Who Owns Appalachia? Land Ownership and Its Impact (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. 24, No. 1, May 1984, pp. 58-62 REVIEWS Who Owns Appalachia? Land Ownership and Its Impact. The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983. xxxii and 235 pp., maps, tables, appendices and references. $25 cloth (ISBN 0-8131-1476-4) Who Owns Appalachia? Land Ownership and Its Impact is one of the more important books published on Appalachia. Representing a coordinated effort of more than 80 individuals working under the leadership of the Land Ownership Task Force of the Appalachian Alliance, detailed ownership studies were made covering 80 counties in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The primary purpose of the study was to: "(1) Document ownership patterns in rural Appalachia, looking at such factors as the extent of corporate ownership, extent of absentee ownership, extent of individual or family ownership, description of principal owners, rate of change of ownership patterns, relationships between ownership and land use; (2) To investigate the impacts of these ownership patterns upon economic and social development in rural Appalachia, exploring the relationship of land ownership patterns to land use, taxation structures, land availability for housing and industry, coal productivity, agricultural productivity, economic growth and stability, social development and stability; (3) To develop action-oriented policy recommendations for ARC; state, federal and local officials; government agencies; and the public to assist them in dealing with problems relating to ownership patterns." The overall quality of the study is indicated by the findings of a panel of government and academic land specialists convened by ARC, who described the final report as "the best regional land ownership data source" and as "one of two best data sources on ownership patterns, its only possible rival being the Agriculture Department's 1978 Land Ownership Survey. " One of the primary criticisms leveled against the study is that it has a distinct anti-corporate, anti-bigness bias. The Task Force did enter upon the study with the assumption that many ofAppalachia's problems Ed Bingham, Emory and Henry College, Emory, VA 24327. Vol. XXIV, No. 1 59 were directly tied to land and minerals ownership, and the use of this ownership to manipulate the economic and political forces working within the region. For this reason the counties selected for this study were not randomly chosen, but rather were those that fit most clearly into the colonial model. And the underlying purpose behind the study was to reveal not only the extent of external/corporate ownership, but the impact of such ownership on the land and people of the region. A valid criticism of the study is that only negative impacts of external/ corporate ownership is given emphasis, deliberately overlooking the social and economic benefits provided to the local areas by the corporate ventures. However, the reader should be aware of the fact that the study was not designed to offer praise, but rather to look for interconnections between the ownership of land and resources and the multiplicity of Appalachian problems including impoverished local governments , inadequate public services, low per capita income, poor schools, poor health services, etc. This is an area that generates tremendous wealth. For the real Appalachian scholars there are few surprises. Ownership ofland and minerals in the 80 counties is highly concentrated, with absentee holders, corporations and government agencies combining with one percent of the local population to control 53 percent of the total land surface. The high degree of concentration of ownership is further indicated by the fact that 41 percent of the 20 million or so acres included in the survey is held by 50 private owners and 10 government agencies. And as one would expect, the federal government is the largest single landholder, controlling more than 2 million acres, or 10 percent of all land. Surprisingly, a high level of absentee ownership was found in non-coal mining areas. Perhaps more alarming to the Appalachian peoples than the ownership statistics are the ownership trends revealed in the study, i.e., (1) in agriculture, the trend toward fewer and larger farms, and in recreation dominated areas, the disappearance of farms altogether because of escalating land prices; (2) the trend toward further corporate control of timberlands, paralleled...