Ex-Pat Appalachian’s Story can Help with Transition

“I don’t know whether I’m part of Appalachia anymore, but Appalachia is part of me,” says Graham Shelby in a wonderful Lexington Herald-Leader essay published last week. It’s a refrain so many young Appalachian ex-pats find themselves saying. There is a pull to the place, but often, the place is not where they ultimately decide to hang their hat. Shelby grew up in eastern Kentucky, but moved with his parents – Edmund and Anne Shelby, two Appalachian writers of note – just outside the region to Lexington in 1978. He now lives in Louisville, where he “haunt[s] coffee shops and Indian restaurants, listen[s] to classic rock and watch[es] sci-fi TV.” He is physically far from the mountains of his youth, but his roots in the region run deep, even though he often struggles to find the proper balance of Appalachian dialect to use. His is the story of migration – generations of Appalachian diaspora, the impacts of which can still be seen in the region: “I grew up like countless other kids in Lexington, Cincinnati and points north, spending Friday and Sunday evenings on Interstate 75, Ky. 11 or some other umbilical highway in and out of a place the ancestors called home.” He says one challenge in sorting out his feelings about the region is “acknowledging there is more than one Appalachia:” The real, geographical place, and the Appalachia that is a myth that can be “anywhere, everywhere, all the time.” He acknowledges all the challenges the region faces,...

There’s Precedent for the Transition Assistance Eastern Kentucky Needs...

The new power plant rules proposed this week will make coal less competitive in the coming decades. It’s just one factor pointing toward continued decline in eastern Kentucky coal production, the main causes of which are the rising cost of Central Appalachian coal as the dwindling resource is harder to access and the drop in natural gas prices due to fracking. Coal’s further decline in the region spells more economic trouble for eastern Kentucky. That’s on top of being one of the nation’s poorest regions even when coal was booming. When policies and other factors cause serious economic problems for a region or group of Americans, there is precedent for federal investments to help workers and communities adjust and transition. There’s even precedent in eastern Kentucky–the Appalachian Regional Commission was created in 1963 as a response to the region’s persistent poverty in a nation of growing abundance. But the ARC’s non-highway budget has declined dramatically from its peak of over $1.2 billion in today’s dollars in the mid-1970s to well south of $100 million today, money which it spreads over 13 states. Some small new federal investments have been announced for eastern Kentucky since the Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) initiative was launched, but much more is needed to transition an economy that has seen its coal jobs reduced by half in the last three years. Other precedents for federal investments to support economic transition include: The Trade Adjustment Assistance program, established in 1962, which provides services and supports...