“I Just Keep My Mouth Shut”: The Demobilization of Environmental Protest in Central Appalachia

Introduction

Over the past several decades, two lines of inquiry have undergirded the study of environmental movements: the first has focused on explaining mobilization against environmental injustice and the emergence of social movements (McAdam and Boudet 2012), while the second has examined the production of “quiescence,” that is, “the absence of collective activism in the face of . . . injustice, especially under conditions in which one might reasonably expect protest to occur” (Cable, Shriver, and Hastings 1999:61; see also Shriver, Adams, and Messer 2014). In recent years, scholars have begun to devote a greater attention to a phenomenon that occurs betwixt and between mobilization and quiescence: demobilization—the process whereby individuals reduce their commitment to environmental movements, withdraw demands for remediation, or cease employing transgressive collective action to achieve them (Lapegna 2013, 2016).

The literature that has emerged on demobilization generally attributes the process to one of four factors: co-optation (e.g., Gaventa 1982), legitimation tactics (e.g., Shriver et al. 2014), violent repression (e.g., Cabrejas 2012), and/or lack of identity correspondence between activists and social movement organizations (SMOs) (e.g., Bell 2016). This study builds on that literature by investigating an empirical anomaly. The case involves a group of environmental activists living in “Shale County,” ¹ a coal-producing community in Central Appalachia. After several years of mining-related protest, participants demobilized before having resolved any of their grievances.

In contrast to instances of demobilization analyzed by previous studies, the coal industry did not subject Shale’s activists to violence or attempt to co-opt their movement. The activists, moreover, did not feel like their personal identities clashed with the culture of the broader environmental justice (EJ) movement. ² Although the coal industry carried out public relations work in the county, the residents I interviewed mobilized after those efforts had begun. Theories that emphasize co-optation, legitimation, violent repression, and/or identity correspondence, as such, lack the ability to explain why they abandoned protest.

Employing Michael Burawoy’s (1998) “extended case method,” which analyzes empirical anomalies to expand and reconstruct sociological theory, this study examines why Shale’s activists, despite not being encumbered by the factors normally associated with demobilization, withdrew from protest. Drawing from nine months of ethnography, multiple interviews, and document analysis, I argue that their demobilization resulted from the subtle acts of obstruction, noncooperation, and dissimulation they faced when attempting to resolve their grievances. Over time, these “clandestine kicks” and “invisible elbows” elicited feelings of frustration, isolation, and humiliation, making activists feel like protest wasted their time and eroded their happiness (Auyero 2010; Tilly 1996).

My analysis contributes to the social movements and environmental sociology literatures in three ways. First, I make sense of an instance of demobilization that existing concepts and theories cannot explain. Second, I highlight an aspect of contention that previous studies have largely overlooked: subtle, under-the-radar displays of industrial power. And third, I show how social conditions moderate the efficacy of corporate counter-protest tactics. Rather than construing “clandestine kicks” and “invisible elbows” as monolithic impediments to protest, I illustrate how their efficacy depends on the context in which industrial polluters employ them. Overall, I advance a model of demobilization that foregrounds its active production (Lapegna 2016) and provides insight into the conjuncturally specific resources movements need to render themselves robust to dissolution.

Social Movement Theory and the Demobilization of Environmental Movements

Social movement scholars have developed several explanations for why protest groups demobilize. ³ Among them, “co-optation” remains one of the most prominent. Piven and Cloward (1979) argued that elite support and/or sponsorship funnels grievances into official channels, which discourages disruptive protest and encourages concession (see also Gamson 1975; Gaventa 1982). While adherents of political opportunity theory also posit links between co-optation and demobilization, they primarily attribute movement decline to deteriorating social and political conditions. ⁴ McAdam (1982; McAdam, McCartby, and Zald 1988), for example, argued that demobilization tends to occur when the opportunity to impact elite decisions passes; when activists lose “free space” in which to assemble, plan, and exchange ideas; and when public opinion turns against movements. ⁵

Scholars influenced by the “cultural turn” and “framing perspective,” on the contrary, emphasize the importance of affect, interpretation, and collective identity for movement sustainability. ⁶ For example, Norgaard (2011) has found that unpleasant emotions can prompt people to scale back climate change activism (see also Eliasoph 1998). Stotik, Shriver, and Cable (1994), in a different vein, argued that the American Indian Movement collapsed because its participants failed to foster a meaningful collective identity in the face of aggressive social control tactics. Bell (2016), similarly, found that conflicts between the cultural frames SMOs project and the collective identity pollution victims espouse prompt demobilization.

Scholars from a variety of perspectives have also attributed demobilization to “coercive” and “proactive” forms of social control (Shriver et al. 2014). The former typically involves firing workers who complain about toxic hazards (Mix, Cable, and Shriver 2009), discrediting activists by labeling them “tree huggers,” “environmental wackos,” and “traitors” (Austin 2002; Edelstein 1993; Shriver 2000), and subduing protest with violence (Cabrejas 2012; Eller 2008; Gaventa 1982). The latter involves the use of legitimation and information control tactics. Many companies frame environmental protection as incompatible with economic development (Kazis and Grossman 1982) and use public relations campaigns to articulate their productive activities with local culture (Bell and York 2010; Lewin 2019; Scott 2010; Shriver, Adams, and Cable 2013). This creates the perception that environmental protection will not only cost workers their jobs but their way of life (Lewin 2019). Companies also pressure politicians and physicians to contest the relationship between industrial contamination and illness (Austin 2002; Cable, Shriver, and Mix 2008; Lapegna 2016), engage in shady assessment practices (Shriver et al. 2014), convey industrial production as earth friendly (Lapegna 2016; Scott 2010), and dismiss pollution-related illnesses as the consequence of unhealthy lifestyles (Shriver and Kennedy 2005). This encourages demobilization by making pollution victims feel confused about the cause of their illnesses (Auyero and Swistun 2009).

