Dead or Alive? Odishan and Appalachian Mountains as Partners in Activism

Dongarias Kondhs in Niyamgiri: A Background

My (Annapurna Devi Pandey’s) work is based on the fieldwork I conducted among the Kuttia and Dongaria Kondhs, beginning in January 1987, followed by return visits during the summers of 2004, 2012 and 2016, and nine months on a Fulbright (July 2017–March 2018). In the last few decades, I have observed quite disturbing dismantling of tribal social structure, culminating in a massive plan for a mega mining project. Here I argue that the exploitation and marginalisation of the tribes can be explained through ‘internal colonialism’ as in the British period that Singh and others have documented (Rao, 1978; Singh, 2002) and the development model as imposed from above, totally disregarding the world views, interests and well-being of the indigenous people. Development theorists and World Bank economists utilise models that force non-western people to mirror westerners in their world view, both in ideology and in way of life (Bairoch, 1977; Pandey, 2012; Sen, 2007). I also expand on Rama Chandra Guha’s observation that adivasis ³ as a whole have gained the least and have lost the most from six decades of democracy and development in India (Guha, 2007). That example is presented first, then the example from Appalachia.

Dongaria Kondh women, men and children—classified as a ‘scheduled tribe’ by the Indian government—live in the Niyamgiri hills (which would be seen as mountains through a global lens) in south-western Odisha, on the central eastern coast of India. Dongaria Kondh women, especially, have mobilised against the mining of bauxite (a source of aluminium) by the Vedanta Corporation, based in the United Kingdom, since 1997. Niyamgiri refers to thousands of acres of densely forested hills and abundant streams and is known as the food bowl of south-western Odisha. Dongaria Kondhs have traditionally worshiped Niyamgiri as Niyam Raja, King of the Law, who is their source of living, identity and their heritage. The Kondhs’ ⁴ relationship with Niyamgiri is beyond a human–environment relationship—in their cosmology and world view, there is no distinction between Niyamgiri and Kondh identity and agency. The Niyamgiri hills provide not only means of subsistence for the Kondhs but also roots and herbs used as medicine and in religious practice. The deep reverence that the Dongarias have for their hills and streams pervades every aspect of their lives: Their art, music, dance and textiles, among other aspects. Their name Dongaria is tied to the word dongar, meaning ‘hill’, and their name for themselves is Jharnia, protector of streams ⁵ . The Dongaria sing:

We are the hills, we are the streams, we are the water, we are the air, we are Adivasi, Dalit peasants, mothers, sisters, crop, fields all carry the same meaning for us. We are the smile of the soil, we are the branches of the same tree. Oh dear we can’t live without each other. I can’t live without you, you can’t live without me. Our rhythms, our dances, our musical instruments (Dhab, Nisan, Dhol Mahuri), our weapons (Thenga, Badi, Dhanu, Kateri). The essence of our King Niyam Raja, King of our soil, the only master of our streams, our forests, our land. (Mishra, 2015)

In an interview in 2016, one resident told me ‘we go to this mountain all the time. Besides growing crops like ragi (a type of millet), we collect leaves, dry wood, ants’ eggs and all kinds of greens not only for our family to survive on but also to sell in the market in exchange for clothes and medicine’ (author’s translation). Many studies explain that mountains are the foundation of the indigenous world view rooted in an awareness that all life depends on the water sourced from the mountains in countless perennial streams. Niyamgiri has provided Kondh residents with all that they require to sustain their economic, socio-cultural, and spiritual life, until disrupted by mining interests. Another resident told me in 2016, ‘We are alive because of this land. It fulfils all our needs. We get our shelter, our water from it. We are happy here and we are at peace here’ (author’s translation).

Kondhs I have interviewed said that even if they were provided all modern amenities and alternative means of livelihood, they would never leave Niyamgiri as it is their most precious sacred shrine. The World Conservation Congress promotes the concept of Indigenous Community Conserved Areas. Niyamgiri is a living example in which biodiversity coexists with cultural diversity. Dongaria Kondhs maintain a taboo on cutting trees there, in the name of Niyamgiri, out of recognition that the natural vegetation conserves the fertility of their land through an abundance of streams (Mathur, 2011, p. 163). The Forest Rights Act (FRA) in India recognises the rights of forest communities to live by their customary use of forests where they have lived, or which they have used, and from which they shall not be forcibly displaced. Forest communities also have a right to protect, conserve, regenerate and manage for their sustainable use the forests they have sustained as their community forest resource. ⁶

Employing a very different view of the Niyamgiri hills, and often disregarding the rights of the Kondhs, the government of Odisha—which has the majority of India’s bauxite supply, the world’s largest reserve—developed a partnership with several multinational corporations, primarily the Vedanta Group, for extensive extractive activities, including the mining of bauxite, copper, coal and iron ore, in areas inhabited by tribal people. The main activity in Niyamgiri has been the construction of refineries to produce aluminium, which extremely pollute the water, air, and soil. The government did this even after these same corporations had amassed a long list of violations of human rights and environmental regulations in India and elsewhere (Padel & Das, 2008).

