A Brief Background of the Region

A Trailer for Blood on the Mountain: a Documentary Film about the Coal Industry: 

A Look into the Wilderness Idea in West Virginia: 

A topic often studied in the Appalachia Seminar is that of wilderness in the region, especially at sites surrounding sustainability or the mining/energy industries. Today, the state of West Virginia holds 9 designated wilderness areas, including Cranberry Wilderness, and multiple National Rivers, Scenic Trails, and Heritage Areas under the National Park Service (NPS), including the New River Gorge National River.[1] After the Wilderness Act of 1964 and leading up to the decision on New River Gorge was a burst of environmental legislation in the 1970s throughout the country—the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and new laws regulating waste and management of federal public lands in 1976.[2] The establishment and protection of the New River Gorge National River under NPS in 1978 kicked off an era of wilderness conservation and preservation in the state. It was followed by the fight for dozens of other areas and improved legislation, the most notable of which were the designation of the Cranberry Wilderness Area in 1982 and the extension of the Monongahela Wilderness in 2009.  Juxtaposing the designation and protection of wilderness areas and national parks, strip mining and mountaintop removal for the collection of coal from the mountains since WWII have had a devastating impact on the land that many West Virginia natives and tourists alike consider to be their wilderness. The resistance to harmful mining practices, as one of working people and small communities of Appalachia in defense of what they considered to be their home brings attention to the way that wilderness was conceptualized by natives of wilderness land within the conservation, preservation, and environmental movements.[3] However, the protective mountaineers and their beliefs are only a small subset of the common population of the region.
Sometimes romanticized, sometimes viewed as primitive, and most of the time viewed as poor, the people of Appalachia are often portrayed as bold supporters of the coal industry and half a century behind the rest of the country in terms of technology and economy. After railroads were laid in the 1870s, coal towns emerged along the New River and around the Gorge, continuing to be the portrait of West Virginia in the eye of the general public today. Yet if one visits the Gorge today, he/she will be hard pressed to find evidence that there was ever human habitation in the areas that now seem so wild—the average tourist’s schema of New River Gorge includes nothing but unbound wilderness. The number of these tourists has soared since the National River’s inception in 1978 and now numbers well over a million visitors annually.[4] There lies much complexity between and within these groups’ perceptions of how “wilderness” is defined in the old mountains of the Appalachian state.


[1] "About Us," West Virginia Wilderness, April 26, 2017, http://www.wvwild.org/about-us/.

[2] Designating Cranberry Wilderness, H.R. 97th-97-561 (1982).

[3] Chad Montrie, To save the land and people: a history of opposition to surface coal mining in
Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3.
 
[4] Colias, “Almost Heaven Still?”, 96.