Several issues limit our understanding of demobilization, however. First, our models of the process remain underspecified. As Lapegna (2016) noted, “our theoretical toolkit about processes of demobilization pales in comparison to the availability of concepts explaining mobilization itself” (p. 14). Even when the factors researchers have identified as causes of demobilization are absent, movements sometimes still dissolve. Second, because social movement theory has primarily emerged from studies of successful mobilization, it tends to “explain demobilization in negative terms, identifying what is lacking or merely seeing demobilization as the reversing of mobilization” (Lapegna 2016:14). Existing theory thus fails to specify how social conditions mediate the relationship between emotions, resources, industrial counter-protest tactics, and demobilization (McAdam and Boudet 2012; cf., Lapegna 2016).

Third, studies of demobilization tend to focus on the role that highly visible anti-environmental tactics play, for example, open displays of violence and extravagant public relations campaigns. Researchers have given these tactics more attention not because they are more common or effective, but because they are more observable and hence known. The unseen dimensions of anti-environmentalism—the tactics that become visible only through sustained ethnographic observation—remain underexplored (Lapegna 2016).

This study addresses these theoretical and empirical lacunae by (1) examining a case of demobilization that existing theory cannot explain, (2) drawing from ethnographic fieldwork to capture the role that “clandestine kicks” and “invisible elbows” played in it, and (3) showing how social conditions moderated the effectiveness of those tactics. ⁷ In the following section, I describe the case on which I focus.

Background: Mobilization and Demobilization in Central Appalachia’s Coalfields

Over the past 150 years, coal production has degraded Central Appalachia’s natural beauty, destroyed its roads and infrastructure, subjected miners to deadly working conditions, contaminated the water mountaineers drink, and polluted the air they breathe. Those living in mining communities face substantially higher risks of cancer, birth defects, heart, kidney, and respiratory diseases, and premature death as a result (Ahern et al. 2011; Bell and York 2012; Hendryx and Zullig 2009).

Although researchers have examined how coal companies cultivate popular support (Bell and York 2010; Lewin 2019; Scott 2010) and how they politically construct quiescence in the face of mining-related blight (Bell 2016; Gaventa 1982), only two studies have examined why anti-coal activists withdraw from protest before resolving their grievances. Gaventa (1982) found that the industry’s violent social control tactics, efforts to co-opt movement leadership and capture regulatory agencies, and ability to “mobilize bias” suppressed mining-related protest. ⁸ Bell’s (2016) work, on the contrary, argues that mining communities lack the social capital that sustained protest requires, that the industry’s legitimation tactics undermine “cognitive liberation,” and that people disassociate from the EJ movement when they feel like the groups they join are too extreme, use protest tactics they do not agree with, and are led by “outsiders” who do not share their values.

Not all cases of demobilization in the region conform to these explanations, however. In Shale County, activists demobilized before achieving their objectives even though (1) their movement had not been co-opted by corporate or state authorities, (2) they had not faced violent intimidation, (3) their identities had not clashed with the culture of external SMOs or the broader EJ movement, and (4) the coal industry’s public relations work had predated their mobilization. This raises the question, “When identity correspondence issues, violent social control, legitimation tactics, and co-optation are not salient, what forces prompt anti-coal activists to withdraw from protest before resolving their grievances?”

Data and Methods

My analysis draws from a nine-month community study of Shale County. The project, which I conducted from 2011 to 2012, originated as an investigation of how marginalized populations develop their political understandings, and how exploitative economic and political actors achieve legitimation. Early in my fieldwork, I met several local activists who had attempted, without success, to resolve mining-related grievances. They included residents of a farming community who had attempted to block the permits for a surface mine in their neighborhood; residents of another neighborhood whose roads had been destroyed by overloaded coal trucks; a family attempting to stop a coal-processing plant from polluting their property; and several individuals whose family members had become ill from coal pollution.

In attempting to secure remediation, they had approached the managers of coal companies to complain about regulatory violations; lodged complaints with the state’s environmental division; contacted representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); spoken out at permitting hearings; filed motions to block the state from granting new coal permits; and engaged in other forms of consciousness raising (e.g., participating in rallies, writing editorials, and circulating petitions). As I spent more time with them, I developed an interest in three issues: (1) how coal companies and regulatory institutions respond to people who complain about pollution; (2) why people who take a stand against pollution sometimes withdraw from activism before resolving their grievances; and (3) how Issue 1 affects the likelihood of Issue 2.

Before leaving Shale County, I conducted six interviews with the above individuals. Although none of them had unpleasant contact with an SMO, had been victimized by violence, or had been co-opted by pro-industry groups, all had halted or significantly curtailed their activism by that time. To flesh out my findings, I conducted five follow-up interviews with personnel from three environmental organizations in late 2016. ⁹ In both sets of interviews, my questions focused on respondents’ grievances with coal production, how they had tried to resolve those grievances, and how coal operatives, politicians, and regulators had responded.

While living in Shale County, I also conducted ethnographic fieldwork, attempting to envelope myself in the county’s everyday life. This involved attending church services, high school football games, social gatherings, public meetings (e.g., coal permitting hearings), and public festivals (e.g., coal mining competitions). These activities allowed me to have hundreds of informal conversations with residents regarding their perceptions of coal production, political participation, and the community’s general well-being. I also carried out extensive document analysis, analyzing reporting in the local newspaper from 2002 to 2012; articles about coal production and local politics that appeared in regional and national newspapers; the public relations materials of coal companies; the public materials of environmental organizations; and public conversations on local web forums.

