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  • “Visit My Community”: The Need to Extend Environmental Justice to the Countryside
  • Vagel Keller (bio)

A friend in a university history department recently told me he agrees with some of his colleagues that history as a profession has become irrelevant to our society. In the context of Pennsylvania’s environmental history I am forced to agree. How else to explain the regression of environmental policies dealing with the exploitation of natural resources in this Commonwealth over the past two decades, or the persistently low air and water quality in western Pennsylvania due to the manufacture of coke and the production of electricity at coal-fired plants? From the loosening of restrictions on longwall mining in the 1990s through the regulatory shenanigans surrounding development of the Marcellus shale today, the fact that Pennsylvania has been through this sort of thing before seems to have escaped everyone. There is no evidence that history has informed—let alone influenced—policies now in place or under consideration, whether due to willful ignorance by our government or a failure by historians to enter the debate. [End Page 395]

One reason for this collective amnesia might be what historian Samuel P. Hays called “environmental lethargy,” a self-congratulatory feeling afflicting politicians, elites, and activists after the transformation of the national environmental regulatory framework following Earth Day in 1970. He coined the term in an essay he delivered at a conference, “Pittsburgh’s Environment: A Historical Perspective,” held in that city during September 2000. In contrast to the generally upbeat theme of the conference (the edited volume produced by the conference was titled Devastation and Renewal), Hays scolded those groups—and his audience of historians—for failing to alter the region’s stunted “environmental culture,” resulting in plans for economic development that lacked “a vigorous voice to define regional environmental aspirations.” Not to single out western Pennsylvania, he decried the problem as characteristic of other regions where “remnants and traditions of the old economy and the traditional culture organized around activities of an earlier time still dominate.”1

In fairness, environmental historians have made some progress in documenting the long and checkered history of public policies dealing with the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels here. Joel A. Tarr’s The Search for the Ultimate Sink, a compilation of his articles published in 1996 on the evolution of regulations and technologies dealing with municipal and industrial wastes, included several examples from Pennsylvania’s past.2 In 1998 Christine Meisner Rosen’s article, “Costs and Benefits of Pollution Control,” dealt with the judicial response to industrial pollution in three industrial Mid-Atlantic states: Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.3 Although the bulk of the cases in both of these works dealt with manufacturing rather than extraction, each revealed the overwhelming economic and political power that the coal industry wielded in thwarting antipollution initiatives aimed at it until well into the twentieth century. Oil extraction has also received attention, including articles by Brian Black and Paul Sabin on the oil industry in the late nineteenth century that appeared in the autumn 1999 special issue of Pennsylvania History.4

But it is hard to refute Hays’s criticism completely, especially when in 2000 Pennsylvania was one of only six states where the acreage of state parks had actually shrunk since 1970.5 Given the mild-mannered public response to the predictable degradation of the rural environment from the expansion of longwall mining and the present ambivalence toward “fracking” in the Marcellus shale, the entire state seems to fit his model. I believe that longwall [End Page 396] mining and natural gas extraction from the Marcellus shale are the two most significant environmental issues facing Pennsylvanians today, if not the Mid-Atlantic region in general. Moreover, these issues are more difficult to address because their impacts fall overwhelmingly on rural communities and small towns in regions where Hays’s “remnants and traditions of the old economy” still persist. Therefore, the problem appears to be not so much a failure by historians to address important issues as a lack of attention by our audience to what we have to say. Consequently, we need to frame our scholarship in a way that...

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