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Keynote Address to
The East Kentucky Leadership Conference
April 23, 2009
Dr. Ron Eller, Professor of History
University of Kentucky
Living on Uneven Ground
Eastern Kentucky has certainly drawn its share of attention
lately from the news media. One national survey found that not
only was per capita income in central Appalachia among the
lowest in the country, but people were unhappy about it. Go
figure. The ABC News 20/20 program of a few weeks ago
certainly rekindled old stereotypes about the region, but it also
revealed the harsh truth about poverty and drug abuse in our
communities. My own latest book documents the failure of
government programs over the past five decades to bring
prosperity to all of Appalachia. The economic ground continues
to be uneven in the mountains, I argue, not only because of the
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weakness of our commitment to equitable change but because of
the assumptions that we have adopted about progress and about
the good life. But I want to focus here not on our failures but on
our potential. Briefly I want to explore some of the lessons I
have learned from studying our past and their implications for
building an alternative future for our children. I have spent
more than forty years researching the history of Appalachia and,
despite all of our failures to overcome the challenges facing our
communities, I am still hopeful about the future. That history
tells me that if we are going to build a brighter future for all of
our people, we are going to have to make some fundamental
changes in our assumptions.
Journalists and historians are often accused of only
reporting the negative, of being too critical of our failures. That
may be true. Perhaps that is why many of my colleagues in
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history avoid writing about the recent past and choose not to
engage in debate about current public policy. As Bill Moyers
described the difference between journalists and historians,
“Journalists tackle the here and now, which can rear up and bite
you; historians tend to deal with the dead and gone, who are in
no position to complain. Journalism encourages the making of
snap judgments and the drawing of facile conclusions: history
grows out of sustained study and a patient resolve to connect the
dots. Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel;
historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.”
Tonight I am going to step into the gap between the past
and the future and challenge you to think of history not just as a
tale of past events and dead people, but as a road map for how
we can shape a better future for our communities. What do the
lessons of history tell us about the roads we might take to build a
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truly new Appalachia, a 21st century Appalachia? I have tried to
identify a number of these lessons in my recent book, Uneven
Ground, but we do not have time this evening for me to explore
these in detail. I will just have to invite you to read the book.
However, a quick summary would include the following
observations:
1. Appalachia is not the “other America” that the
national stereotypes would have us believe but in fact is a
bell-weather to the challenges facing our larger society.
2. Growth and Development are not the same thing.
Growth does not always lead to fair, secure, and sustainable
development for everyone.
3. Urban and national models of growth are not
always appropriate for rural places. The consolidation of
public services in one place can cause the decline and
neglect of other places.
4. Land Use Matters. Extractive economies tend to
produce social and economic inequality, environmental
destruction, and short term growth.
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5. Environment and Culture are inextricably connected.
How we use the land affects how we see ourselves, how we
relate to each other, the values that we pass on to our
children, and the meanings that we give to life.
6. Development is a political act that requires
democratic community engagement and open public debate.
Leadership, creativity, and civic participation are essential
for successful communities.
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Community-based strategies produce more
sustainable and equitable development than those based
solely on national and global market priorities.
The implications of these lessons for you and me today, I
believe, are clear: we must learn to think about the process of
development differently, to reconsider how we define the good
life, and to search for alternative ways to get there. This would
not mean a return to some romantic past, but it would require a
revolutionary way of thinking about the future. It would require
willingness to dream and to take risks. Thomas Jefferson
believed that America needed a new revolution every thirty
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years or so to empower each generation to think creatively about
old problems. Maybe we need just such a revolution in our
thinking in the mountains.
I would offer that we have a narrow window of opportunity in
Appalachia today for such revolutionary thinking to take root.
Global warming, the financial crisis, international recession and
world terrorism create an opportunity for change, if we can seize
the moment.
There are no easy solutions to the challenges
facing our communities. If there were, we would have already
addressed them. But maybe the problem isn’t the lack of ideas
about how to grow our economy but the way we think about
growth and development itself. Moving beyond the assumptions
of our past has implications for action, I expect, in three general
areas:
1. The Environment.
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First, we must change how we understand this place and how
we understand our place in it. We must look beyond an
extractive-based economy to one that values and enhances the
landscape and the resources that it holds, one that connects our
own sustainability and future to that of the mountains
themselves.
We must begin by abolishing surface mining, including the
radically destructive practice of mountaintop removal.
Mountaintop removal isn’t necessary to the regional or the
national economy; it’s just cheaper. We can continue to mine
coal, gas, and other mineral resources but the impact of
extraction on the land, on water, on forests, and other sensitive
ecosystems must be strictly regulated and enforced. Ultimately,
however, we will have to move away from an extractive
economy, especially one based upon coal.
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Such a policy only makes sense in a political, cultural, and
economic environment that is going to see declining coal
reserves, rising opposition to coal fired electric generating
facilities, and limits placed upon carbon production. Over the
short term, during the national transition away from coal that
must occur, we can continue to support underground mining,
while weaning state and local governments from the tax
dependency that coal severance has imposed on the public
sector.
We have the capacity to move from extractive jobs to jobs
that enhance the environment. Land, mountain land, can be a
source of new jobs, green jobs managing the forests for
sustainable production and for carbon recovery, for eco-sensitive
recreation, and for localized energy production in the form of
wind, solar, bio-fuel, hydro and other sources of electricity.
