Alliance for Appalachia is an umbrella organization that includes 16 different community organizations across Central Appalachia. There are others like Appalachian Voices and other regional platforms for just transition, and there are many different visions of what transition looks like, but all of them emphasize the importance of leadership from the local scale and from the regional scale rather than an approach that simply drops in some new industry from above and keeps all of these configurations of land in place.
The other thing that people are seeing and are concerned about is that many of the dominant narratives of transition don't deal with the legacy impacts, not just the political and land ownership dynamics we've been discussing, but even the basics of environmental cleanup. What is the point in investing in all of these new solar farms, for example, if you're going to leave all of these brown fields in place and people are on boil alerts to be able to drink the water that comes out of their tap?
[00:18:37] Adam Calo: okay, so you have these semi-consensus vision that land use should change, but you have many competing visions of what it should change to. What your paper really does is it says, well, what actually happens when this investment attempts to change the land use?
The paper uses three cases of land transition where the role of these legacy landowners that you were talking about and other incumbent actors end up distorting the ultimate land use in Appalachia.
I'd like to walk through each one focusing on who the incumbent actors are and how they end up getting what they want over the other interests. Can you walk me through the first one? How does prison infrastructure end up getting prioritized on lands seemingly earmarked for broader land reclamation projects?
Why do prisons end up being the chosen land use here?
[00:19:23] Lindsay Shade: Well, at this point, a lot of central Appalachian communities are economically devastated, and they've also been socially and politically weakened. And so in many areas people do not want a prison in their backyard. Oftentimes, economically devastated rural areas become targeted as places for prison development because it's a place where locals may say, this is our only economic opportunity. Or rather, they may hear that from politicians presenting it to them as an economic opportunity and say, well, if this money doesn't come here, the development's gonna go somewhere else and will be left with nothing. It also keeps the prisons kind of out of sight and out of mind when they're isolated in these hard to reach areas. There are a number of prisons on former mine lands in the central Appalachian region, at least 16 if we're just looking at prisons built since around 1990 on former mine lands. So one basic element of the prison industry is that it requires a large amount of land.
It requires a large amount of infrastructure. And it's very easy for a politician to say, look, I did something. I brought you an industry. I fixed the problem. Prisons in particular became a really popular rural development strategy after the 1990s. There are. Many more federal prisons in the Central Appalachian region in particular than would make sense given the population that's in Central Appalachia.
In particular in eastern Kentucky, there are already three federal prisons, and Eastern Kentucky, of course, is an area of that historically concentrated coal mining. There is a fourth federal prison currently proposed to be built also in eastern Kentucky. All of these prisons were advocated for by a particular congress person named Hal Rogers, who has been in office for over 40 years representing the district that covers pretty much all of Eastern Kentucky, all of this coal region.
And for a long time, he was the chair of a very important committee in Congress, the Appropriations Committee, and he still remains the chair of the subcommittee that makes appropriations for things like prison development. And so, he in particular has been very active in advocating for prisons as opposed to mine land use.
He's also connected to a number of nonprofit organizations that he's been successful in directing federal funds toward, some of which are also involved in the incarceration system itself, such as an organization called Unite. It's about processing drug related charges and collaborating with police on that.
You know, there are a lot of questionable connections. There's a history of crony capitalism in the region. In the ways that it connects to legislators and regulators. We see this preferred industry time and time again coming into play.
[00:22:31] Adam Calo: One of the other cases presents a really powerful image because in Martin County you describe how there's this potential for a large scale solar operation is proposed to sit atop a former mind.
There's the transition in one image. How does this case actually play out?
[00:22:48] Karen Rignall: That solar installation is actually operational now, and so it is the first large scale solar to be sighted on a rec reclaimed or partially reclaimed surface mine named Martiki coal mine. The area that houses this facility at one time was the largest surface mine in the world.
It has been out of commission, since the early nineties, and so much of Martin County grew up never having seen coal from that site. But it has been held without any activities for formal and economic development for a significant period of time. Residents, however, have been using the site. There is a herd of wild horses.
This has been essentially a county park, as it were in the midst of the pandemic. A solar facility was announced by Savion as the developer. They hired a local political official candidate from the Lexington area, who has a company called Edelen Renewable to do the community outreach. So this is an interesting case because in theory, this is the grand opportunity to take land that's not being used, that was so disturbed by mining that there are very few other activities that can happen on it, then put it to use for green energy. However, there are key issues that are coming up with this project that energy justice scholars and activists have really identified around large scale solar and other renewables around the world, which is that they generate even fewer jobs than either coal oil, or I think gas as well.