I collated the sum of these materials into Atlas.ti and coded the data by identifying common impediments to environmental activism; common ways companies, politicians, and regulators responded to citizen complaints; common effects of those responses; and the events and emotions that were associated with demobilization. In the following pages, I present my findings. ¹⁰

Controlling Information and Obscuring Risk

When expressing their concerns about coal production, Shale’s activists struggled to find a base of support in the community. Few residents took their concerns seriously, and some even gaslighted them. The skepticism activists encountered when complaining about pollution stemmed from the measures coal companies had taken to limit public awareness of industrial activity. Most companies have mastered what Freudenburg and Alario (2007) call “magicianship”—the ability to conceal the effects of toxic production while operating in plain view of their audiences. This process begins with permit applications. When seeking mining permits, the only public notification a company must provide is an advertisement in the local newspaper. If the people who will be affected by proposed projects do not scour their paper’s legal notifications section, they tend to remain unaware of them. Although, the editor of Shale’s paper, Edward, told me, “an upsurge [of] permits [had been] granted in Shale County . . . over the past few years,” most residents insisted that active mining had largely disappeared in the area. ¹¹

Making matters worse, companies do not always properly post notices. Shannon, an attorney who represents victims of mining-related injustice, explained to me how one of her clients was “not included in the newspaper notice that [affected her property] and had no idea what was going on until the permit was issued.” In some cases, companies manage to begin extracting coal from the personal property of landowners without their knowledge. Another individual whom Shannon represented had moved away from Shale County but maintained family property in the area. Eventually, he received a call from a friend, telling him he needed to

come down and find out what [the coal company was] doing on [his] land. He comes down, Thanksgiving, and finds that they’re mining his land! It looks very clear to me that [the company] had no documents showing that they had a right to enter the land. They knew that the property owners were out of state, though, and unlikely to be observing what was going on.

The state government, which companies have “captured,” enabled situations like these to occur (Fox 1999). As Shannon stated, “This [was] very rural land . . . so I think that the state just said: ‘Good enough . . . Nobody’s complaining. We’re just going to let you have this permit.’”

The state’s failure to properly monitor and enforce regulations also facilitated companies’ “magicianship.” For example, a 2010 investigation by the environmental organization Appalachian Voices found that subsidiaries of International Coal Group and Frasure Creek Mining had submitted thousands of falsified water-pollution discharge monitoring reports to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet (the actual discharges were as much as 40 times the legal limit). The company had simply copied and pasted the same falsified data from one quarter to the next, and the state had neglected to scrutinize them (Cheves, Estep, and Blackford 2013). These practices limited awareness of pollution-related health risks by making companies appear to comply with the law.

Smoke and Mirrors: Concealing Production Sites

Another strategy companies employ to limit knowledge about pollution involves concealing processing plants and strip operations. While fully shrouding them is impossible, operators keep the most visible forms of degradation out of sight. For example, companies have been known to purchase the land surrounding active mines and require sellers to sign paperwork forbidding them to sue, testify against, seek inspection of, or make adverse comments about them. ¹² When high costs and/or resident noncooperation prevent community buyouts, as Shannon adumbrated, companies use the region’s remoteness to shroud the negative externalities of production. “Baker Energy,” Shale County’s largest coal company, relied heavily on these smoke and mirror tactics.

Maria, a 64-year-old educator and activist, describes how Baker hides the eyesores of coal production in an op-ed she penned for the local newspaper:

Most mountaintop removal sites tend to be off the beaten path. To get there, you have to turn off the main road, onto gravel and then dirt, then you can take some kind of ATV, but finally you have to get out and walk. Even when you get there, standing at the edge, you can see only a little of what’s going on. To really see, you have to go up in the air.

After taking an airplane tour of Shale and the two counties adjacent to it, Maria lamented, “What I saw . . . has saddened me beyond the telling of it. Everywhere, in every direction, the earth has been laid bare.” Cheryl, a 35-year-old farmer who had petitioned to block new mining permits in the county, also told me that viewing the large, recently permitted surface mine near her home yielded scant visual evidence from the ground:

[The mine] runs the entire highway, you know, and they’re covering thousands of acres and taking it way back up hollers. But most of it you cannot see. You can see it from the highway, but the majority—like 98 percent—you can’t see.

Despite explicitly setting out to study coal production in Shale County, even I had been unaware of the site near Cheryl’s home until I interviewed her.

In fact, I had remained ignorant of a massive tipple and slurry impoundment located just two miles from my own house until I interviewed Benjamin, a 42-year-old mechanic living next to it. The company had concealed the slurry reservoirs by planting a thick row of trees around the permit area. When I used Google Earth to generate aerial images of the site, I was shocked to learn of its scope. Because of the trees, the impoundment’s presence—despite containing millions of gallons of toxic sludge—remained unnoticed to many residents. ¹³

In addition to taking measures to prevent residents from seeing mining sites and processing plants, coal operators concealed pollution by operating during strategic times of the day. Benjamin told me that the owners of the impoundment near his home conducted their most environmentally destructive activities at night. Once darkness fell, he alleged, the facility jettisoned regulatory compliance and carried out flagrantly illegal behavior:

One night I noticed the river was all black . . . What [Baker Energy] had done [was] . . . pumped [their] slurry into the river to get rid of it. That stuff is not supposed to leave their permit. At nighttime, when the inspectors are in bed—when everybody’s in bed under the cloth of darkness—that’s when they do their dirty work, man. That’s when they pump their slurry ponds into the river. That’s when they can run the tipple wide open without water or anything. They do their worst at night time.

How “Magicianship” Isolates Activists

Due to the industry’s efforts to buy out mining communities, place production sites in remote areas, implement security measures around them, conceal tipples with physical barriers, and carry out destructive activities at night, many Shale Countians never came into direct contact with pollution. They tended, as a result, to view it as an individual problem—not a social problem that affected the community. As Benjamin complained,

Coal is trucked in from . . . all these other places to be busted up behind my house. If that stuff was in somebody else’s yard, they’d be saying the same thing, but it’s not, so they don’t have to look at that every day . . . It’s up to Benjamin to do something about it . . . It’s my problem. I mean, that’s the way they look at it.

The mindset that coal production caused only isolated problems, however, was an illusion.

The processing plant that billowed dust onto Benjamin’s property put almost all Shale Countians at risk. Its dust emissions, among other things, had polluted the tributaries that fed into the local water supply. Some of Benjamin’s neighbors, for example, told me they regularly observed orange waste building up in the creeks near their homes—a consequence of water absorbing iron oxide from acid mine drainage (Lilly, Board, and Todd 2015). As one repined,

This coal company has absolutely poisoned this river . . . Everything in this river has been killed. The state record muskie was caught right beside my house. But there ain’t no good fishing in that no more. Me and my neighbor a while back . . . got to noticing that there was a lot of dead fish, and any fish that would be living, you could just catch in a net. These fish would be swimming funny . . . and they would have these big sores on them . . . And the city pumps water from that river into our dam where our city water comes from!

