Coal, Identity, and the Gendering of Environmental Justice Activism in Central Appalachia
Abstract
Women generally initiate, lead, and constitute the rank and file of environmental justice activism. However, there is little research on why there are comparatively so few men involved in these movements. Using the environmental justice movement in the Central Appalachian coalfields as a case study, we examine the ways that environmental justice activism is gendered, with a focus on how women’s and men’s identities both shape and constrain their involvement in gendered ways. The analysis relies on 20 interviews with women and men grassroots activists working for environmental justice in the coalfields of Appalachia. We find that women draw on their identities as “mothers” and “Appalachians” to justify their activism, while the hegemonic masculinity of the region, which is tied to the coal industry, has the opposite effect on men, deterring their movement involvement. We explore the implications of these findings for understanding the relationship of gender to environmental justice activism.
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1.
1. Snow and McAdam (2000, 42) define collective identity as “a shared sense of ‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’ among those individuals who compose the collectivity.”
2.
2. Most people living in the Central Appalachian coalfields are white. In fact, Boone County, the top coal-producing county in West Virginia, is 98.5 percent white (U.S. Census Bureau 2000).
3.
3. “Culture of silence” is a concept that Paulo Freire (1970/2000) discusses in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. However, it was not clear from the interview whether Bo Webb was intentionally citing Freire.
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