During the last thirty years, I have witnessed increasing exploitation and marginalisation of Dongaria Kondh residents of the Niyamgiri hills leading up to the mega mining proposal made by the state and the Vedanta Group, which has disregarded the perspectives and sometimes even the existence of the tribal people living in the area. Dongaria Kondh communities have suffered from colonisation (external and internal), dispossession from their land and resources, discrimination, and other forms of oppression. While the resources of their region have been extracted to benefit people elsewhere, the Dongarias have lived with the consequences of those extractive industries. The consequences have been more dire for women than men, given their responsibility for provision of household resources (food, fodder, firewood and water) and their exposure to sexual violence in the industrial zone that has been imposed on their home communities. As is the case with indigenous people in other nations, they have become one of the most impoverished groups in their country.

In India, despite the presence of several laws to protect the adivasis (another term for indigenous or tribal people) and where they live, such as Schedule V, Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas of 1996, FRA of 2006 and the Land Alienation Act (forbidding the transfer of Adivasi lands to non-adivasis), the lands of the Dongaria Kondhs have been systematically violated and encroached upon by mega national companies and multinationals for the extraction of minerals and other natural resources. Odisha has a high concentration of tribal residents, and the highest number of those designated as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in India. According to Shah (2010, p. 18), in the name of the special protection of the scheduled tribes:

Tribal areas called scheduled areas have been treated as separate administrative categories in order to protect the rights of scheduled tribes over their land, forests and water. Fifth and sixth schedule of the constitution of India carried over the principles of the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874 which excluded scheduled area from the operation of ordinary laws of British India.

Ironically, nearly half the state of Odisha’s area (44.70%) is under Schedule V of the Indian Constitution, ⁷ but instead of promoting well-being, these are some of the most poverty-ridden areas in the country (Elwin, 1936). Despite being extremely rich in resources, 72% of the tribal households in Odisha live beneath the poverty line. Since much of the country’s mineral resources are located in these protected scheduled areas, they are constantly amended by the state in order to extract all the rich resources and help the state to rapidly improve its economic growth rate.

When I first visited Kandhmal in 1986–1987, I was struck by the hardworking Kuttia Kondhs who walk miles on difficult terrains of Niyamgiri to collect fuel and fodder, do their planting as well as harvesting and climb down several hills just to come to the weekly market in the plains once a week. I was closely observing the rich, vibrant and multi-layered spiritual lifestyle of the Kuttia Kondhs and nearby Dongaria Kondhs living in the area. The Kondhs were known for speaking a distinct language and for their distinctive culture. They did not see their gods as residing in temples but as tied to the forests, hills and streams of their surroundings. Every village, at its entrance, had a wooden pillar (see Figure 1) known as the bata debata, the gatekeeper, as the divine marker of the village and at its centre, Darni Penu the Earth Goddess (the divine feminine as their main deity) was worshipped along with Bura Penu, the Sky God. At that time, I was studying the exploitation going on in this area with the influx of people from the plains namely, government officials, businessmen, contractors, moneylenders and other entrepreneurs grabbing land and living well at the cost of the Kondhs.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: Annapurna Devi Pandey.

The exploitation of the Kondhs is nothing new. It has gone on for a very long time as F. G. Bailey and other scholars have reported. During the British colonial period, their land was classified and became available for profit making, leading to their land alienation. The role of Christian missionaries, money lenders, zamindars (large landowners), and the British punitive rules and regulations were major sources of their exploitation (Bailey, 1957, 1960, 1969). What is new is robbing them of their land and their livelihood by state-supported and -sponsored multinational mining projects. The state of Odisha, especially the southern belt comprising of Koraput, Balangir and Kalahandi districts (KBK), is endowed with 1,733 million tons (70%) of the total bauxite resources of the country. In the post-liberalisation period, this mineral resource has attracted many multinational corporations both from within and outside the country, dragging this state into the global commodities arena. The state whole-heartedly supports these initiatives, attracting huge revenues from the mining. During the 1992–1997 period, bauxite resources in Odisha pulled in $20.5 billion dollars. Vedanta Aluminium Ltd set up a one-million-ton aluminium refinery at Lanjigarh, in the district of Kalahandi, based on a memorandum of understanding signed with the Government of Odisha stating that up to 150 million tons of bauxite for the plant were to be supplied from nearby Niyamgiri hills.

Dongarias established the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti (NSS) to protect Niyamgiri, their father and mother who they have described as giving them their identity and source of sustenance and livelihood. The NSS was comprised of the local tribal residents and neighbouring villages affected by mining-related displacement and environmental pollution in their area. They were joined by national and international activists and environment rights groups in order to fight Vedanta, the multinational corporation working along with the state of Odisha to expand the mining of Niyamgiri. The tribal people’s resistance movement is primarily in opposition to such projects because of the resulting harm to their social and natural environment.