Indeed, when I asked Rebecca, Liz, and Jake—staff workers at a statewide environmental organization—about the local tap water, they told me to steer clear of it.

Benjamin’s battle against the processing plant, however, stoked fire rather than support from the community. The petition Maria, Cheryl, and other concerned community members drafted to have areas around their neighborhood declared unsuitable for mining, similarly, accumulated only a handful of signatures. And when Rebecca’s, Liz’s, and Jake’s environmental organization attempted to establish a local chapter in Shale County, they failed to recruit sufficient membership and abandoned the effort. The inability to corroborate their grievances with visible evidence made it difficult to garner support.

The industry’s public relations work, which had fueled the perception that Washington was waging a “war on coal,” exacerbated this situation (Bell and York 2010; Lewin 2019; Scott 2010). Many activists had trouble even initiating a conversation about coal pollution with their neighbors. As Cheryl complained, “If I say anything, the response is always, ‘If you don’t like coal, don’t use electricity!’” Jake, echoing her comments, said,

We’re in . . . a tricky situation. The idea of [regulatory] enforcement . . . is not really where the conversation in the region is . . . People [have] the idea [that] you don’t want to kick [companies] when they are already down.

When combined with these public relations efforts, magicianship made pollution victims feel stigmatized, disillusioned, and alone.

Company Responses to Discontent: Invisible Elbows

Although magicianship concealed much of the mining-related blight that existed in Shale County, some residents connected the dots between coal pollution and personal health problems—a process scholars call “popular epidemiology” (Brown 1997). When this occurred, they typically contacted the offending company, hoping to civilly resolve their grievances. Companies, however, neglected to accommodate their complaints. Instead, they denied responsibility, avoided contact, stonewalled their requests, and/or derided their character. If necessary, management offered token conciliations that did little to address their underlying concerns. In the absence of supportive friends and neighbors, these “clandestine kicks and invisible elbows” frustrated, if not humiliated, pollution victims (Auyero 2010).

To illustrate how these experiences encouraged demobilization, this section discusses how Baker Energy responded to Benjamin’s complaints about its processing plant, which was contaminating his property and making his daughter sick. In attempting to resolve his grievances, Benjamin had battled the company on an almost weekly basis for nearly a decade, obtained two letters from physicians verifying the cause of his daughter’s illness, filed complaints with the state’s environmental division, contacted EJ organizations, and hired an attorney. I focus on his story because, of all my participants, he invested the most time and effort in attempting to directly resolve his grievances with Baker Energy, and because his complaints were among the most clear-cut of those I documented. His case also allows me to illustrate how multiple attempts to resolve a grievance with a polluter—using multiple different tactics—unfolded over time.

As Benjamin reports,

My little girl, Julie, when she was about six months old, started getting sick, just being congested all the time [with] respiratory problems. We’d lived here all our life, so we really didn’t think much about it . . . . One day I give Julie a bath, and she was learning how to crawl . . . I got her out of the bath tub, put a diaper on her, and she was just in her diaper. I took her out on the porch, and I set her down on one side of the porch, and I went to the other side and made her crawl to me, you know: “Crawl to Daddy!” When I picked her up, man, she was filthy! Her hands were covered in coal dust, her legs was too! And it was like a light bulb went off in my head [snaps his fingers]. You know: “Maybe all this coal dust could be what’s making my child sick.” So I picked her up, and I took her over to the coal tipple . . . just the way she was.

When I got there, I said, “look at my child.” I said: “I just got her out of the bath tub; she just took one crawl across my porch. Look at her legs and her hands.” This big well-to-do guy—he was eating some Pringles—was like: “Well, what’s the problem?” I said, “man, you’re covering us up with coal dust!” . . . I said, “I’ve got nothing against you or what you do, but I live right across this river from you . . . Do whatever you gotta do, but keep the coal dust off us. That’s all I’m asking you.” So, he says, “well, give me one day” . . .

So . . . the guy did put a foot forward. He set some sprinklers up . . . But it went two or three months later, and I just started noticing everything. I just started paying attention more to what was going on. Like I noticed all these trucks coming out of [the processing plant] dragging all this dust with them. So I went back to the tipple, and I said: “Man, I appreciate you trying to put a foot forward . . . But you guys are still covering us up with coal dust. My child’s paying the price for it here.” But it just got worse from there.

When the sprinkler system Baker Energy set up failed to contain the dust emissions that were blackening his property, Benjamin pleaded for the company to do more. They not only refused; they frequently ran their tipple without the sprinklers, increasing his exposure to dust.

Getting nowhere, Benjamin began documenting the company’s regulatory violations with his video camera and filing complaints with state regulators. Despite submitting multiple complaints and driving hours to meet with representatives from the state’s environmental protection division, coal dust continued to pollute his property. When he escalated the frequency of his complaints, managers dismissed his concerns and stonewalled him. As he describes,

I was trying to work with the coal company, trying to get them to relocate us, because that’s the right thing to do . . . I showed the doctor the conditions we was living in, and I asked if he could write me a letter [documenting the relationship between the coal dust pollution and Julie’s health problems]. I told him I want to get along with this coal company . . . I just can’t afford to move . . . Who would want to buy my house, you know? The doctor said, “I have no problem with that.”

So . . . I took [his letter] and showed it to the coal company. I said: “Look, dude, I’ve got two doctors saying that your coal dust is keeping my child sick. All I want you to do . . .,” and they cut me off immediately. They looked at me and said: “What is it that you want? Is it money? Is it land? What is it? What do you want?” I said, “I want a clean, safe, healthier place for my child to live in! Is that too much to ask for? . . .The least you guys could do is relocate us.” They said: “well, talk to an attorney and give us a fair number” . . .

So, I did that. I sat down with lawyer, and he come up with [$200,000] . . . So [I gave them the number], but we never heard anything back from the coal company. ¹⁴ Nothing . . . So I kept fighting them and fighting them, and one day there was a gentleman who pulled in my driveway wanting to make me a ridiculous offer.

