Since the last presidential election, I’ve witnessed a near constant stream of ridicule against Appalachian Trump voters: “They are getting what they deserve,” “They had a choice and they chose a lying bigot,” “They screwed us all.” I have even been told “We don’t have time to deal with them (Trump voters). We have bigger problems to fix.” Rather than go ad hominem on my fellow Appalachians—like a majority of the nation did—I became depressed realizing just how much damage has been done by the environmentalist fueled culture war surrounding mountain top removal (MTR) mining.
The culture war began in the early 2000s when environmentalist tactics, influenced by outside organizations, became the opposite of grassroots organizing. Rather than meet people where they were, they enacted their own versions of feel good activism that pushed Appalachian communities further and further into coal industry and conservative rhetoric and ultimately toward voting for the most deplorable people imaginable. This was a shift, because in the 2000 presidential election, the core of central Appalachia’s coal producing counties voted for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush. Note the image at the top of the page.
It is not surprising that much of the vitriol toward Appalachians comes from people who did not grow up in the mountains, nor do they have any idea of our history. Their lives of privilege makes it difficult for them to understand the limited choices Appalachians have had to face and constant struggle for basic human rights against ruthless extraction industries. They were not the ones who fought, bled, and died fighting for what labor rights we did have in this country for a time. Nor did many of them attend underfunded, resource poor schools where teachers have a hard enough time teaching basic standards let alone critical thinking— especially when kids are facing the ravages of poverty and the opioid epidemic.
You can imagine then, how disheartened I was to see that my Huff Post article garnered the same derisive comments as the election. What’s more, many of the statements came from social justice advocates who I thought were open minded critical thinkers. Apparently, it’s easy to confuse working for a good cause with actual humility.
If I were to let all of these comments fester itself into defiance, I myself would put a Trump sign in my own front yard and scream at the top of my lungs, “F**k all y’all.”
This is exactly the point I’ve been trying to make for the past five years.
Let’s look at a few election maps. Click through the slides below and note the switch from blue to red in the central Appalachian coalfields of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and southwestern Virginia.
How did a coal-based region go from voting for Al Gore—a man who openly warned about the issues of human-caused global warming—to voting for his polar opposite? What could have happened in just 16 years?
If we know anything in Appalachia, the coal industry will stop at nothing to protect its investments. They immediately began employing public relations strategies to save face and begin a counter offensive to environmentalist anti-MTR/anti-coal mining campaigns. Under normal circumstances, no one back home would have believed the coal industry rhetoric. Everyone still held a deep distrust of the industry given our history of labor rights struggles. But between the failure of the United Mine Workers to re-organize a new generation of miners (likely due to corruption); the increasing poverty due to years or economic development monkey wrenching by the coal industry1; and the indifference shown by large environmental organizations towards coal mining family’s economic needs; the industry’s public relations efforts were overwhelmingly successful. The evidence can be seen in the election maps above.
The last seven years have been especially difficult for Appalachians. When the latent effects of the Haliburton Loophole flooded energy markets with cheap natural gas, it all but destroyed an already fragile Appalachian steam coal market. Shifts in global steel industries and the metallurgical coal market also decreased the demand for high grade Appalachian met coal causing more mine closures. When similar issues hit the coal industry in the 1990s, coal companies used the opportunity to shut down union mines and break the back of the union.2 This time, they used it to shift everyone’s politics to the other side of the isle with the help of large environmental organizations.
Thousands of coal miners were losing their jobs in areas already devastated by poverty when the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign received tens of millions of dollars from Michael Bloomberg to shut down the nation’s remaining coal fired power plants. Headed up by Mary Anne Hitt, the campaign celebrated victories based more upon energy market shifts than anything else, all while failing to realize their campaigns were deeply antagonizing Appalachian people and driving deeper wedges between actual Appalachian anti-MTR grassroots activists and their neighbors.3
Do we blame the coal industry and conservative politicians for doing what they have always done? Do we blame the UMWA and the Democratic party who abandoned Appalachian coal miners decades ago? Or, do we blame the environmental organizations who obstinately conflicted with local culture and failed to understand their needs?
Nah. Let’s just blame all the coal mining families for voting for a man they hoped would keep their promises and upset the political establishment, who represented an opposition to all of the liberal elitism and stereotyping they’d suffered, and who could possibly give them some economic relief—even if he was from New York, even if he was a billionaire, even if his promises were probably more bullshit.
Over the years, I’ve realized many so-called “environmental justice organizations” avoid the hard tasks of actual grassroots organizing, i.e. humbling themselves, checking their privilege, and supporting (not leading) local grassroots organizers who listen and accept their neighbors for who they are. Organizations keep all the fundraising resources to themselves rather than providing community organizers the resources necessary for building their own, local, broad based movements for progressive change. The end result should be organizations composed of, and led by, local people from communities that are well respected for their work helping their neighbors.
Perhaps this is why J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has become so popular among both conservatives and liberals. Liberals who seriously messed things up and prefer not to reflect on their mistakes can now scapegoat the Appalachian people, joining conservatives in the belief that Appalachian people are degenerate and should just pick themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Trump’s election should have been a wake-up call, prompting Democrats and environmental organizations to question the effectiveness of their tactics. But they won’t because they are not interested in helping people, they are interested in themselves.
What’s perhaps the most interesting in all of this? Following the election I spoke to a lot of Trump voters back home and many of them said they would have voted for Bernie Sanders, hands down. Now there‘s something to think about.
- The coal industry has always taken a vested interest in economic development. Rather than face labor competition from alternative industries that would offer better jobs without health risks (thereby forcing coal companies to raise wages to attract workers willing to risk life an limb) they were strategic. They worked with the local chambers of commerce and kept themselves involved in economic development initiatives. One of the more blatant cases was when coal industry involvement in the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority, a state created entity charged with helping diversify the coalfield monoeconomy to offer alternative job opportunities. During the 2000s and early 2010s, half of their board was coal company officials. This led to millions being used to build the Appalachian American Energy Research Facility in Wise, Virginia that offered space for companies to conduct clean coal research. ↩︎
- Schnayerson, Michael. Coal River. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
↩︎ - In my sociological research on anti-enviromentalism, I came across reasearch suggesting large environmental organizations intentionally antagonize working class communities facing a jobs vs. environment dichotomy. The result is angry workers who the organization then labels as anti-environmentalists which they need more money from their funding base to fight. Shoreman-Ouimet, Eleanor. “Concessions and Conservation: A Study of Environmentalism and Anti-Environmentalism among Commodity Farmers.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 14, no. 1 (January 2010): 52–66. ↩︎
Thoughts of a Coal Miner 
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