The Reluctant Environmentalist: Finding Evidence of Injustice in James Wright's Ambivalent Writing of Place and Identity

In the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections, Twitter users, verified and unverified alike, flocked online to shake their heads at the benighted politics of red-leaning regions and states. As one tweet put it, "Yet again, Florida proves that it prefers white supremacy to being above sea level."¹ Similar reactions haunted West Virginia's senate primaries, particularly the enthusiasm with which citizens greeted one-time Republican candidate and embattled former chairman and CEO of the Massey Energy Company, Don Blankenship. In 2015 a federal court found Blankenship guilty of conspiracy to violate safety and health standards ahead of the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine explosion, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine workers. The campaign denied culpability, redirecting blame to federal oversight by tapping into what Arthur Rose recently referred to as "coal nostalgia," a communal sense of industrial pride (and regional persecution) revolving around resource-extraction labor.² Despite economists' and environmental scientists' general agreement that an assemblage of cheap natural gas and automation had already halved the coal workforce between 1980 and the passage of the Clean Power Plan, "the sympathies of many mine families [had] shifted from unions to mine operators, who are portrayed as job creators."³ Blankenship even received the presidential nomination for the rightwing Constitution Party in 2020, after failing to jump onto its (and the Republican Party's) West Virginia senate ticket in 2018.

To an extent, state politics in Appalachia play out as a struggle over place-based identity—how a person or group of people understands itself in relation to a given environment based on the cultural meaning with which they invest it. That is, it's a struggle over what it means to exist in coal country and what kind of relationship to the environment that identity captures, one of either master or partner and as victim of either federal oversight or the industries that often flout it.⁴ Contrary to left-leaning Twitter jeers, West Virginia activists have long fought both big coal and the condescending perspective that Appalachians, en masse and as a rule, choose coal over human and environmental health. One need only glance at recent coverage of state politics to note a growing acceptance of the local Mountain Party's allegations that lawmakers "continue to allow the injection of coal prep slurry into abandoned coal mines despite the mounting evidence that doing so has poisoned the source waters for a number of our rural communities."⁵ The disparity between the Constitution and Mountain Parties' respective positions, rooted as it is in conflicting claims to economic and scientific fact, is representative of the broader conversation surrounding truth following the 2016 presidential election. In the context of West Virginia, vehement disagreement exists as to what caused the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion, who is to blame, and, more broadly, the role that extraction plays in Appalachian place-based identity. Blankenship largely dismissed the autobiographical evidence of misconduct amassed by families impacted by the explosion, just as the Trump administration, during its tenure, denied local and global evidence of the earth's changing climate by deploying "alternative facts." The willingness of many voters to accept Donald Trump's claims of election fraud following his presidential defeat by Joseph Biden in 2020 demonstrates just how pervasive—and influential—misinformation has become in the American public sphere. While such "facts" have met with widespread condemnation across the political spectrum, their demonstrated rhetorical power suggests that few would disagree with the notion that all too often "our public figures take our language away from us, erode its meaning, so that we can't trust other people when they make some public gesture in language," a comment made in 1972 by the Appalachia-born, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Wright.⁶

Rather than consider Wright particularly prescient, we might appreciate how long today's discursive concerns have circulated, especially around matters of environmental justice. That said, Wright does not particularly provide an expected model of such environmentalism—one that takes seriously intertwined environmental and social violence—rarely...