They offered me $30,000 to just leave. I said: “Dude, I can’t even buy a piece of property for $30,000!” He said, “well, we’ve got some property in [a faraway county]. I said, “I’m not moving all the way [down there], you know, to the boondocks! What am I supposed to do when I get to this place? Am I supposed to leave my house and move my child into a tent?” They said: “Look, we’ll offer you $30,000. That’s all your place is worth.” I said, “let me tell you something, brother, you get in your truck, and you leave!” I said, “don’t you never disrespect me, pulling in my driveway and telling me what my place is worth!”

As this story illustrates, Baker’s management responded to Benjamin’s request for a buy-out only after he had pressed them about it for months. When they finally made him an offer, it was $170,000 below what his attorney had requested—a dismissive attempt to get him to “just leave.” The proposal also would have relegated his family to a remote part of the state—an area out of sight and out of mind, where they would hopefully be forgotten.

These responses insulted Benjamin, conveying the low estimation in which the company held people like him. As Scott (2010) noted, Appalachians tend to be “extremely conscious of their place in the national imagination” (p. 204). Rather than experiencing poverty as a badge of honor, most experience it as a source of shame and discrediting difference (Portelli 2011). Baker Energy exploited these feelings by insinuating that Benjamin was a poor man, and that the land he lived on lacked value. By treating him and other pollution victims like nobodies and subjecting them to endless acts of waiting, company personnel reminded them of their status as “backwoods hillbillies” who lacked money, cultural capital, and political power. This assailed their self-worth, narrowed their sense of entitlement, and discouraged them from seeking redress.

Indeed, seven years after connecting his daughter’s respiratory problems to coal dust, Benjamin had scaled back his activism. Given the personal toll it had taken, persisting with it felt futile. After sacrificing nearly all his free time to documenting regulatory violations, filing complaints, and arguing with Baker’s management, his efforts had resulted in little more than what Lapegna (2016) calls “performative governance”: actions that “respond to people’s demands without addressing the underlying causes motivating [their] claims” (p. 141). As Benjamin lamented,

It’s been seven years now, and I’m still having the same issue with them. Julie: she’s on eight different respiratory medicines now—twice a day, every day . . . It’s ridiculous . . . I’ve got two letters from doctors saying that the reason my child is sick is because of the conditions we have to live in . . .

[But] all this time, the most that I’ve got out of the coal company is—they’ve not done anything we’ve asked them to do—other than they’ve redirected their traffic . . . Anybody can drive through [where they now enter and exit] and see that it’s filthy. Yes, they’re keeping the dust off us a little bit better, somewhat. We’re still getting the fine micro particles that leave the plant—that’s the stuff that kills you . . . But all they’ve done . . . is moved that problem to somebody else.

Shannon, the attorney I interviewed, told me that coal companies almost always answer citizen complaints in this way (if they respond at all). They had offered the same kind of token conciliations to her own family when she was young:

During the time I was growing up . . . an underground mine went in below our farm . . . We had three wells and a number of fresh water springs, and those were all dewatered pretty much as soon as the mining began. What ended up happening was the company basically brought tanks out to the farm, connected them to the plumbing systems in the houses, and for 50 years brought water by truck once a week . . . to replace the well water that stopped.

Despite entreating the company for a permanent solution to this problem, Shannon told me that “it was really only after a maximum-security prison was located near our farm that we got municipal water.” When I asked how residents of her community felt about the situation, she responded,

[Everyone] had an attitude like: “This is coal. They’re going to do what they want, so why fight it? We’re lucky they’re bringing water in tanks every week, so we shouldn’t complain.” . . . There was a sense that there’s nothing you can do about it.

The indifference, if not hostility, with which companies responded to complaints drained pollution victims of self-efficacy. Activists felt like they should be grateful for receiving conciliation at all—no matter how paltry it was. This encouraged them to stand down before resolving their grievances.

Colonizing Civil Society and Establishing Panoptic Control

When I arrived in Shale County in 2011, its civil society was already strained due to population loss, poverty, political dysfunction, rural isolation, and low social capital (Bell 2016; Billings and Blee 2000; Eller 2008). The county lacked public amenities and parks; stores, schools, and churches were closing their doors; a corrupt political machine controlled local government; few residents belonged to voluntary associations; and many lacked access to reliable automobiles, the Internet, and mobile phone service—all major problems in a “deep rural” area. These conditions made community organizing, whether in relation to pollution or other local concerns, very challenging.

The extensive public relations work that Baker Energy carried out rendered the situation worse. On the rare occasions when public events brought community members together, the company staged, sponsored, or co-opted them. ¹⁵ The company also used marketing and advertising techniques to make itself “pervasively visible in the social landscape” (Bell and York 2010:135). ¹⁶ This made expressing critical views about coal production very difficult. To illustrate how this problem encouraged demobilization, this section tells Maria’s story. She was, at the time of my fieldwork, the most vocal critic of coal production in Shale County. I focus on her story because, like Benjamin’s, it allows me to illustrate how attempts to carry out activism in a community that lacks “free space” play out over time. Feeling like she had nowhere to openly express her views, Maria had reigned in her activism by the time I left the county.

The black imprint of coal dust was everywhere in Shale County. Baker Energy saturated the county with pro-coal paraphernalia (e.g., bumper stickers, t-shirts, public relations messages, and heritage memorabilia), and it sponsored nearly every local organization and event within the area. The county’s Fourth of July parade, for instance, was themed “Friends of Coal” and featured a motorcade of shiny coal trucks, pro-coal banners, and scenic displays of miners relaxing on their homesteads. During a public festival, the county held a few weeks later, a large “Friends of Coal” banner hung behind the podium from which inductees into the community’s “Hall of Fame” spoke. When the high school football season kicked off that September, the stadium’s loudspeakers blared “this game was brought to you . . . by the coal companies that work to keep the lights on” during almost every timeout. Local politicians relentlessly pronounced their support for mining while campaigning for office that fall as well. And nearly every week, the county’s newspaper reported instances of Baker Energy making token donations to the school board and other local organizations.