So you have a situation where a large facility is enclosing land that people are using and promising a new dawn. Literally the language is quite breathless in some of the promotional materials for these facilities, but in reality, the actual revenues that come to a county government are very minimal and without any requirements to produce sustained community benefits.
The solar developers simply will not. So that is kind of where the situation is in a holding pattern for many developers because a lot of the federal incentives are in doubt on hold and, and likely to be canceled. So many projects may in fact switch directions because developers are not seeing the same kind of financial incentives.
[00:25:22] Adam Calo: And the final case is in a place called Clearfork Valley, where you really detail the history of this 200,000 acre parcel that is passed from various owners throughout time up until most recently, the Nature Conservancy ends up owning this large parcel. Tell me the story of this case and tell me how the incumbent actors adapt to continue to seek to gain revenues off this one parcel of land.
[00:25:48] Lindsay Shade: I'll start by getting into a little bit of the land transfer history of this parcel. This area of East Tennessee forms part of a large number of parcels that comprise over 250,000 acres of land that actually include Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. This area of land was purchased by The Nature Conservancy from Hartwood Forest Land Fund, which
was purchased from the Forestland Group, which was originally timber rights that were severed by Pocahontas Land Company. Pocahontas Land Company is one of those companies that was started by the railroads. It was started by Norfolk and Southern. So that's how far back this consolidated land ownership goes and how you see it change over time.
So there has been coal mining. There's active oil and gas extraction on this land. Still in East Tennessee, as well as other areas where this conservation project exists. The name of the conservation project, now run by the Nature Conservancy is called the Cumberland Forest Project. And so there are different revenue generating streams that are associated with this project, including tourism development, like off-road recreational vehicles, carbon credits among others that we discuss in the paper.
The whole idea behind this purchase is that it is actually backed by a separate wing of the Nature Conservancy called Nature Vest, which is funded by private investors. The land was always intended to be sold about 10 years after it was purchased. Once the return on investment could be given back to the investors.
So the whole idea is that conservation and capitalism have to be made compatible, in order for conservation to exist, you have to have the buy-in of these investors. Over time, there have been this continuation of efforts to extract revenue from the land and return it back to investors who are outside of the region.
It's hard, I think, sometimes for people who live near these parcels to see a material benefit in their own lives from these kinds of transactions, even if there may be some conservation benefits, which are also perhaps hard to pin down again, because there's also active oil and gas extraction, which because of the nature of severed estates, the Nature Conservancy really can't do anything about.
They actually have a history of buying land with ongoing oil and gas extraction, and then using those revenues to fund other conservation projects elsewhere. What we may even be seeing is really just a shift in the geographies of where extraction is funding conservation somewhere else, but maybe not necessarily mitigating or stopping it in any way.
[00:28:41] Karen Rignall: As an image of potential transitions on large parcels of land, it presents a neat picture that there are ways that you could generate revenues off of the natural resources without de spoiling them. The reality is that one cannot avoid the multi century history that we've been talking about, however, you cannot have an equitable or in fact ecologically sustainable transition when you are replicating the extraction of wealth from the area.
And each of the activities that are outlined as generating revenue are really accumulating capital for these investors. The notion that there are community benefits, which would be the most narrow definition of a kind of just transition effort here is not even a viable option because these structures are also not set up for meaningful stakeholder autonomy or participation in decision making.
So residents who have been using these lands and have in fact been stewarding the water and the woods. They are not structured institutionally to participate in generating the revenue or benefiting from any of these projects. So the Nature Conservancy has expressed an interest in a community benefits plan that's gonna be robust around a solar facility, but the actual implementation is proving to be very challenging.
[00:30:22] Lindsay Shade: I kind of wanted to add one thing on the Nature Conservancy discussion. It's super interesting. A company called the Forestland Group bought timber rights from Pocahontas Surface Land Company throughout the region many years ago in West Virginia.
Right now there's a very interesting lawsuit in the Supreme Court in which Pocahontas is now suing the Forestland group. so Pocahontas continues to own the surface. The Forest land group owns the timber. They're suing the forest land group over who actually gets the revenue from carbon credits. So this lawsuit is trying to decide, are the benefits from carbon sequestration accruing to the landowner because it's sequestered in the ground or to the timber owner, because it's the trees that do the work of sequestering the carbon.
