Who Owns the Mountains?
2 min read

Who Owns the Mountains?

I wrote for the New York Review of Books website about the political economy of concentrated and outside landownership in Appalachia in the wake of Helene and previous disasters—and the activists and scholars who have pushed for something better. I have been thinking a lot lately about what tourism and service economies can do, in terms of economic justice, and what they can't. This is also part of my continuing project of piecing together how rich and ultra-rich buying up land in rural "hinterlands" affects not just the economic structure, but the culture, community life, and small-d democratic practices of those places.

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, corporations and in some cases wealthy individuals bought up immense acreages of mountain land in southern Appalachia, planning to extract value from them in the years to come. Two industries predominated: mining and tourism. In some places the land would be strip-mined, in others clear-cut, in others used as the site of a ski resort or second-home development. In the aftermath of the Tug River flood, some organizers, scholars, and writers identified these patterns of consolidated land ownership as issues of vital concern for economic justice and democracy in the region. To understand how political and economic power manifested in Appalachians’ lives, they believed, they needed to understand who owned the mountain land, and what it was being used for....
The land ownership survey published a full report on its findings in 1981. Among its recommendations were short-term fixes: progressive property taxation, community-led land use boards, the development of publicly owned state or regional land banks to create local capital reserves. But the study included a more ambitious proposal: land reform. Targeted at large absentee landowners, such reform could, the authors wrote, take a number of forms: redistribution programs, community land trusts, “eminent domain for meeting community needs,” limiting excessive corporate ownership of unused land. “For too long there has been a pervasive myth that land reform is only needed in countries of the Third World, ignoring the urgent need for land reform in the rural areas of this country,” they argued in Who Owns Appalachia?, a book that gathered some of their findings two years later. “Nowhere is the need for such reform more obvious than in Appalachia.”

The news cycle moves on, but folks in the places devastated by Helene are still in the early stages of rebuilding. Here's a few places to support if you're able:

Because the election is tomorrow, I'd be remiss not to send out another link to my piece on J.D. Vance, the Agrarian-Distributists, and the conservative tradition of invoking "tradition" in defense of reactionary politics.

Right-wing discomfort with the moral and cultural consequences of market capitalism is not new. Nearly a century ago, another generation of American conservatives, distrustful of the economic changes around them, also invoked “tradition” to counter what they saw as the extreme forces of their time: industrial capitalism, communism, and fascism. They were known as the Agrarian-Distributist movement, and like members of today’s right-wing movements, they also found themselves accused of harboring unsavory ideologies. That movement’s origins and dissipation helps us understand the historical precedents and intellectual genealogy of today’s resurgent right.

If you haven't already early voted, get out and vote tomorrow—the top of the ballot is important, but the downballot stuff is where your vote really has an impact, especially if you don't live in a swing state (Missouri, I'm looking at you and your ballot initiatives).

Be well, friends, and see you on the other side of November 5.

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