So it begins

Welcome to my Substack newsletter, the working title of which is “Hannah’s Field Notes” though I am totally open to suggestions if anyone has a cleverer name (preferably one with a pun related to Appalachian environmental politics if you can pull that off. I know some of you reading this are fellow writers and/or comedians). I started this newsletter to document my observations in the field as I travel through West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina (in that order) over the next month as part of a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and UChicago. “Crisis reporting” might sound like overkill for reporting on domestic issues in semi-sleepy Appalachian towns, but I think many of my sources for this project would describe the economic lives and wellbeing of Central Appalachians as in a protracted crisis, both before the coal industry left and earlier. I’m here because as we shift away from relying primarily on fossil fuels—which at this point appears inevitable, the question is really how painful and protracted our political and economic leaders will make it for us—I want to know how that transition will happen, who will benefit from it and who will be left behind by design or neglect. Because of its political and geological history, rural Appalachia is in danger of being overlooked in this “energy transition,” a one-two punch given how coal has left the region and taken money and tax revenue with it. Other American communities, from Chicago’s industrial southeast side to the tribal communities that straddle New Mexico gold mines, are facing a similar question: will we continue to be extracted from, or will we have access to clean energy too—will the future be built for us? There are other journalists doing important work in those communities, but my dispatches happen to be from Central Appalachia, a place I grew up not far from and have a familial affiliation with/knowledge of. I used to think that anybody should be able to report on any place or any group of people, but the more I grow as a writer the more I think there are stories we are set up to be adept at telling and those where we risk “parachuting” into a place that others in our field can read better, by sheer accident of birth or by long study and commitment. So I am here. These are my notes from the field as I piece things together and probably come away with more questions than I started with. I’m basically Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, except instead of my column being about sex and the city, it’s about the political and cultural challenges to the renewable energy transition in rural Central Appalachia. Which as far as I’m concerned is just as scintillating, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

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