The director of a local economic development authority leads me on a tour near the coalfields of central Appalachia on a recent winter weekend. ‘This place is unique in this country’, he says, ‘I doubt there is any other region that has been so completely left for dead’. Out the window the signs are stark and starkly obvious. We pass the sprawling Walmart that has contributed to the closure of scores of area businesses, the recently bustling timber mill now rotting by the wayside, and a medical clinic treating an opioid crisis among the worst in the country. He tells me that ‘the freight cars used to pass through here each and every day, carrying ten thousand tons of coal. But there hasn’t been a train on the tracks since 2016’. A large fallen boulder now obstructs the railway that no multinational corporation or municipality has any impetus to clear. It’s an apt metaphor that marks a quite literal end of the line; what anthropologist Kathryn Dudley (1994) describes as ‘lost jobs, new lives in postindustrial America’.

Joseph Schumpeter (1994) proposed creative destruction to describe the way in which productive forces organized by capitalist logics tend to innovate through annihilating the existing order. He offered the example of U.S. steel replacing craft manufacturing, but many instances come readily to mind: Blockbuster and reference books; payphones and the printing press, candles and the horse-drawn carriage. Through a process of (un)planned obsolescence, capitalism obviates entire economic sectors—from the products themselves to those who produce them—often overnight. Creative destruction, Schumpeter (1994: 83) writes, ‘incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating the new…’. As ‘the essential fact about capitalism’, creative destruction continuously brings emergent economic, social, and technological forms to life. In its wake it leaves landscapes of abandonment.

The heart of central Appalachian coal country is a region long defined by extractive industry— with its booms and busts, its attendant displacement, dispossession, and ecological and economic disruption. Despite Trump’s trumped up promises to bring back jobs to the region, it’s clear that king coal has been dethroned, replaced by cheap and abundant fracked gas while mechanization has replaced manpower in the mines. Left behind are landscapes scared by strip mines and the aftermath of an increasingly anachronistic industrial economy. The fallout of the flight of capital.

Thinking with creative destruction encourages us to attend to not only ‘economies of abandonment’ (Povinelli 2011) but also ‘life in capitalist ruins’ (Tsing 2015). That is, to notice how things fall apart, but also how they come back together again. In this context, I ask what emerges from the devastation of capitalism and a changing climate? What crops up in and of its damaged landscapes, as other socio-economic forms wither away? In short, what does destruction create?

In central Appalachian coal country, one answer is…more of the same. Economic divestment in coal has cleared ground, quite literally so, for a form of disaster capitalism in which mountain top removal sites are being reimagined as fertile sites of high-tech food production. One project in particular has received inordinate attention from media and moneyed interests alike, a development initiative proposing to revitalize a region in ruins. Harvesting Mountains (let’s call it) has received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to construct a two-million square foot high-tech greenhouse on an abandoned strip mine. This project is billed as a state-of-the-art solution in the service of environmental and economic sustainability, promising to bring jobs and local produce to communities riddled with record-setting unemployment and maladies of malnutrition and obesity. In these proposed agro-industrial factories, vegetables can be grown at commodity prices using futuristic technology to conserve water, extend the growing season, and reduce the cost and carbon footprint of distribution. Its billed as a silver bullet solution, a pledge for a path out of poverty.

What is being created here? What destroyed? Pockets lined with speculative investment, in this emerging imaginary for an Appalachian future, the blasted landscape offers a fertile new frontier. Rather than an environmental and economic catastrophe of epic proportion, in this rendering, mountain-top removal sites carve out space for Progress, affording a blank slate for the building of a brave new world of advanced agriculture. Rich with resources but poorly suited for industrial designs, the rugged landscape has now finally been tamed—Nature made docile by bulldozers. With a nod to Kipling’s tale of civilizing through conquest, you might call the legacy of these loped-off landscapes, the White Man’s (Over)Burden.¹ Reimagined as untapped edges of extraordinary potential, the ruins of an old economy beckon with abundance anew. In a region long defined by dashed dreams and discourses of development in which outside interests remake landscapes into extractive commodity frontiers, such projects are easy to interpret as merely a brand of business-as-usual. Once a promise to bring progress to ‘yesterday’s people’, now a fantasy of the technoscientific fix, it’s yet another salvation story as old as the hills.²

Harvesting Mountains exposes one way in which capital finds ways to capitalize upon its own sacrifice zones, reclaiming resources (land, labor, infrastructure, development dollars) at fire-sale prices, marshalled for more of the same. But other modes of creative destruction are possible. They offer a very different politics and more promising possibilities.

Counties away, still deep in the coalfields, another example is telling. No industry has been hit harder than print journalism, no industry is a better example of the destruction of capitalist creation. In a region reeling from the retreat of coal—where once bustling villages are now being used by filmmakers seeking to set horror films in ‘ghost towns’—the proposed closure of the last area newspaper spurred community members to rally to save the bankrupt business. In the span of a few short weeks staff were able to crowd source funds to buy out the exiting owners with a plan to operate the newspaper as a collective. It remains to be seen how successful the takeover is, in the long term, but for now they’ve managed to make the operation viable, even expanding subscriptions. A community organizer emphasized to me how important the revitalization has been for the area: they’ve inherited a failing business, a falling down building, and an ancient printing press, she says, ‘but the pride that was built in this community, the very first front page that this county controlled, there were tears from little old ladies, the newspaper had never been under local control before. They were like, even if it goes under in six months, we’ve done something. Then six months passed and they were still in the black…it’s been really awesome to watch the newspaper ninja their way into making it work’. Rather than yet another abandoned building rotting by the wayside they have a bustling business, led by local people, invested in the local community. Individuals that wish to see both thrive. It stands as a beacon that change is possible. More still, the newspaper will allow locals to tell their own story, stories of hesitant hope in a blasted landscape (Kirksey et al. 2014) and of potential rebirth in a region riddled with ruin.

These two small stories suggest divergent ways in which destruction catalyzes creation. I’ve used the analytic of creative destruction in a capacious sense, expanding it to encompass—and thus help us to better understand—processes by which capital invests, divests, and thereby clears ground for emergent formations, in potentia. Its effects are ambiguous, nearly always calamitous, but not only so. Central Appalachia, like other regions in crisis (Klein 2018), offers insights on ruination and recovery, a window on the worlds that capital has made, unmade, and which are being remade once more. Creative destruction is the means and the ends of capitalism. However, if Marx is correct that capitalism creates its own gravediggers, and if folks like those from our newspaper collective ultimately succeed in reclaiming abandoned industries and putting them under community control, creative destruction may also expose escape routes; ruptures that potentiate (always partially, always precariously) capitalism’s end.

Endnotes

1. Overburden is corporate speak for the so-called waste—soil, rock, and other earthen material—that is removed to expose coal seams in strip mining. [↩]
2. Interestingly, the project was recently forced to re-site elsewhere in the state, citing structural integrity concerns. As one journalist quipped, such development projects slated for reclaimed strip mines stand on ‘shaky grounds’ indeed. [↩]

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