Labor and Environment Entwined: A Radical Green New Deal and Just Transition in Applachia

In this Article, Professor Lofaso and Professor Stump propose a genuinely transformative Green New Deal and Just Transition in Appalachia. The Article opens by tracing the long history of the Appalachian labor and environmental movements. Next, the Article interrogates the common contention that the Appalachian environmental and labor movements are opposed. While this contention has substantial truth, more complex forces have been at work in the region. Fossil fuel industry elites, for instance, have wielded exaggerated “jobs versus environment” rhetoric to maximize profits and quash emergent solidarities among local workers, residents, and activists. This Article contends that a key solution is pursuing a jobs–and–environment strategy, as exemplified by leading proposals, such as the Green New Deal and Just Transition. However, such proposals should be informed by bottom-up approaches that require radical transformations of our ecological political economy and not mere “policy interventions” from within the system. Such proposals also should reach beyond the United States, grounded in an emancipatory green transition that requires ending imperialism and neocolonialism. Ultimately, such an approach would constitute a radical Green New Deal and Just Transition democratically coordinated from regional to global scales.