There is a strong tradition of Kondh women’s political organising. An earlier successful indigenous movement, Ghumusar Mahila Sangathan (GMS) was led by Maka Naik in 1979. It had become a common practice for male officials and businessmen who had come from other areas on temporary assignments in the forests of Odisha to build roads or work in steel mining projects or to fulfil government or forestry contracts to take Kondh wives in Odisha even though they had wives elsewhere in India. The men knew that this was not in compliance with the 1956 Hindu Marriage Act, but taking Kondh wives was convenient for meeting their temporary needs for sex, meals and housekeeping, and when the men were transferred out of the area again, the tribal women were abandoned. GMS was organised to address the plight of those abandoned Kondh women and their children, and student organisations and other activist organisations and media representatives took up their cause. GMS challenged the men in court and succeeded in getting traditional Kondh marriages recognised as legal, with the women being entitled to financial support. The state ultimately recognised the situation of these women and their children, providing compensation, and the men who engaged in this practice were charged with human rights violations. The practice is no longer common in the region, even with the growing number of mining operations bringing many new workers into the Niyamgiri hills.

Now, with the bauxite mining in the area, new problems have emerged for the Dongaria Kondh communities. There has been massive displacement of tribal people from their own land, forests have been depleted quickly due to large-scale mining and many residents have had to migrate to urban areas to find livelihoods, which often ends up to be sex trafficking, for women especially. When I visited the area in 2004, the community house was not being used for socialising and young women were wearing vermilion and covering their faces in line with state-promoted Hindu practices to avoid being teased, mistreated and worse. Constant threats of rape and abduction of Kondh girls even by their non-tribal teachers made schools an unsafe place for them to be. The increasing role of state and capitalist ideologies, and practices in the region concentrate oppression for women, and the GMS continues to focus its organising on many aspects of tribal women’s problems resulting from their reduced access to forest resources (through massive deforestation and mining activities) and an associated reduction in the equal decision-making by men and women in traditional tribal livelihoods.

Local protests, led most often by Dongaria Kondh women, have led to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest forbidding bauxite mining at Niyamgiri. This victory was supported directly by the activists’ view of a living partnership with the hills themselves. One of the Kondh women described their struggle to protect Niyamgiri to me in 2016 in this succinct way: ‘Niyamgiri is the Kondhs’ breathing and feeling divine’ (author’s translation). When I asked whether community members saw any benefit in allowing Vedanta’s activities in Niyamgiri, she answered:

Nothing. No benefits. Rather it will be a loss. Our Dongar will be turned into a desert. Now we have these natural resources and we are getting fresh air and water. After this hill is cut off, the land will turn into a desert and we will die. As a fish dies without water, we too will die. So, there will be no development, rather destruction. We have been fighting for this. Here the Vedanta people are imposing British rule on us. They barge into our homes, beat us, and shoot us, just like the British rule’ (author’s translation).

The Niyamgiri hills provided major livelihood sources to the Dongaria Kondhs—not only the sources of food and water but also their identity and spirituality. As per their origin myth, Dongar Raja is their god, ancestor and the source of their being. They realised that with bauxite mining in the area, their kin and clan have been displaced and have suffered severe blows; depletion of forest resources have become the biggest threat in the wake of mining projects in the surrounding districts. This has been accompanied by the ‘piling up of solid effluents such as red mud and tons of sodium hydroxide, leaving a high pH level in the soil and loss of vegetation and natural habitats’ (Padhi & Panigrahi, 2011, p. 43), a major health hazard.

The Niyamgiri hill range, Niyam Dongar, is regarded by the Dongarias to be the abode of their divine god, Niyam Raja (the king of order, who defines law and order). The god and goddess live there, as one. The mountain is actually considered to be the law maker. To maintain the mountain is at the centre of their religion and of their narrative about always having dwelled there. They carry a wealth of information regarding the secrets of the forests, plants and wildlife, and have passed it on from generation to generation. The tribe’s religion is based on respect for nature and they observe traditional rules of restraint known as niyam, regarding everything that is acquired from nature. As a part of these laws, felling trees on mountaintops is considered taboo and as a sign of disrespect to their supreme deity. Displacing them would completely uproot them from their moorings and would represent a disaster/catastrophe for their existence. Dongarias are land-based people. Their religion is intertwined with their land and they say they cannot survive without their land. It gives them their purpose in life. The forested mountain land is their god, it is a gift from their ancestors. Displaced from that land, they have said, they would not be the same people. Land for them is not a commodity, it is part of their selfhood and personhood. They identify with the plants, trees, water resources, animals and earth as the basis of their identity. As I have learned from them, their religious views are at the centre of their successful environmental justice organising.

