The New Appalachia

Think of this small book as a collection of action snapshots of a region on the move. Sometimes the focus is on the land itself, such as "brownfield" sites in western Pennsylvania or small farms in southern New York. Often it's on infrastructure, like a replacement for an aging bridge in Tennessee or links between roads, rail, and a waterway in northeastern Mississippi. Frequently the camera zooms in on sophisticated technology, such as laptops used by schoolchildren in Georgia or satellite-assisted surveys in western Maryland. Always, always, we see people in action-working together to build something. What they're building may be a structure, like a water line along a rocky ridge in western Virginia; or a strategy, like a Kentucky program designed to produce homegrown doctors for rural Appalachia. Sometimes they're investing in projects whose payoffs may not materialize for a generation, as with a West Virginia youth leadership camp or an Alabama county's efforts to encourage its talented high school graduates to stay in the area. One way or another, all these stories are about capacity building-acts of faith in the future of Appalachia. They're also about collaboration within communities, across the Appalachian Region, and with partners in the larger world outside Appalachia. In that respect, they're evidence of how Appalachia has changed during the 37 years since the President's Appalachian Regional Commission called Appalachia "a region apart" from the rest of America. But they're also examples of a continuing commitment to the vision that made change possible. In 1965, economically speaking, Appalachia's eggs were in a very few baskets, each vulnerable to market shocks. The Region depended heavily on the extraction of natural resources and on agriculture. In the southern states, manufacturing meant mostly low-wage textile mills; in the northern Rust Belt, it meant heavy industry in aging plants employing fewer and fewer workers. From 1950 to 1960, a decade when national employment grew 15 percent, Appalachian employment actually declined. One in three Appalachians lived in poverty, a rate 50 percent higher than the national average. The Region's narrow mountain roads choked off the growth of commerce and industry and constricted people's access to jobs, schools, and services. They were used by trucks hauling coal and timber to railheads, and, all too often, by some of the Region's most talented young people moving to places far away