So I think this is just one case that really speaks to the importance of centering land ownership and how pivotal land and resource ownership is in figuring out these dynamics of transition and who benefits from it.
[00:31:27] Adam Calo: In the case of the Nature Conservancy, just the pure size of the parcel presents this challenge.
You know, who can possibly take control over this as a private entity, unless it's some kind of investment vehicle Even if the Nature Conservancy is innovating with some kind of community benefit model, they have this other problem. They need to make a return on the investment. Therefore, that might separate their interest on who they're really benefiting.
[00:31:51] Lindsay Shade: Well, I think that's exactly right, how you've summarized it, Adam. And another thing to note about all of that is that community organizations came together and arranged a series of meetings with Nature Conservancy leadership in the region and talked to them about the possibility of breaking up some of these large parcels since they're going to sell it again anyway, but exactly because of that conflict, because of their obligation to their investors and the amount of administrative burden that's associated with breaking up and managing sales of all of these parcels, it's too complicated and so even though people may have vision for something like a community land trust that could support housing development and other kinds of infrastructure that are really needed in the area, it's not compatible with the land tenure dynamics that exist.
[00:32:42] Karen Rignall: Part of the issue as well is the capacity and the commitment of some of the county level and regional economic actors.
So part of the concern with a lot of the federal dollars that were coming into these energy communities is the capacity of some of the county governments or community groups or even corporate partners to apply for some of these monies and absorb them. But I have actually found that sometimes it's not a question of capacity, but it's a question of some of those incumbent actors not really wanting to advocate for greater community benefits or higher tax revenues.
Because it's not necessarily in their interest. And so the dynamics of who is advocating for community interests have to also account for the internal in inequalities and the fact that many of these incumbent actors are not only still presently control almost all aspects of local and regional economies.
So coal mining is still present in counties where there is no active mining because the old coal boss owns all of the gas stations, all of the McDonald's, all of the institutions, companies, retail that are some of the only employment opportunities.
[00:34:14] Adam Calo: I guess in the case of the solar project, The Nature Conservancy with its carbon credits, and maybe even the prison expansion, isn't it reasonable to say that these are signs of progress in the transition?
You know, who cares who controls the land, if the land use is changing away from coal and towards other less emitting uses?
[00:34:34] Karen Rignall: That presupposes that carbon is actually being reduced. And in fact, what we're seeing is an explosion in greenhouse gas emitting activities. So if renewable energy is being directed at energy hungry data centers, we are not, in fact having a transition even in the narrow sense of energy production and carbon. I really bristle at the idea that we need to push these projects through no matter what because the situation is so urgent. That's crisis capitalism. Because in fact, the most urgent actors are really benefiting in terms of capital accumulation and rents, and not in fact reducing emissions.
So holding up a region such as Appalachia as prime for renewable energy development will not yield either environmental, social, or economic benefits unless this legacy of extraction is addressed.
[00:35:43] Adam Calo: Lindsay, you mentioned that there are these other actors who have different designs for the land. What are some of these alternatives and why don't they come to be?
[00:35:52] Lindsay Shade: So some of them do come to be and have come to be. There are a couple of existing community land trusts in the region. There is also recently at the site of the proposed prison development in Letcher County, Kentucky, a group called the Appalachian Rekindling Project was able to purchase land that is in the same site where the prison is to be built and they have a different vision, which is bison restoration, and they've held local community events, getting people interested in bison restoration. And this organization is also indigenous woman led and focusing on land return. And so there are some really exciting intersectional campaigns around land and what it can mean to people when we start thinking about land in terms of care and what it can provide.
To produce economies of care in our communities, but it's challenging because most investment, both from philanthropy and from government is not targeted at this kind of really innovative community-led work. And that is part of the purpose of our paper is to really highlight that there are other opportunities that could really move the region in a different direction. That could have real implications for sustainability. But it is going to require a kind of systemic change away from this substitution model of transition.
[00:37:19] Karen Rignall: The kinds of creativity that Lindsay is talking about can even accommodate larger scale renewable energy, such as the solar facility.
It's not that they should never happen, we do in fact need a carbon transition. There are ways to think about who owns those facilities, the kinds of revenue they generate, and then the kinds of activities they support. One of the problems of this substitution model of transition that we've been talking about is that it is so purely jobs focused.