It is interesting to note that the state government advertises the establishment of massive bauxite mining and processing operations as the symbol of state pride, when it has so adversely affected the tribal people and their livelihood (reinforcing the notion that tribal people are marginalised from a full sense of belonging as state citizens). With the depletion of the forests as a source of livelihoods, people have been displaced from their own land and forced to perform wage labour. Around every bauxite mine, local people have said that their water sources that were perennial have dried up—this is just part of the danger faced by farmers in the area. I saw what could happen to Niyamgiri while visiting a neighbouring region, which has already been consumed by extractive industries. There was thick red dust all over the trees, roads and houses. I could see the open-cast mining mile after mile; the hills have been cut down and piles of iron ore mounted and transported by trucks to the nearby railway station. The people have moved away from the hills and were living in small makeshift housing and were standing in line to work in the mines. All the managerial jobs were held by the non-tribal babus while the low-paying manual jobs were given to the tribal people. It was clear that there was no fair sharing of the profits made through the mines.

Because of the dedication and the courage shown by the Dongaria Kondhs, the Niyamgiri hills have not been devastated to this extent and are still standing except for the area around the refinery. For the people, the Niyamgiri hills are too precious to be touched. Everyone knows that once the machines move in, it is a slippery slope and those hills will become history. The Dongaria Kondhs in the Niyamgiri hills have raised their voice against such mega-development projects. They have questioned these development projects by asking ‘Development for whom and at whose cost?’ noting that it steals tribal people of their livelihood resources. This is one of the reasons why there were protests of the tribal people in Odisha against the state-sponsored bauxite mining operations in 1985, 1996, 1997, 2000 and 2005 (Padhi & Panigrahi, 2011). In all these movements, with the mountains as active partners, women have been leaders in picketing, processions and public hearings. The emergence of an indigenous leadership made all these movements more widespread, and their source of strength lay in the land itself. When I asked the protesting women, ‘If you were provided with water, food and everything without hampering your natural habitat, would you agree to the mining proposal to extract bauxite from Niyamgiri?’ One answered for all saying, ‘No, once the bauxite is extracted the water will dry up. We know the consequences. If they show us greed, we are not going to agree. We cannot destroy our natural resources. If we support deforestation, it will be very difficult to get the same forest again’ (author’s translation). The logics of development between the Kondh residents and the representatives of the state and Vedanta were completely different, and the Kondhs’ logic of development and well-being is profoundly connected to the well-being of the Niyamgiri hills.

Vedanta continued fighting in the courts for its right to mine in the Niyamgiri region and reopened its refinery in 2013 while appealing the mining ban. The Indian Supreme Court rejected that appeal and made the decision on 18 April 2013 that the Dongaria Kondh had to be consulted themselves about the future of the area, upholding their religious and social rights. This was done through a referendum in gram sabhas (village councils), which serve as the basis of grassroots democracy in India, letting ‘the people plan and decide about the development of their own village’ (Rout & Sahu, 2013, pp. 103–109). Representatives of mining interests tried to subvert the local decision-making process, but the Dongaria Kondh made the collective decision time and time again to prevent mining in the Niyamgiri hills.

This decision of the Supreme Court upholding grassroots democracy in India does not come as a surprise since earlier in 1997, the unprecedented verdict of the Supreme Court of India in a case known as Samata vs. State of Andhra Pradesh, popularly known as the Samata Judgment, was in favour of the right to land and livelihood of thousands of tribal residents of the rich mining regions of Andhra Pradesh. The state government had proposed massive bauxite and calcite mining transferring the tribal land to corporations like Birla Periclase, which was against the basic rights of tribal communities to their land and natural resources. The tribal people who would be displaced and affected by private mining companies took up the fight for their rights. At the time that the Supreme Court made a directive that state encroachment could only be permitted exceptionally—subject to the laws of the state concerned (Rebbapragada, 2017). Dongaria Kondhs have taken full advantage of the 2006 FRA to uphold their rights over their land and resources.

When I asked a Dongaria Kondh woman why she and other women voted against the mining by Vedanta, she quipped, ‘Who will give us food and livelihoods and our identity? Will Vedanta do that?’ (author’s translation). Mishra’s documentary Referendum (2015) provides many examples of the mountains being active participants in that decision. Gobina Sikaka, from a village in the region, said:

We are not literate. We do not know what is Patta [land title]. The whole of Niyamgiri belongs to us. Write Niyamgiri as our name. Their god Niyam raja’s abode is Niyamgiri. His body stretches from Rayagada to Kalahandi, covering a wide region. Niyamgiri represents nature. If man has not created Niyamgiri, who is to destroy it? (Mishra, 2015)

Others in the film spoke of the hills feeding them, but not the company, and of Niyamgiri not being able to walk ‘if you break his legs and his body’. These depictions of the mountains as having the same agency as people, or more so as sacred beings, resonate with powerful art representing Appalachian Mountains as women being violated through MTR mining (in the sculpture ‘The Agony of Gaia’ by Jeff-Chapman Crane and the poem ‘Boom Boom’ by Crystal Good, for example), but that is not so broadly shared a view that it has been a prevailing organising logic in social movements.

