ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogical strategies that emphasize experience and witnessing can help students understand material and socio-ecological consequences of uneven geographical development. This chapter is based upon eight years of learning alongside Keepers of the Mountain—a grassroots organization based in Virginia that educates student groups about the environmental consequences of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining—and reviews student responses to witnessing sites of MTR mining and of open-air coal for export. This experiential-learning curriculum, tied to my Resource Wars course, challenges students to understand the consequences of our historic fossil-fuel dependency. We first use commodity-chain analysis to explore connections between rural zones hard hit by the fall of coal mining and deindustrialized zones in cities like Baltimore. Activist anthropology merges with critical resource geography as students perceive MTR mining's effects and how they connect to Baltimore communities. By tracing resources from zones of extraction to urban transport and processing plants, the abstract global circuits of resource extraction, transport, and export come to life in new ways; students are able to see, hear, touch, and taste the effects of our dependency upon fossil fuels. Further, the course demystifies rural Appalachia as a “foreign” and “unfamiliar” place by placing it alongside urban Baltimore.
