We are tentatively scheduling the guest-edited Black Ecologies issue for this year. We are officially replacing the fourth issue for this year with an eco-grief journal with writing practices and prompts.

Intro to Volume 3

Appalachia the Catastrophe, Appalachia My Home

I have two images in my mind.

In one, I look down to see my naked toes, awash in shallow shoals amidst stones polished by rushing flows, somehow both azure and amber. When I stand to leave the water, my feet find new relief, padding upon the humified forest floor—each step releasing a fragrance that awakens a memory from hundreds of lives ago. Something other than society happens to my body in this place, something better left to my senses than to my words.

In another, I close my eyes and find my back pressed comfortless in the void of what used to hold a mountain’s heart. I cough and hack and cower in a cavern carved by the clatter of pick and claws. The rattle of pills in my pocket helps with forgetting the dream that brought me here, and the pain it caused. What dream I was sold, what dream I paid for with blood.

The first image, I am no longer certain is real. The second image, in a sense, is not mine. The third, fourth, fifth now wash over my body, and I’m drowning. They course from ventricles to capillaries, I’m drowning. My child is drowning. My home is drowning. The blue ghost, the bluebells, the redhorse, and the green heron are drowning. I ask myself what peace is possible.

Appalachia, the catastrophe. Appalachia, my home…

For two years, we have been thinking together about the situation and history of Southern Appalachia, the Southeast, their peoples, and ecologies. For two years, we have pondered together what it means to envision a future beyond apocalypse, any future at all. For two years, we have pondered transition.

For two years, though, we have also watched a steep decline from the brutalities of neoliberalism to the onslaught of Christofascism (or technofascism. It seems they cannot decide… They may not have to.) For two years, we have watched the grinding gears of fascist greed reject the voices of our people and ecologies, who shouted in protest and cried from the belly of catastrophe. We are drowning.

In a post-industrial hell, Southern Appalachia reaps the dire consequences of extractive capitalism year after year. 2024 was no exception. The abandonment of Eastern Kentucky, the suppression of Cop City organizers, the fast-tracking of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the flooding of our beloved mountain towns: these are reminders of the corporate abuse in our region, reminders of the government's neglect of our people.

In 2025, we ask a question: must Appalachia continue this catastrophe?

How do we subdue the lashes of trauma and catastrophic thinking to produce a collective vision of mutuality, reciprocity, and abundance in Appalachia?