Ironically, although there have been some successes through invoking the mountains as living partners in Odisha, Niyamgiri has become a site for contestation by various agencies. Dongaria Kondhs and their supporters are still fighting to save their natural resources, and cultural and religious rights. Though lying low, the state government of Odisha is still supporting mining operations in the adjacent mines and bringing the bauxite for processing at the Lanjigarh refinery. It wants to give leases to multinational and other mega-national corporations in the hope of getting some investment in the state. The central government has its own environmental mandate in line with the constitution. Different political parties each have their own agenda regarding mining. The state, to its advantage, can invoke the policy of ‘eminent domain’ ⁸ in support of Vedanta mining operation in Niyamgiri. The argument is that communities will be forced to give away their lands for the larger benefit of the public, in the process disregarding the customary laws and the cultural and religious rights of the local communities. History shows that the state invariably has used force to invoke eminent domain causing the indigenous people immense suffering. There is tremendous uncertainty looming large as a Vedanta aluminium factory is still present in the Niyamgiri area. The state has increased the patrolling by the Central Reserve Police Force where innocent people are picked up—implicated in false cases or branded as Naxalites. ⁹ With low levels of education and employment possibilities, they are unable to aspire for any alternative livelihood. Despite creating an oppositional space for themselves, the indigenous people are unable to stop atrocities and discrimination by outsiders. A 20–25-year-old Dongaria Kondh asked me, ‘how will a Kondh become aware? Call a Kondh, give her a slap, two slaps, three slaps. Then at the fourth slap, a Kondh will ask why are you hitting me? Now after years of exploitation, they are asking why are you doing this to us?’ (personal conversation with Annapurna Devi Pandey, 24 May 2016). We venture that there is much to be learned from comparing the logics informing land use and social activism, both within and between mountain regions.

The Appalachian Context for Comparison

Residents of the Appalachian mountains ¹⁰ have been stereotyped as ‘backward’ and ‘isolated’ in national discourses, like the Kondhs, even though extractive industries (lumber, salt and coal, for example) in Appalachia have fuelled global capitalist circuits for centuries (Dunaway, 1995; Lewis, 2004). Within the United States, there are contradictory or ambivalent logics through which mountain landscapes are viewed, just as in India, but the mountains have not had the strong role as sacred partners in efforts to stop large-scale mining that destroys the mountains themselves in the Appalachian context. In part, this is due to the multiple ways in which Christian logics may be used to understand the relationship between humans and their environment. Christianity is the dominant religious framework in the United States, even though the United States is constitutionally secular. ¹¹ Culturally, there is a dominant religious framework of Christianity that has a strong influence on political life (all US presidents have been sworn in on Christian bibles, for example). As Euro-American observers including Max Weber—who observed Protestantism at work on a trip to the Appalachian United States (Peacock & Tyson, 1989)—have noted, there is broad variation in Christian logics and practices shaping perspectives on spirituality and materiality. I (Ann Kingsolver) will parse some of those here since they do sometimes motivate social movements, but I do so with the important caveat that overwhelmingly, the lens through which mountains are viewed by those in the United States is a non-religious, non-spiritual, capitalist framing of monetary value, or the ethic of extraction, as Brian Black (2011, p. 33) has documented, ‘Appalachia’s energy landscape is one of the clearest expressions of a specific American environmental ethic: extraction’.

Most strands of Christian logic in the United States are used to justify environmental stewardship through that exploitation of resources for human benefit (supporting extraction), but others are used to argue for preservation of mountains as whole, with the view that that is the will of their creator, the Christian God. This multiplicity of logics has been documented excellently by Joseph Witt (2016) in his account of religious perspectives and social movements resisting MTR coal mining in Appalachia. As he said, ‘mountaintop removal… arises at the confluence of many conflicting visions of “place” tied to other global religious, social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics’ (ibid, p. 47). From his interviews with activists against MTR coal mining, he found three Christian logics motivating their activism, sometimes interwoven: ‘eco-justice arguments’, ‘Creation Care’, and ‘dark green religion’ (ibid, pp. 54–55). Unlike the example of the Dongaria Kondhs and the Niyamgiri hills, in Appalachia there is not a strong overlap between a single, shared logic regarding the use of natural resources and shared residence in the mountain landscape, except perhaps in the Qualla Boundary (land collectively owned and controlled by the First Nations Eastern Band of the Cherokee in the North Carolina portion of the Appalachian mountains) where there are still differing views, as there are disagreements among the Kondhs, but there is a process for collective decision-making as there is among the Kondh communities. There is no similar agreement in the region of the Appalachian Mountains most affected by MTR coal mining, West Virginia and south-eastern Kentucky. ¹²