When I conducted follow-up interviews in 2016, respondents told me that these activities had persisted, if not intensified, despite declining coal production. As Lily, a 30-year-old organizer for an EJ organization, stated, “Even as the industry is dying in the region, it’s almost harder now to speak out against some of the environmental problems than it would have been 20 years ago . . . They’re just holding on with everything that they have.” These public relations tactics created the perception of panoptic surveillance, a term Foucault (1977) used to capture how powerful social institutions make people comply with their prerogatives without using force. By generating the perception that one is always being watched—or that one always could be being watched—he argued that dominant institutions stimulate subordinates to discipline themselves. In Shale County, that meant withholding criticism of coal production. As Jake told me, “We’re not really hearing from people in the region about problems at this point. I would say five years ago we would have had a steady influx of people [contacting our organization]. We’re not getting that influx [anymore].”

Whenever “free space” emerged in which candid discussion about mining became possible, the industry co-opted it. In the summer of 2012, for example, a national collective of actors who attempt to create open environments in which audience members can discuss community problems visited Shale County. Maria recounts the occasion:

[They] came . . . and the place was full. It was just wonderful . . . There was a facilitator, and he went around with a mic and asked us, you know: “What do we think . . . of this thing and that thing in Shale County” . . . People really got into it . . . We had a really good, interesting, open discussion.

And then, at the end, they turned it over to someone from Baker Energy. He got up there—in my view ruining the whole thing—and made this huge deal out of giving 17 thousand dollars to [a local organization] . . . He had this big check, and he did this period of self-promotion. You could just feel the whole atmosphere in the room went “pfffff!” . . . Here we had . . . this lively discussion . . . and then we had an ad from a coal company, and it was just like a reminder that we’re everywhere, and we’re really in charge here.

Industry representatives, as she describes, discouraged Shale Countians from openly discussing their views by reminding them that “they’re everywhere,” and that “they’re really in charge.”

When concerned citizens took a stand against pollution anyway, the industry mobilized its political and media connections to overwhelm their voices. As Maria told me in another story,

Some people from the EPA came on a tour through [the region]. The first place they came was Shale County . . . I spoke when they came, and some other people from around here spoke . . . [Our state senator] was just infuriated about this, [and] he wrote a letter, which the [local newspaper] put on the front page . . . about how it was not fair to the coal companies that the EPA should come here and just listen to what people had to say about them [laughs] . . . So I wrote a letter to the paper . . . but they put his letter on the front page and mine on B12. I knew they would do that.

Baker Energy, as Maria explains, controlled local media coverage. This allowed them to block information that portrayed them in a negative light. As she told me in another story:

Baker Energy was recently applying to have [a mining permit] renewed . . . so there was a public hearing about that . . . We went, and people from Baker Energy came too. So Benjamin spoke, and other people did, and one of Benjamin’s neighbors . . . said: “I believe in coal, and we need coal, but they ought to follow the law, and they don’t.” It was all very civilized . . . Then the Baker Energy representatives, when asked to speak, didn’t say anything.

So, afterwards, Edward [the editor of the local paper] was reporting on it, and he wrote out exactly what happened ¹⁷ . . . And his boss—the publisher—said that his account was biased, because he hadn’t given Baker’s side. Edward said: “I was just covering a public hearing, and they didn’t say anything!” So, to make up for that, the paper ran—against Edward’s wishes—this big headline the following week that basically said: “Baker Energy Saves the Day,” because they had re-seeded a golf course for free . . . [Baker] also [released a public statement] saying they were going to withdraw money that they were going to give to some crippled children, because of what Benjamin had said . . . It was definitely a David and Goliath thing.

Even when residents simply sang folk songs against coal production, as Maria describes in a final story, company officials brought out “the big guns”:

We . . . started making up these folk songs about mountaintop removal, going around singing them in colleges . . . and stuff. We certainly seemed harmless enough . . . And then some coal companies . . . bought their own band! They bought a country band and sent them around singing pro-mountaintop removal songs . . . It’s always the same stuff. Even though our efforts seemed so meager compared to [theirs], they always respond with such big guns. They don’t let anything go by unchecked.

By responding to criticism so aggressively, the industry cultivated the perception that all acts of opposition—no matter how meager—would be registered, quashed, and punished.

These efforts to control public space, subsume community organizations and events, and capitalize upon political and media connections to overwhelm critique made environmental activism difficult to sustain. Wade, a 50-year-old educator and activist, told me that his out-of-town friends repeatedly exclaimed, “Wade, I don’t see how you live down there and speak out against coal!” With public scripts limiting what activists could and could not say (Lapegna 2016), and with the industry’s panoptic surveillance enforcing those scripts, speaking out required, to use Lily’s words, “a lot of bravery, a lot of gumption, a lot of courage.” Most pollution victims, unfortunately, had only a limited store of that “gumption”—especially since their activism almost always fell on frosty ears.

Even when other community members agreed with their advocacy, they rarely expressed approbation. As Benjamin lamented, “A lot of people around here know they’re getting run over, done wrong and stuff, but they’re afraid to speak up . . . They’ve got a story, but they’re not going to tell it to you.” Maria, likewise, stated, “There were people who supported us, but they weren’t . . . going to say anything . . . They didn’t think they could.” With the ostensibly omnipresent gaze of coal producers lurking in the background, “stories” about pollution remained “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990). This impeded activists’ complaints from strengthening into “social currents” that would circulate through the community, influence others, and eventuate collective transgressive action (Durkheim [1895] 1982).

Clandestine Kicks: Alienating Environmentalists

All the anti-coal activists I interviewed insisted on meeting in private for fear that others would overhear their grievances. Two insisted upon verifying my background before agreeing to meet, suspecting I might have a hidden agenda. When I encountered them in public thereafter, they refused to talk about coal-related issues and sometimes ignored me altogether. They did so for good reason: industry operatives shored up the effects of their “invisible elbows” and panoptic surveillance tactics with “clandestine kicks.” This involved harassing activists at work, spreading rumors about them, and making them feel isolated in the community.

