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Hey y’all,
Crystal Mello is going to Washington, D.C.
An Equation Campaign Fellow and community organizer for Protect Our Water, Heritage, and Rights (POWHR), she is fighting against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia and Virginia. In a recent essay for The Nation, Mello writes of the threats the pipeline presents to the environment and health of the people living in this corner of Appalachia, pointing out that the region will reap none of the rewards.
“We’re done with being a sacrifice zone,” she writes.
I have been thinking a lot about what Mello said. Appalachia has long been a “sacrifice zone” for capital. From the earliest days of mining magnates tricking people out of their mineral rights to the labor disputes which arose from those same magnates turning our region into an internal colony and onto the strip mining of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we’ve always been exploited by powers lying miles from here.
The wealth our region generates in coal and other industries rarely remains in our region. Instead, it is shipped off to the Great Lakes or the coast, where it is exported and sold. Our hard work lines the pockets of millionaires and billionaires in New York, Washington and elsewhere. Meanwhile, we are left to wallow in our own relative poverty as a region.
This is happening again. As Mello points out in her article, the jobs being brought into the region by the Mountain Valley Pipeline aren’t even going to local residents. They’re bringing in people from out of town. The natural gas passing through it doesn’t benefit Appalachians; it’s just passing through our region. Yet if it ruptures in an earthquake or a landslide or a flood, the catastrophic consequences will be borne by the people who live here – people who do not stand to benefit in the least from having this pipeline passing through their backyard.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline isn’t the only project demonstrating that the rest of the nation still views us, as Mello put it, as a “sacrifice zone.” Elsewhere in Appalachia, residents are complaining about another menace: cryptocurrency mining.
Last week, the Washington Post reported on a crypto mine on Poor House Mountain in North Carolina. The mine, the Post found, is regularly producing sound pollution at decibels higher than allowed in Washington, D.C., even during the daytime.
“When crypto mining companies were forced out of China last year, the ample power available from the Tennessee Valley Authority made Appalachia an appealing spot,” the Post reports. Since 2020, at least three such mines have opened in Cherokee County, North Carolina. Residents in east Tennessee have also complained about the noise levels and environmental impact from plants in Claiborne County and Washington County, where a judge ruled that the mine violated local zoning ordinances.
An investigation earlier this year by the Knoxville News-Sentinel found that these crypto mines are pushing property values down while driving the cost of electricity up. The presence of crypto mines can be beneficial to local utilities, who will see more money as a result of the electricity being used in the mines, but can drive up costs for local residents while offering little in the way of community investment or employment opportunities. “They don’t care,” Allison Hamilton, director of markets and rates for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told the News-Sentinel. “They don’t know much about the community. They just want to go where the power is cheap.”
Pierce Greenberg, a sociologist at Creighton University who has studied crypto mining, also has concerns that the new rush on our region won’t benefit the people who live here. “I worry about this being another extractive industry in Appalachia or East Tennessee, one that takes a lot of wealth out without leaving anything behind for the people that live there,” he told the News-Sentinel. “I’m skeptical of the claims that this will provide a stable, long-term economic benefit.”
In the face of all of this, it can seem like the 21st century in Appalachia is gearing up to look a lot like the 20th century – one where we are exploited for our resources while our people are left to languish. However, people like Mello and those in Claiborne and Washington Counties are standing up to these outside interests, and in the process, reminding us of an often-forgotten legacy of labor and environmental activism in our region.
Yesterday was Labor Day – a timely reminder that Appalachians have never taken the exploitation of our labor and resources lying down. The Coal Creek War at the end of the 19th century led to the end of convict leasing in Tennessee mining operations. The Mine Wars of the early 20th century, while unsuccessful, did demonstrate that miners would not be cowed by the forces of capital. So too did the Harlan County War of the 1930s. Later in the century, "Harlan County, U.S.A." would win an Oscar for Best Documentary for portraying the struggles of Harlan County miners in the face of exploitative capital.
All this is to say that Appalachians have agency. We aren’t going to take anything lying down. Sometimes it feels like we are perpetual victims of capitalism and neoliberalism, accused of being backwards bigots who elect hateful populists or as provincial rubes who don’t know enough to prevent our own exploitation. We are scapegoated and stereotyped, criticized and condemned. Our fatalism and culture of poverty leads us to accept our lot in life without any attempt to improve our own circumstances.
That is not and has never been true. Men like Bill Blizzard in the past and women like Crystal Mello in the present remind us that the future is not preordained, but ours to write as we will. Appalachians have, are, and will again rise up against the nefarious forces which seek to oppress, exploit, and destroy our region and its people and its environment. We have never accepted this exploitation and destruction without a fight, and we won’t do it now.
We have agency here in the mountains. The rest of the country may not realize that but mark my words – they will.
Solidarity with Crystal Mello, the citizens of Cherokee County, Claiborne County and Washington County (where I now live), and with all Appalachians fighting for a better future.
Until next week, y ‘all be blessed.
Sincerely,
Skylar
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