As the Kondhs argued about the destruction of the Niyamgiri, once the land itself has been destroyed, there is no replacing it. Contradictory and plural conceptualisations of the landscape as sacred or secular, and with different ways to interpret the sacred as motivation for action, can be navigated over the long term (through what Mark Whitaker, 1999, calls ‘amiable incoherence’) except when actions necessitated by one logic completely negate the possibilities of other interpretations and relationships. This is the case when the Appalachian Mountains, which can otherwise simultaneously be navigated through plural logics, are altered fundamentally and irrevocably through MTR mining. Since the 1970s, through blasting and shifting the tops of mountains off of coal seams that used to be reached via tunnel mines, displacing the rock and earth to fill in river valleys between the mountains, more than 500 mountains have been completely eradicated from the Appalachian range and thousands of miles of streams (water sources for urban areas in the lowlands) have been destroyed and filled with toxic sludge through MTR mining. ¹³ Through this practice, giant bulldozers erase histories and displace forests, homes and livelihoods, leaving flat, barren sites on which new businesses are promoted by state and corporate alliances, much like in Odisha; these include maximum-security prisons and Amazon warehouses.

In the capitalist logic through which mountains are replaced by prisons and warehouses, the unwritten costs (or what economists call externalities) of reduced biodiversity, altered headwaters, perpetual remediation, new displacement following multiple erased histories of displacement and whatever future revenues might have been generated by viewing the mountains through other logics (ecotourists coming to view the most biologically diverse region in the hemisphere outside of Amazonia, for example), go unrecorded. There are occasionally moments when there are ways found for capitalist logic—so dominant in the United States’ legal and social fabric—and logics framing more sustainable uses of the Appalachian Mountains to come to a balance, but for the most part the market costs of coal and labour have determined whether MTR mining goes forward (a decision made largely by non-residents with controlling interests in land holdings) or not. The most successful movement to stop MTR mining appealed to both Christian and capitalist logic: A Quaker (Christian) group convinced a bank to divest from companies doing MTR mining, following successful anti-Apartheid organising strategies (Lakey, 2015).

Exhaustion of the more accessible coal seams in the rock in the Appalachian region shifted most of the surface removal mining to the north-western United States, where there were large seams available close to the surface of the land and the extractive energy industry shifted its focus more to hydraulic fracturing of the rock underground to get at natural gas supplies—a technique bringing its own environmental damage, especially the pollution of underground water sources. But the Trump administration (2017–2021), which had benefited from political funding from coal industry corporate leaders and lobbyists from Appalachian states, removed environmental regulations, making it possible for them to extract more coal and gas from the mountain region. The following example is just one symbolic conflict illustrating our comparative argument in this article that emerged in that era.

In 2018, a conflict arose between capitalist, environmentalist and spiritual interests in mountain land use focused on the Appalachian Trail (a well-known footpath of over 2,000 miles through the Appalachian mountain range) over whether to prioritise conservation of the viewshed (the landscape that can be seen from the trail) of the Appalachian Trail ¹⁴ or destruction of a section of that viewshed (through deforestation) for the construction of a long-distance natural gas pipeline, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, by private-sector energy corporations. That viewshed of conserved mountain forest land and the Appalachian Trail itself were established, ironically as a refuge from capitalist development in the Progressive Era of US politics in the early 20th century. The ‘debilitating effects of capitalism’ (Cronon, 1996) were definitely what Benton MacKaye had in mind when he first proposed the idea of the Appalachian Trail in 1921. His wife had committed suicide and he believed that people needed to experience nature to heal from the angst of industrial capitalist life (Mittlefehldt, 2013). He envisioned a trail that would simultaneously enable hikers to reduce their alienation through the act of walking, not unlike sacred pilgrimages in many traditions. As Sarah Mittlefehldt (ibid, p. 3) reports, MacKaye exhorted the Appalachian Trail hiker ‘(1) to walk; (2) to see; and (3) to see what you see’.

Much about the Appalachian Trail experience, associated with national environmental movements, emphasises a communal rather than a capitalist logic: the forests through which the trail goes seem to be communally held (although they usually are not), with an often uninterrupted viewshed of what can seem like ancient tree—promoting a sense of spiritual connection with primordial nature, without much context for learning about the centuries of extractive industries that put Appalachia at the heart of global capitalism. Shelters along the Appalachian Trail are open and shared; it is not possible to reserve a shelter, they are on a first come, first served basis, and often shared by strangers. Hikers are encouraged somehow to be outside capitalism, connecting with nature and a sense of equity with the living mountain biosphere communities, taking their own risks with bears, rattlesnakes and heights. The trail’s vistas have often given little indication of the competing logics through which the mountains are framed. A documentarian told me that she had had to hire a helicopter and violate corporate airspace in order to show the extent to which mountains had been extensively carved away with intentional avoidance of the interstate and national park view sheds by the mining companies for as long as possible.