Because Central Appalachia has a limited economic opportunity structure, all interviewees expressed concern with how their activism would bear upon their labor market prospects. As a local miner, who had for years endured unsafe working conditions, stated in a regional news story, “They remind you every day there’s a hundred men standing in line for your job . . . Your choice is either refuse and get fired, or do something you know is dangerous.” Even residents not directly employed by the industry worried about the repercussions of their rhetoric. Wade, for example, was nearly fired from his job for criticizing Baker Energy, given that the company donated money to the school at which he worked. Maria told me that a course she had taught for years at a satellite college campus in the area was discontinued after she published an op-ed criticizing the county’s state senator for his stance on coal. And Edward, the local newspaper editor, was reprimanded at his job simply for publishing the critical comments other people had made at a coal permit hearing. As Lily explained,

There’s a lot of fear about speaking out against the coal industry, and it’s not an unjust fear. It’s very justified. My mom, for example, was an elementary school teacher, and she had a “tree hugger” bumper sticker on her car that was keyed several times. It got her into a lot of hairy conversations at her school . . . It’s [also] not unusual to hear about folks who are facing intimidation [at work], because they may have, like, given a quote to a reporter who was coming to talk to them about the creek behind their house being contaminated—[even though] they may be saying something very tame and not controversial at all.

Activism, as her comments indicate, put one at serious risk for losing her job.

Activists also worried about strained interpersonal relationships. ¹⁸ Cheryl told me that her opposition to mining had turned her into a social pariah in the community:

People are finding out [about my activism]; they’ve seen me working with Maria lately in the schools. And suddenly I’m as bad as her—because she’s like enemy number one in our community.

Me: So she has a bad reputation?

Oh yeah. Because she’s one of the only people willing to speak, and she does. So with my new job I’ve been seen with her in our schools, and all of a sudden everybody’s treating me very, very differently—people who for twelve years always said, “Hi, Cheryl! How you doing? Good to see you!” They turn their heads now and walk away.

When I asked Maria about the consequences of her activism, she confirmed Cheryl’s claims. She told me she had lost friends and now endured a daily dose of sneers from her neighbors. “Up here in the mountains,” she repined, “the coal industry . . . does such a good job of making people be afraid that if they say anything at all against coal . . . people will lose their jobs, and then there will be a lot of hungry children, and it will be your fault.” Indeed, when she and Cheryl attempted to collect signatures for their petition, residents slammed doors in their faces and chased them off their properties. Industry representatives, both claimed, had spread rumors about them before they had a chance to make their rounds.

Sometimes, the “clandestine kicks” industry personnel threw were even more manipulative. When Wade ran for a position on the local energy co-op, for example, his pro-coal opponent stole the election by carrying out a proxy-voting scheme. As Rebecca told me,

We were . . . working to fight a coal-fired power plant that the rural electric co-op was . . . going to build . . . Wade wanted to run for [the] board, and we had like a month . . . to get 500 signatures . . . So we were out here standing in the parking lot every weekend for like four or five weeks talking to people and getting signatures around the issue. People were super willing to sign around that. But during the election . . . the incumbent who was on the board, and all the other board members, showed up with a ream of proxy votes. They were just pigeonholing people, like: “here, sign your name to these,” . . . and just lined people up to vote those proxies!

Such experiences made activists feel like resistance was futile. As Maria repined, “I’m glad that we [protested] . . . but in a way there wasn’t any point . . . They still just keep doing the same thing.”

Discussion: The Processes of Demobilization

Previous studies of mining-related activism have attributed movement decline to violent social control, co-optation, legitimation tactics, and lack of identity correspondence between EJ organizations and participants (Bell 2016; Gaventa 1982). These issues, however, do not explain why Shale’s activists demobilized—at least not alone. Although they sometimes faced intimidation, none of my respondents experienced violence, and only one cited safety concerns as a factor in her decision to stop protesting. ¹⁹ When I asked Maria if fear had influenced her decision to demobilize, for example, she laughed and stated, “I never thought, like, I could be in danger. I never felt like that.” When I asked Wade if the threats he received while running for the local energy co-op made him reconsider his activism (his opponent had told him he had friends who were not afraid to “break [his] arms . . . if they need[ed] to”), he responded, “No, I kept in the movement. I thought it was a great story to tell [laughs]!” If anything, violence seemed to embolden some activists. As Benjamin told me,

A number of times my little girl would ask people and say, will the coal company kill my daddy? That child has been scared that something is going to happen . . . because I spoke up. She even got to the point where she’d ask me to quit doing it . . . But as a father, I’ve got to do [this] for my child . . . I told her: “Julie, you’re going to look back and say, you know, my daddy was right…One day, you’re going to be proud of your daddy . . . Even when world was against him, he stood up, and he spoke up for me.”

Threats, as his commentary illustrates, enabled activists to demonstrate their moral fortitude through acts of heroism and sacrifice (Lewin 2019; Scott 2010), and to fulfill their protector roles as parents—even if they were men (cf., Bell 2016). Rather than weakening their commitment to activism, the perception of danger often strengthened it.

Moreover, none of Shale’s activists worked with or received sponsorship from coal companies. Participants almost always carried out their activism individually or in informal groups. Although Maria, Wade, and Cheryl sometimes collaborated with EJ organizations, they maintained positive relationships with them. Co-optation and discontent with the culture of SMOs, as such, did not explain their retreat from protest. The primary cause of their demobilization, to the contrary, was the mundane acts of dissimulation, obstruction, and noncooperation they faced when attempting to resolve their grievances. These “clandestine kicks” and “invisible elbows” pushed their patience to the limits and made them cynical about the prospect of change.

