Dead or Alive? Odishan and Appalachian Mountains as Partners in Activism

Abstract

Mountains may be simultaneously viewed through multiple logics—sacred or secular, dead property to be commodified or living and powerful community members, for example—unless and until one of those logics is used to destroy them. We compare the way these logics figure in environmental justice movements in Odisha, India and the Appalachian region of the United States. In the first example, mountains—considered sacred and alive—have served as partners in a successful movement by Dongaria Kondh women in Odisha to stop the destruction of the Niyamgiri hills through aluminium mining. In the second example, while there are competing logics that include views of mountains as sacred in the United States, a capitalist logic through which mountains are considered dead and without a role in acting on their own future has prevailed in extensive coal mining through the destructive method of mountaintop removal.