Features
Your source for incisive, peer-reviewed articles that bring the insight and authority of our panel of experts and authors to bear on the most important ideas for creating a sustainable future.
Latest Feature Articles
In early November 1996, workers arriving for the morning shift at the Louisiana Pacific plant in Dungannon, Virginia, were told to go home. After 10 years of operation, the plant, which used the region’s forests to manufacture oriented strand board, a type of engineered wood commonly used in construction, had closed without warning. The facility was profitable, according to a company official, but not profitable enough to continue operations. For the 100 people who had lost their jobs and the small landowners whose forests bore the scars of poor logging, there was no recourse.
This has been a familiar story in Appalachia, and one that has its roots in nineteenth-century economic principles. In 1817, English economist David Ricardo put forth the theory of comparative advantage to...
0 Comments
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
—Wendell Berry, Unsettling of America
Coal Mining in Appalachia
Coal mining has been practiced in Appalachia since the Revolutionary War. An upsurge in extraction began with the twentieth century.1 By its end, increased mechanization produced enough coal to provide over 50 percent of the electricity for the United States, thereby emitting nearly 40 percent of the country's carbon dioxide emissions.2,3 With increasing demand from such developing nations as India and China, Appalachian coal is also being shipped overseas.2,4
Coal slurry is a major contributor to environmental degradation. It consists of a mixture of minute particles of...
2 Comments
Meet the Feature Authors
Founder of the international climate campaign 350.org; scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
Professor Ostrom is Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Professor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Head of the Environmental Policy Group in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT; Founder and President of the Consensus Building Institute (CBI); Director of the Public Disputes Program at Harvard Law School; Head of the Negotiation Pedagogy Initiative at PON.
Senior Lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of the Sloan Sustainability Initiative.
More Features
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
—Wendell Berry, Unsettling of America
Coal Mining in Appalachia
Coal mining has been practiced in Appalachia since the...
Like many waterways in the U.S. region of central Appalachia, the Cheat River once ran acidic—a legacy of drainage from the watershed’s countless abandoned coal mines and refuse piles. Just a couple...
Central Appalachia has much to recommend it. It contains one of the most biologically diverse forests in the world and breathtaking mountains that have inspired artists and writers for centuries....
In Focus
The Alliance for Appalachia
www.theallianceforappalachia.org
The Alliance for Appalachia is a group of 13 organizations...
Coal is cheap. At only a few cents per kilowatt-hour, it usually costs less than natural gas and nuclear power, its chief...
The plan proposed by John Todd and colleagues is an ambitious one: to build a new economy for Appalachia based on principles...
Environmental groups have been facing off with the coal industry for years, trying to reduce the country’s dependence on...
The poet W.H. Auden remarked, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” Having sufficient quantities of...
Groups
36
Exploring solutions presented in our special July/August issue on Appalachia
250
Bowdoin College's Phil Camill offers a fresh perspective to the issues surrounding environmental change.
135
This is the University of Vermont Solutions Group. We are based in and around Burlington, VT.