The industry’s smoke and mirror tactics, however, created the background conditions for these sentiments. Coal producers limited public awareness of pollution by capitalizing upon lax notification requirements, fabricating regulatory reports, concealing production sites, and operating during strategic times of the day. This prevented most residents from coming into direct contact with toxic hazards. Activists, as a result, found it difficult to corroborate their claims and recruit other movement participants. Acclimation to pollution that was visible in the community compounded this problem. Individuals who grow up amid coal dust, slurry impoundments, razed mountains, and acid mine drainage often learn to normalize the toxic hazards that abound in their daily lives—a process Auyero and Swistun (2009) call the “relational anchoring of risk perceptions.” ²⁰ “Consciousness transformation” typically requires a seismic event that disrupts everyday routines, or an event that forces contamination victims to reckon with the relationship between personal health problems and environmental conditions (Auyero and Swistun 2009; McAdam and Boudet 2012). Such events, as Benjamin’s story shows, are rare, typically only occurring through serendipity. This creates an uphill battle for activists, who must, without physical evidence, convince their neighbors that the community they have always safely lived in is in fact very dangerous. The incredulity and derision they face when advancing such claims results in feelings of alienation, impotence, and invisibility.

Lacking community recognition and support—and facing a state regulatory apparatus that coal producers had largely “captured” (Fox 1999)—pollution victims had to confront the industry alone. This substantially reduced their leverage. When they lodged individual complaints, companies could avoid accountability by denying responsibility or delaying ameliorative action. Industry representatives also reminded the aggrieved of their status as impoverished “hillbillies” who lacked credibility and power. As Shannon’s story about the community in which she grew up illustrates, this transformed “disputes about risk” into “disputes about rights,” inducing activists to adopt a narrower conception of their entitlements and stand down (McAdam and Boudet 2012).

Companies try to ensure that grievances remain at this individual level by establishing panoptic control over civil society. When activists spoke out in Shale County, the industry capitalized upon its economic resources and media connections to overwhelm their voices. By making itself “pervasively visible” in the social landscape with bumper stickers, t-shirts, commercials, and organizational sponsorships, it also eliminated the “free space” they required to raise consciousness about their struggles and recruit support. Feeling like they were always in the purview of an institution that could ostracize them, other pollution victims internalized their concerns instead of vocalizing them. Discontent thus remains a “hidden transcript,” which inflamed activists’ feelings of isolation.

Key to participants’ decisions to demobilize, however, was not the mere presence of surveillance, but the overwhelming feeling that their activism had accomplished little to nothing. As Maria’s, Wade’s, Cheryl’s, Lily’s, and Benjamin’s stories make clear, companies used their political and economic resources to disrupt every action they staged. They spread rumors about canvassers, upstaged public events, blacklisted critics from employment, and even interfered in elections. Over time, these actions made activists feel like the industry’s dominance was inevitable, and like speaking out against mining just made their situations worse. As Maria confessed, “I don’t want to give up, but at the same time . . . I can’t expend all of my energy and happiness on [activism].” Continuing, she lamented,

I think I might have given you a different interview sometime in the past . . . I don’t want to be embittered and don’t want to be cynical, but I feel somewhat experienced with this kind of thing, so I don’t feel particularly hopeful about any kind of grassroots community thing being able to change . . . the coal industry. . . . One of my heroes in the labor movement is Aunt Molly Jackson . . . I identify with her a lot . . . She was at the Battle of Evarts ²¹ . . . where it came to a battle . . . It was the coal companies and the local power structure . . . versus some of the miners. [The miners] had the courage to do that . . . I think we have to admire that…but they totally lost, I mean they were crushed, and the unions were driven out, because they just could not stand up against that power.

Succumbing to “that power” herself, Maria had ended her activism by the time I left Shale County. She did so not only because of the defeats she had faced, but because, as she put it, “it was taking over my life, and I couldn’t see that I was making any difference.” Benjamin felt this way too. After seven years of protest, Baker Energy had not taken any meaningful steps to rectify his grievances; it had offered only “performative governance.” Cheryl, Wade, and Edward had also failed in their respective endeavors to effect change.

By the time I left the county, the only individuals who remained active against mining were employed by environmental organizations—all of whom lived outside the county. Fighting pollution within Shale County, residents felt, would, at best, waste their time, and, at worst, ruin their lives. As Cheryl put it, “If I moved from here I would fight it like hell . . . I’ve noticed that some of the strongest fighters of these problems live elsewhere.” Indeed, the distance removed activists from the daily realities of alienation, gaslighting, waiting, panoptic surveillance, and humiliation. For those who remained in the county, demobilization functioned as perhaps the lone elixir to those stressors. As Cheryl lamented, “I just keep my mouth shut and spend a lot of my time up my holler and stay away from it.”

Conclusion

This study has contributed to the social movements and environmental sociology literatures by making sense of an empirical anomaly, highlighting an aspect of contention that previous studies have largely overlooked (subtle, under-the-radar displays of industrial power), and demonstrating the conjunctural nature of demobilization. “Clandestine kicks” and “invisible elbows,” my data suggest, become effective when activists lack “free space,” live in places where pollution is easily concealable and the “relational anchoring of risk perceptions” has occurred, and when residents feel culturally connected to and economically dependent upon the polluting industry—especially when they feel like their communities are experiencing socioeconomic decline. This suggests that social conditions moderate the impact of counter-protest tactics.

My data also suggest that social conditions determine the resources movements need to hedge against demobilization. Shale’s activists would have benefited from “free space” in which to openly discuss their concerns, visible evidence with which to corroborate their grievances, social support from other community members and SMOs, and affirmation that they were making a difference. Had the activists sought greater assistance from EJ organizations, organizers would have needed to be familiar with their “practical life” to be effective (Lewin 2019; Scott 2010). They also would have needed to calibrate their rhetoric about environmental justice and their protest tactics to accord with activists’ cultural identities (Bell 2016).

This is not to suggest that movements can reignite themselves simply by awaiting the right circumstances or garnering a static set of resources (McAdam and Boudet 2012). Shale’s activists did not passively respond to the environmental conditions in which they protested. They demobilized through an active process, deciding, based on their experiences, that resistance was not worth the personal and social costs it involved (Lapegna 2016). Structural conditions do not eclipse activists’ agency; they shape how activists enact it (Bell 2013). These theoretical observations—that demobilization occurs actively rather than passively, that it unfolds within spatially and temporally specific conjunctures, and that it often involves clandestine power dynamics—should guide future research.