ABSTRACT
Loyal Jones identified mountain residents' love of place as significant in his seminal essay, "Appalachian Values". In a similar vein, Ann Pancake is a contemporary Appalachian writer with ecofeminist sensibilities and a keen awareness of gendered nuances that distinguish her characters' interactions, or lack thereof, with the natural abundance that is at risk of destruction. The eco-social landscape of her Strange As This Weather Has Been documents the ravages of mountaintop removal coalmining in contemporary southern West Virginia and a nuclear family's conflicting reactions to this form of resource extraction primarily by absentee landowners. She aligns herself with Huggan and Tiffin's argument that "the righting of imperialist wrongs necessarily involves our writing of the wrongs that have been done". Editor of The Green Studies Reader Laurence Coupe cites both Chingyuan and Dorothy Wordsworth as authors who understand such a spiritual awakening in Nature. Pancake directly links this patriarchal violence against nature with violence against women in one of Lace's chapters.
