The environmental health risks associated with the production and use of fossil fuels have sparked grassroots resistance efforts throughout the world, leading to stricter regulations, lawsuits, defeated pipelines, and bans on hydraulic fracturing and wastewater injection in certain municipalities, states, and nations. Arguably, the hegemony that fossil fuel industries have long maintained is under threat, whereby the pass they have received to externalize environmental and public health costs onto society is increasingly being contested. How have fossil fuel industries responded to these challenges? Through an analysis of the public relations materials of three fossil-fuel-energy front groups in the United States, this study examines fossil fuel industries' efforts to retain cultural hegemony in the face of increasing threats to power and profits. We find that a central strategy of these public-relations campaigns is a process we term ‘Identity Co-optation,’ which entails appropriating and reconstructing the identities of fossil fuel industries' fiercest opponents – concerned women and mothers – in the delivery of their counterclaims. We argue that the strategic mobilization of women in defense of coal, oil, and gas is a clear example of hegemonic powers attempting to appropriate, embody – and ultimately neutralize – threats to their influence and authority.

This article describes a collaboration among a group of university faculty, undergraduate students, local governments, local residents, and U.S. Army staff to address long-standing concerns about the environmental health effects of an Army ammunition plant. The authors describe community-responsive scientific pilot studies that examined potential environmental contamination and a related undergraduate research course that documented residents’ concerns, contextualized those concerns, and developed recommendations. We make a case for the value of resource-intensive university–community partnerships that promote the production of knowledge through collaborations across disciplinary paradigms (natural/physical sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and humanities) in response to questions raised by local residents. Our experience also suggests that enacting this type of research through a university class may help promote researchers’ adoption of “epistemological pluralism”, and thereby facilitate the movement of a study from being “multidisciplinary” to “transdisciplinary”.

As a wide body of social movement scholarship demonstrates, inaction in the face of environmental injustice is far more frequent than mobilization. Using the case of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP)—a highly controversial natural gas pipeline that has been under construction through the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia and West Virginia since 2018—we ask: what conditions predict whether a person who has experienced negative quality-of-life impacts from this pipeline will take action or resign themselves to quiescence? Through our analysis of responses to a 92-question survey questionnaire that our team mailed to residents living in 10 of the counties through which the MVP is being constructed, we find that the most powerful predictors of quiescence are variables related to social networks. Among respondents reporting negative quality-of-life impacts from the pipeline, those with neighbors supporting the pipeline were nine times more likely to be quiescent, and those who were not sure how their neighbors felt about the pipeline were five times more likely to be quiescent. On the other hand, those who had joined a social media group focused on stopping the pipeline were nine times more likely to take part in resistance actions than those who had not. We situate our findings within existing scholarship on social movements, which points to the centrality of social networks for predicting social movement participation and quiescence, while also adding nuance to discussions of neoliberalism and sites of acceptance.

The Forest Botanicals Region Living Monument is a public humanities initiative that celebrates the cultural, historical, medicinal, and economic importance Appalachian forest botanicals have held for a variety of people, stretching from pre-colonization to today. A project of Virginia Tech, Appalachian Sustainable Development, and the City of Norton, Virginia, this monument was made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation-funded Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia in 2023. Elements of the monument include a “Storywalk Trail” composed of 11 interpretive signs placed along a wooded trail at Flag Rock Recreation Area, an online exhibit, and a sculpture at the High Knob Destination Center. Explore our website to learn more!