It misses opportunities for essentially a reparations model or a basic income model, which has been proven successful in supporting historically and systemically marginalized areas. So why not in fact redirect some of the revenues From a solar facility away from Savion is owned by Shell Oil, and instead direct those revenues towards basic income, for example, to households who sacrifice their livelihoods, their health, and their land for the coal industry?
[00:38:31] Adam Calo: You write:
“the territorial reconfiguration induced by processes of transition, necessarily confront constellations of interests that facilitate or constrain such transition processes, including historical power dynamics, complex bureaucracies, and often difficult to trace patterns of capital, mobility and accumulation.”
To me, this passage really presents an image that even if there is an agreement that a landscape ought to be reshaped in some way, there are these powerful forces just waiting to jump in and benefit from that energy of reorganization. I've been caught up in some of these debates about “Abundance” as this new book came out and, and one of the central thesis here is that this urgent need to build infrastructure to support a green transition suggests we should identify and remove legislative bottlenecks that prevent efficient and effective government action.
But even if we accept this premise, this Abundance theory of transition doesn't seem to consider the roles of these, as you put it, constellations of interest. How would you respond to an Abundance style argument that says the problem here is regulatory heel dragging that that's the deeper driver preventing effective transition out of coal?
[00:39:39] Karen Rignall: If you remove all of that regulatory structure, the only people, companies, or groups able to take advantage of those opportunities are the constellations of interests that have benefited from previous waves of extraction.
[00:39:54] Lindsay Shade: We also have an example right here in Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides energy across seven states across a huge geography—it’s a quasi-public utility, but unlike other utilities, including private utilities, it doesn't really answer to a publicly regulated utility commission. It answers only to Congress, which is currently debating whether or not to increase oversight of the TVA and provide some regulation and without regulation.
The TVA has been rapidly accelerating pipeline development, natural gas development to support highly polluting industries such as chemical hub build outs, data centers, and without having to go through a lot of the kind of permitting and review processes that are normally imposed on these kinds of projects.
And it's creating a great deal of community conflict and is not moving us anywhere toward a sustainable energy transition. So I would also respond by saying the onus is on people who want to promote this Abundance narrative to really provide evidence that regulation is somehow the problem.
[00:41:11] Adam Calo: Well, one of your policy recommendations is that to ensure that planning for a transition is driven by, as you call it, frontline communities, some of the actors that you've mentioned with these alternative land uses, so that the allocation of funds and design of future plans have a more democratic character.
But doesn't this solution just slow down the transition that we need by adding more interest in into this constellation?
[00:41:33] Karen Rignall: Focus on the temporality of transition versus its nature and the social distribution of cost and benefits, I think is misguided because we cannot envision effective transition without taking care of the governance and economic and political support for the status quo. And a key kind of scale or intervention needs to happen at the local and regional governance level to address some of these regulatory issues, but the profound corruption that is built in to the system of land consolidation and extraction. I mean, we don't necessarily use that word a lot in our writing because it is such a red flag for people who are worried about accusations, but honestly, the corruption is a really big piece of this story.
[00:42:35] Lindsay Shade: We also just need a root cause analysis, right? I mean, if we look at transition in this abstract way, then yes, we can get caught up in thinking about temporality and constellations of interests. But if anthropogenic climate change is traced through industrialization and excessive extraction of land and labor, then we don't get to any solution more quickly by ignoring that and trying to circumvent that reality.
[00:43:07] Adam Calo: I'm curious about the political winds shifting, kind of changing all of this investment in the region as environmental issues come in and out of favor. Is there a moment where these funds are being rolled back and this pressure to transform Appalachia, wanes away?
[00:43:24] Lindsay Shade: So the current budget proposes to cut 93% of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is the kind of federal, state, hybrid organization that oversees the distribution of these federal funds into the region. We've already seen rollbacks, of course, that are contested of Biden era investments in the region and you know, whatever positive benefits may have come from some of those investments, positive or negative, I would say we haven't really gotten the chance to find out or see what the impact might have been. And so as for what comes next, I think your guess is as good as mine. How about you, Karen?
[00:44:06] Karen Rignall: The solar energy market will continue and readjust.
