All my holy mountain: Imaginations of appalachia in christian responses to mountaintop removal mining

Abstract

Mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR), which has profound environmental and social effects on the Appalachian Mountain region, represents an urgent ethical issue for Christians. At the foundation of the debate over this practice is a struggle over the meaning of a geographic region. I use the work of Christian philosopher H. Richard Niebuhr as a framework for a Christian ethical response to MTR that attends to this struggle over meaning. He argues that human actions are shaped by our interpretations or imaginations of issues and their contexts and that God-centered or theocentric imaginations respond to all issues as reflecting Gods purposes. In applying this approach to MTR, I address imaginations of power and powerlessness, of insiders and outsiders, and of destruction and reclamation. With each pair of terms, I discuss briefly MTRs influence on religious responses to MTR, and I describe what I take to be a basic theocentric perspective: an understanding of power that seeks it in unlikely places, a conception of identity that relativizes boundaries between insiders and outsiders and expands the morally relevant wholes under consideration and a notion of reclamation for God that attends to the details of extraction and reclamation in light of the mountains ultimate source and that includes symbolic acts intended to mark the mountains as Gods. I provide examples of each imagination taken from activists and communities directly involved in the debate around MTR in Appalachia.