Ison Rock victory raises questions of land ownership in Appalachia

Earlier this summer, our friends at Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards celebrated a major victory.

Their long struggle to prevent the Ison Rock Ridge mountaintop removal mining permit in Southwest Virginia from being approved came to an end when Jim Justice’s A&G Coal Corp. did not appeal a prior decision by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to not issue the permit.

The once proposed and now defeated Ison Rock Ridge mine would have destroyed approximately 1,200 acres in Wise County, Va. The mine site would have threatened five communities: Inman, Andover, Arno, Derby and the Town of Appalachia. And the ridge itself is one of the last areas surrounding those communities that has not been destroyed by mountaintop removal. In other words, this was a huge win.

Victory was won over eight years of hard work through local organizing and legal appeal — our friends at SAMS deserve a well earned congratulations. It’s certainly time to celebrate this victory, but we can’t let our guard down just yet.

While the imminent threat of mining is past, the land on Ison Rock Ridge is still owned by an absentee landholding company that is in the business of leasing out their land to coal operators for mountaintop removal. So even though the DMME denied A&G’s permit, there’s nothing stopping them or any other company from submitting another application to mine the mountaintop.

With coal prices in the gutter, many mines in the area currently operating at a loss, and local Alpha Coal’s finances in shambles, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to be racing to start a new application. But that could change in a relatively short period of time if any number of the current market or regulatory conditions shift, which they do often.

The Ison Rock Ridge victory brings us back to the perennial issue in Appalachia of land ownership. In Wise County approximately 45 percent of the land owned by corporate landholding entities, according the Economic Development director Carl Snodgrass. This isn’t a new development, and it’s not unique among coalfield counties across Appalachia. Much of this land was snatched up in the decades after the Civil War when coal reserves were first being discovered and mined, and ever since then it’s been the property of companies whose only interest is to make as money as possible off of it.

So while the issue of outside ownership is nothing new, there’s an increasing number of people, including some elected officials, who are starting a new call for land reform- and there’s never been a better time than now. The growing movement for economic diversification across the region is creating the space for public discussion of hard questions like this- space that just a few years ago hadn’t been created. And as more and more localities see the light of diversification, there will be a groundswell of citizens and leaders throughout the mountains calling for land reform.

Protecting the Central and Southern Appalachian Mountain Region