This is a diversification strategy for oil companies, so it's, there's always going to be market interest. But what we've heard is that a lot of energy companies are sitting on their projects right now waiting to see, because they won't go forward if they don't get the tax incentives. And so, I think that there is actually a window of opportunity for community groups and alliances to build coalitions around more robust community benefits to be ready for when the projects pick up pace again.
[00:44:50] Adam Calo: I guess what I'm wondering is your article really shows that all of this investment really allows these incumbent actors to benefit most from it, and that without some kind of land governance innovation, the investment will always be steered in predictable ways. But would you rather accept the investments?
Without the land governance change and try and, you know, win some of its redistribution or must these always be paired? Isn't there kind of a trap of needing capital investment in this region in order to create the different types of visions that the different actors want?
[00:45:21] Karen Rignall: One of the things that I have learned from coalitions, like the Alliance for Appalachia, which Lindsay mentioned, is to really challenge these false binaries of, well, if you don't want these projects, how are we ever going to get any money in this is better than nothing.
I don't actually think it needs to be such a clear distinction. And I think that in fact, there are pathways for broader resident participation, greater accountability for county officials, greater accountability around state level, regulatory oversight, for example. So I think we can push back against that narrative.
This situation is difficult for many, many people and there are structural issues that are really difficult to resolve, but the idea that we then throw up our hands and, and just continue doing what we're doing, we don't have to do that. We've got good people who have got really strong ideas and I think we can be bolder
[00:46:29] Adam Calo: Sticking with politics for a moment.
I think there's maybe, you know, a liberal fantasy that would expect the way corporate interests have profited wildly in this region while at the same time degrading the social and environmental fabric, would ignite a natural opposition against some of these corporate actors and those who have supported them.
But I think obviously the reality is more nuanced and that doesn't seem to be the case. Am I correct? What's going on here? You know, shouldn't the former coal miners and their descendants be a ready constituency to mobilize against these incumbent actors and develop some of that governance pushback that you mentioned?
[00:47:05] Lindsay Shade: First off, there has been certainly a lot of organized resistance and really interesting models for building up grassroots campaigns to take over local and state governments and to elect people into positions of power at the federal level as well. So one example is West Virginia Can't Wait, which was a campaign all across West Virginia that did listening sessions in communities.
And they ran candidates and got several elected to office in the state. There's a group called Virginia Organizing that's doing that work in Kentucky. We have Kentuckians for the Commonwealth in Tennessee. There's a statewide organization called statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment.
Interestingly a lot of these organizations all have connections to the grassroots group that started the first regional land study back in 1977. Some of them were birthed out of that work, and some of them helped to start that land study. And so there are long legacies of organizing as well as labor organizing.
People forget that the waves of teacher strikes that happened around the nation started in central Appalachia, started in West Virginia, and spread to the Midwest and to the West. So there certainly is opposition to the way things are and that's part of what's generating a lot of creative ideas for governance and for economic development.
But again, in this context in which people have been so devastated and are really busy trying to survive every day and have also been confronted with a very well organized campaign led by the coal industry to break social movements and to infiltrate education systems and educational policy to directly deliver their own curriculum in the school systems that are now underfunded and dysfunctional because of the lack of adequate taxation on some of these landholders and resource extractors.
All of this makes it much more difficult for, for people to organize.
[00:49:20] Karen Rignall: I would also add that there is a disengagement from the formal political system for many people who do reject the kind of exploitation and dispossession that they've experienced over generations, but have really been kind of pushed out of formal political participation or the kind of civic infrastructure that has been very actively degraded in the region.
So this notion of a kind of monolithic coal miner, why aren't they supporting some of these changes? If you actually talk to regular folks, most of most are pretty pragmatic. I don't really run into people who are against a solar facility in Martin County just because it's solar. Pretty much everybody I've encountered is excited.
If there is a project that's going to bring jobs or opportunity to the region, they're into it. But as one friend told me, if you're just coming to dump another bunch of junk on our hills, then we're not interested in that. And so a lot of the narratives of this transition is good for those people are in fact coming from external interests who don't wanna engage with these deep structural issues and with some of the redistributive mechanisms that are essential for this transition to happen.
[00:50:55] Adam Calo: If, in the future the political winds change and a green transition is back on the agenda, how would you design a transition policy that takes into account the way entrenched landowners limit the different pathways that could take place?
[00:51:09] Karen Rignall: That is a really big question. One small thing that we have talked about is really thinking about a land registry, which Lindsay emphasized to our coalition, the US does not have, but even tracking what is happening in terms of land transfers, consolidation, revenues, and use. That is a key piece of this effort.