Opposite to the central spiritual alliance between Dongaria Kondh residents and the Niyamgiri hills, the Appalachian Trail’s spiritual refuge was designed largely for non-residents, often more affluent, and local residents may be seen as intruding on imaginations of a pristine landscape or stereotyped as dangerous and ignorant, as in a whole genre of horror films. I would add that the imagination of the Appalachian Trail as a spiritual refuge originated through a white as well as classed lens. Hikers who identify as other than white in the racialised landscape of the United States, as Gary Samano (2006) points out in his article on the institutional racism of the Appalachian Trail, have asked for whom the Appalachian Trail’s wilderness experience was designed. As Carolyn Finney (2014) argues, national park narratives appear to be all-inclusive, while excluding many people of minoritized identities by ignoring or erasing structurally and physically violent histories of expulsion from and torture in, through lynching, for example, the very same areas represented as timeless and pristine, and simultaneously silencing voices and discouraging visitors of minoritized identities, including local residents, by not representing them in the photos of the national wilderness sites. Rahawa Haile is one of the few black women to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. A writer, Rahawa Haile left her own trail of social change as she hiked the trail. She left books by black authors in shelters along the trail, where there is a practice of leaving and taking books. Haile said, in an interview with Sarah Laskow (2017):

There is so much talk about where the black body belongs. Most of my hike was saying, this is a black body, and it belongs everywhere. These books were a way of me saying, black intellect belongs here, too. I was hoping that by carrying these books and taking them to these incredible vistas, fellow people of colour might say, ‘If those books can go there, so can I’.

There are many personal, social, political and religious reasons for which one might choose to hike the Appalachian Trail (which is less accessible to hikers without white and class privilege, as noted, and nearly unnavigable to those who are differently abled).

Private and public, inclusions and exclusions, are in constant tension in US mountain regions like Appalachia, in accordance with the tensions in basic logics at the core of national discourse. Are the mountains dead weight standing in the way of coal to be exploited for the global economy, providing increasingly mechanised jobs for a dwindling percentage of residents—along with the permanent health effects of polluted streams—or as or a narrow ribbon of biosphere reserve for spiritual renewal for those who can afford it, or both? Iryna Galuschchak, whose visit to the Appalachian region from her home region in the Carpathian Mountains of the Ukraine I hosted, wrote of how strange it was to her not to be able to get out of the car and walk up into a mountain forest. In her home region, that would be considered common land for all to use (Murray & Galuschchak, 2018). The majority of the Appalachian Mountains, as explained earlier, have been held by absentee corporate investors since the United States became a country, and there are often fences or forbidding signs warning possible trespassers to stay off private property in the mountains. Across the Appalachian region, the primacy of mountains as private (often corporate) property is unmistakable for residents, sometimes brutally so. I attended, for example, a reunion of elders who had grown up in a coal camp in eastern Kentucky. Once a year the coal company that owns the property (from which their families were evicted for unionising, immediately destroying their homes) unlocks the gate and allows them to gather there for a day, sharing collective memories, stories and tears. The mountain place meant so much to them that they each had made small replicas of landmarks and buildings that they bring and put together once a year to reconstitute in miniature the community that one told me had been more of a home than anyone had found since.

The Appalachian Trail, however, constitutes a refusal of overt capitalist ownership of the mountains—a spiritual screen quite apart from the lived reality of those who had grown up in the mining camp. Kerry Mitchell (2016, p. 7) argues, like Whitaker (1999), that strategic ambivalence is key to navigating contradictory logics in everyday practice: ‘Through bodily, aesthetic experience, combined with avoidance of articulation of meaning, visitors can experience the park as public and private at once’, Mitchell says. ‘Rather than a failure of intellectual sophistication, the incommunicability of spirituality serves as a social strategy’. Environmental justice activists in Appalachia call out the social disjunctures in ‘shared’ spaces and call for the most inclusive understanding of spirituality, seeing social justice, racial justice, economic justice and environmental justice as intersecting priorities for well-being. Caretta and McHenry (2020), for example, invoke the term ‘energy justice’ as they document the disproportionate risks and effects borne by economically and socially marginalised communities in the United States of energy pipeline construction for the convenience of the nation as a whole without their sacrifices being recognised at all by that national public—an argument long made by coalminers, who sacrificed not only their landscape but their health, suffering from black lung disease due to poor regulation of air quality in underground mines.

Christian logic has been used in dramatically different ways to justify human action in relation to the Appalachian mountains, as Witt (2016) has followed in depth, from Weberian Calvinist performance of capitalist extraction of resources in the (dead) mountains believed to be given to humans by God to manage (the dominant use of Christian logic), by far the majority view, to those who use other passages of the same texts to see mountains not only as living members of diverse communities, but as protectors. Silas House and Jason Howard (2009) wrote about a congregation in Tennessee mobilised to protect mountains using as a base text a passage from the book Numbers in the Christian Bible: ‘It is by grace that we live among God’s mountains. You shall not defile the land in which you live, and in which I also dwell’ (Numbers 35: 34, as cited in House and Howard 2009, p. 151).

