Poverty, Sustainability, and the Culture of Despair: Can Sustainable Development Strategies Support Poverty Alleviation in America's Most Environmentally Challenged Communities?

Abstract

Appalachia is considered one of the nation's poorest areas. Many communities live in isolation. The material use of the natural landscape has affected citizens' views of the viability of and potential for sustainable resource practices. In many resource dependent communities, land is externally owned and controlled. Despite living and working in areas with enormous natural resource wealth, residents have only limited access to these resources. Recognizing the inability of conventional practice to resolve many of the development problems confronting communities in distress, a series of new policy initiatives are focusing on building sustainable community capacity from the ground up. Can notions of sustainability be used as a means of redistributing power and access to natural resources, or does the peculiar fate of a region, tied to massive natural resource extraction, eliminate such potential?