[00:51:37] Adam Calo: Well, you've mentioned this a couple times, this land ownership study that was influential.
Why is just knowing who owns land such an important intervention in the question of what happens on the land?
[00:51:49] Lindsay Shade: We have heard cases in our work with local communities who are trying to track land ownership, where they live, where folks have bought a parcel and then gone to the parcel and found someone sitting on that parcel and said, no, this is mine.
And then gone to the courthouse and been unable to sort it out. So if someone. Wants to start a small business. If folks want to start a land trust, if folks want to reclaim abandoned mine lands … there's a large organization called Green Forest Works that does reforestation on surface mines,that has had huge issues getting in touch with landowners after the historic floods in 2022 in eastern Kentucky.
When Eastern Kentucky County sought to build flood safe housing for its community, publicly subsidized, but was unable to get in touch with the land owning company, Western Pocahontas, in order to get permission to build the land. And so had to go to threaten eminent domain just in order to get the landowner to respond.
And so this is just basic in terms of how our economy revolves around property access and property rights. In order to transition the use to something else, you have to be able to understand the dynamics of ownership. The other thing I would say is that as we have started to get a handle on public revenues and how those flow from these lands often vary unequally.
So in some cases where coal companies control a majority of the land, they may pay as little as 6% of the local property tax base, even when they own over 80% of the land where the rest of the population is burdening the taxes. And so all of that funds any kind of public works, any public infrastructure, which is also going to be necessary for transition, whether we're talking about jobs or ecological transition, we have to address these issues and we can also start to design creative transition policies like they have in Fayette County.
West Virginia, there is an abandoned property registry where again, it's been really locally led. Groups have started to try to track and predict where there are abandoned properties, get in touch with landowners, and then put those properties into a land bank that then can be accessed for some of these more community driven economic development policies.
And at the state level, West Virginia passed a policy to enable this kind of local land banking. So these are some of the ways that those local land dynamics can be taken into account and through practical policy measures as we think about transition.
[00:54:38] Karen Rignall: Land ownership and transfer transparency is also important because the current owners and the actors who do have access to land ownership information really play the advantage.
So often you will see patterns of land transfers that happen in the lead up to a highway construction project. Well, some actors were given the heads up about the project, bought the land, and then turn it around for substantial profit, knowing that that project is going to be happening. There are numerous cases that have come to our attention around that.
So it, it really is also about positioning advocates, residents, with the information that others already have and, and are taking advantage of.
[00:55:28] Adam Calo: So I hear that we need to have more transparency about who owns the land, but also a more transparent procedure about pending sales. What else is needed to destabilize or dethrone the power that these incumbent actors have?
Because it sounds like if there is this increased investment and the power remains unchanged, we are going to get transition, but to something that whoever owns the land wants rather than these other communities in the majority.
[00:55:59] Lindsay Shade: I think we need to have a serious conversation about reparations.
Reparations has been a conversation at the national scale, but it has been less emphasized, I guess, in that national conversation. Some of these other more local and regional scale movements toward reparations that are really changing how we think about land. Shifting from this kind of extractive model of an economy that is rooted in the land and rooted in a system that has created hierarchies of value, not just around the land, but also around the people as we're seeing with these massive raids and deportations that are happening right now as low income people are getting together and looking at the problems they have through the lens of land. There are a number of campaigns and organizations that are starting to put together the pieces that people have more to gain by being in solidarity with each other and by really considering all of the viable paths toward reparations and toward creating a more regenerative kind of economy that, again, regenerates those economies of care, regenerates the land, and you know, it's big, but we need to meet the moment with this kind of big thinking.
[00:57:22] Karen Rignall: It is big thinking, and at the same time, it is real and practical, and you can envision a scenario whereby a solar facility is paying a royalty check similar to households in Alaska, to households in a county in central Appalachia whose families have really sacrificed generations of their health, their resources and their livelihoods. So there's a way to think about reparations that are actually … that are actually pretty practical and don't have to involve unrealistic or utopian policies.
There are ways in which we recognize the kinds of sacrifices the people in ecologies have made in the region, and we should do that.
[00:58:18] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Thank you Karen and Lindsay for coming on the podcast.
[00:58:23] Karen Rignall: Thank you so much.
[00:58:25] Lindsay Shade: Yeah, thanks for having us.