Cracking Appalachia: A Political-Industrial Ecology Perspective

Keywords: Political-industrial ecology, hydraulic fracturing, metabolism, environmental governance, Appalachia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 20

Abstract

This paper presents a political-industrial ecology analysis of an emerging petrochemical corridor in Appalachia. Political-industrial ecology is a nascent field of geography that embeds resource metabolisms within their broader political economic contexts. I advance the field by evaluating how resource metabolisms and governance processes interconnect to shape nature-society relations. Within Appalachia, various ethane “cracker” plants are under construction, or are being permitted, to transform ethane by-products from hydraulicly fractured shale gas in the Marcellus and Utica shales into plastics. The political-industrial ecology analysis links these developments in the former steel belt to the growing environmental burdens of plastics, highlighting how record state subsidies are facilitating these linkages. Further, the systems perspective afforded by a political-industrial ecology view reveals three notable findings. First, the footprint of the corridor extends well beyond the Ohio River Valley to Canada, the US Gulf Coast and international markets in Europe and Asia. Second, the corridor is a significant step towards establishing more globally integrated markets for ethane and natural gas. Third, the analysis illustrates the myriad of environmental systems and communities interlinked through the corridor, which can serve as a roadmap for facilitating cumulative impact analysis, a key gap in environmental impact and justice scholarship.