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Jobs displaced by the loss of strip mining could be replaced by
federally supported programs of reforestation and land
reclamation for alternative energy production, and reclaimed and
unmined lands could be added to our national forests and
managed as national energy trusts for their carbon credits.
Restoring and managing the Appalachian landscape itself would
employ many times the number of people whose jobs will be
lost with the abolition of surface mining, but that process must
begin now. Let us not stick our heads in the sand, as we have
too often done in the past, while the rest of the country moves on
around us.
Developing a new philosophy of land use will also require a
new way of thinking about the goals and purpose of economic
growth itself. We need to move from thinking about producing
goods only for a distant market to producing goods and services
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for local and regional markets. Such a shift in economic
philosophy will demand the development of cooperative
relationships between urban and rural places within the region
and within the Commonwealth, a collaboration that has been
rare in our history.
2. Localization and Regional Growth
Despite national stereotypes, Appalachia has never been
isolated from the nation and from world markets. Nor should
we be, but building a new economy in the mountains in the 21st
century will require us to rebuild local and regional market
relationships that provide for greater sustainability and
autonomy, whatever the global economic situation. This means
shifting our thinking from the recruitment of outside industry as
our only alternative to the generation of job opportunities, from
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a way of thinking that expects someone else to provide a job for
us to one that expects us to create jobs for ourselves.
Government and social institutions can play a major role in
helping to foster and support entrepreneurship and small
business development. We can break down barriers that divide
our rural areas from our urban places and encourage urban
communities to buy regionally produced goods and services and
encourage rural places to see their urban neighbors as potential
consumers of food, recreation, entertainment and cultural
amenities, landscape plants, and digitally generated services.
We can encourage the decentralization of education and
health care, putting schools and health providers back into
smaller communities, especially rural communities where they
provide not only jobs but community cohesion, collaboration,
identity, and responsibility. It is much easier for a parent to be
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involved in a child’s education if the school is down the road
instead of across the county.
In a more community based economy, many of the new jobs
will be green jobs such as conducting energy audits and
improving energy efficiency in homes and schools, replanting
trees and bio-fuel crops on reclaimed mine sites, and
constructing small hydroelectric generating facilities and wind
farms for private and community energy generation. Both West
Virginia and Virginia are experimenting with wind farm
production and surely Kentucky’s mountaintops can help make
local communities energy independent as well.
Finally there is growing potential for local and regionally
coordinated tourism in Eastern Kentucky, but only if the
environment is restored and protected. Central Appalachia will
never develop a viable tourism economy until the destruction of
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the mountains and mountain streams ceases and the quality of
one of the richest natural environments in the world is restored.
To achieve these goals of re-inventing our relationship to the
environment and localizing our economies, we will need new
leadership, one which not only welcomes new ideas but is
willing to listen to a whole range of people as well.
3. Leadership Development
We must all work hard to nurture a new generation of leaders
for eastern Kentucky and to find ways to free them to dream and
to think creatively. Appalachia, and especially East Kentucky,
is one of the most creative places on Earth. Our musicians,
craftsmen and women and our writers and storytellers make
magic out of nothing but dreams. Given the freedom to do so,
this same culture can surely create new and innovative ways of
thinking about what makes a good life and how to achieve it.
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We need to nurture this creativity and diversity at all levels of
our public life. Recent scholarship has clearly confirmed that
there is a direct relationship between creativity, diversity and
successful communities. We need to do a better job of fostering
creativity through our social institutions, to encourage leadership
skills, civic engagement, and social responsibility in our schools
and colleges. We must do this by inviting everyone to bring
ideas to the table, not just those who are currently seated there.
To that end, we should continue to encourage the expansion
of higher education in central Appalachia, including the eventual
construction of a regional university or even a rank I research
university in the heart of Kentucky Appalachia. Most economic
development professionals agree that the presence of major
universities encourage the growth of research and development
capacity within communities; their presence helps to retain
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professionals and entrepreneurs, and to support community
vitality and leadership. This goes beyond the mere offering of
courses and degrees; they are engines of economic and social
creativity. Whether or not you think we have too many
universities in Kentucky, we don’t have enough research and
development capacity within eastern Kentucky, and our
universities are failing to provide that leadership for an
important part of the Commonwealth.
Finally, we should charge the governor and the legislature to
re-establish the Kentucky Appalachian Commission and its
Citizen’s Advisory Council to promote public discussion and
debate and to channel new ideas to state and regional policy
makers on issues of importance to the mountains. We should
encourage these same leaders to rekindle partnerships with
leaders in other Appalachian states in order to press the current
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administration in Washington to re-vitalize the Appalachian
Regional Commission (created by Kentucky leadership
initiatives in the 1960s) and to also establish an aggressive rural
development policy that would encourage rural places
everywhere to build a more equitable and green future.
Moving beyond the old assumptions about growth and
progress and adopting new ways of thinking about the
environment, about job creation, and about leadership will not
be easy – nor will it be accomplished over night. But we can
begin the journey. That journey starts with an understanding of
our past, and it is powered by the courage to take the actions
necessary for change. I hope we have that courage today.