Andrew Thompson (2013) invoked Niebuhr, a theologian significant to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.’s approach to social change, to argue that Christian religious logic can be used to love the mountains as an everyday practice that can lead to preventing their destruction. As someone from the region and working in it, I have seen that the ‘Coal Wars’ represented in the US media and in political rhetoric as pitting residents against each other—as either miners or environmentalists—are another simplistic binary that just does not convey the majority of community experiences. Individuals can be complexly positioned, with family members and church members, for example, or even the same individual, working in the coal industry, mining reclamation and ecotourism. As Kerry Mitchell (2016) said happens with spirituality in the national parks, preventing explicit either/or discourse and actively weaving both/and possibilities are often shared social projects. An interesting foundation for conversations across different perspectives has been established in tree planting organised on post-mined lands through Green Forests Work, ¹⁵ bringing together very diverse groups (which would be seen as on opposite sides of the ‘Coal Wars’ if one were to see environmental and extractive interests as never intersecting).

Unlike the Niyamgiri example, the mountains have not broadly been viewed in Appalachia as living and divine members of the community in ways that can motivate majority protests against extractive industries that would destroy the mountains themselves. But like that example, women have tended to be at the core of those actions that have resulted in changes in policy regarding the Appalachian Mountains and land stewardship. Women can navigate contradictory logics of use of the mountains by bringing to the fore their rights and duties as mothers and grandmothers, as Shannon Bell points out (2013). This is a powerful motivation, as demonstrated by the Mothers of the Disappeared, who brought down a dictatorship in Chile by consistently breaking the silence about their children and grandchildren who had been kidnapped and killed, and by the Dongaria Kondh women who stood up to sexual violence and to the destruction of their environment. In Appalachia, women have had to watch bulldozers push the coffins of their children and the gravestones of their grandparents off of mountains as their homeplaces have been disassembled by force, and cared for family members and eventually themselves as they died from toxic exposures to runoff. Grief can lead to connection with a larger community, and shared action (Arnold, 2001, p. 172), as can a vision for the future. One activist said in 2018 about the fight to stop environmental destruction related to the Trump administration’s shift to extractive oil industries in the national forests: ‘The real fight is just beginning. I have grandchildren. I want to be able to tell them that I tried to stop this environmental insanity’ (Miles, 2018). As the Biden administration begins to restore environmental regulations that the Trump administration eliminated, there may be more state support for that long-range view while acknowledging intersecting economic, social and spiritual interests in the mountains. A promising collaboration documented by Kathryn Newfont (2011) involved many different stakeholders in an Appalachian national forest, for example, logging companies, Appalachian Trail enthusiasts, local officials, artists, scientists and hunters, agreeing on an alternative to clearcutting (the practice of cutting every tree in a large area, leaving only bare ground, in the name of economic efficacy) that involved selective logging using existing roads so that capitalist, spiritual and other interests in the mountains could be served in common. This was a hard-fought and small-scale solution, but it exemplifies what might be possible if there were not such unequal power relations (with corporations backed by government) and more equitable avenues for communication in the Appalachian region. Social movements’ actions and strategies can inform, if not replicate, one another’s positive moments in confronting destructive forces and faces of capitalism. As Stuart Kirsch (2014, p. 224) observes, ‘strategies that succeed in one campaign are circumvented in the next, demanding constant innovation on the part of NGOs and social movements’.

Conclusion

In the two examples we have provided, the Appalachian mountains have been viewed most often and most powerfully as inert property to be exploited (although there are some exceptions) rather than as living partners in livelihoods and decision-making, a perspective which has enabled Dongaria Kondh residents of the Niyamgiri hills to have—at least, at some moments—more success in preventing extractive industry practices which lead to the irrevocable destruction of the mountains themselves. In both regions, however, we note that there are multiple logics, interests and temporal scales used to valorise the mountains and that the most marginalised communities are continually asked to sacrifice their well-being and landscapes disproportionately for national communities, even if those landscapes are then symbolically invoked as spiritually significant. Everyday partnerships, and lack of distinction, between the human and beyond human are increasingly being documented in the social science literature (see Yip, 2021, on partnering with sea ice to address climate change and Sampat, 2015, p. 15 on spiritual allies to humans resisting dispossession from communal lands). ¹⁶ Revisiting our distinction in this article between mountains being viewed as dead or alive, we see both logics applied to mountain regions globally, but when mountains are viewed as agentive they can be powerful allies in social movements even when political power and short-term capitalist aims would seem overwhelming. Beyond this comparative case between Odisha, India and the Appalachian region of the United States, there is a growing body of work in global scholarship attending to the power of human/beyond human alliances in countering capitalist extractive arguments for the destruction of mountain environments, for example, successful assertions of indigenous knowledge and property rights invoking the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This recognition has never gone away, of course, from indigenous ontological collaborations with active mountain partners in contesting capitalism, as in the Andean/Amazonian region of South America. ¹⁷