Who Owns Appalachia? Introduction, Highlights and Resources

  • Oct 7, 2026
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In Central Appalachia, histories of Indigenous dispossession and concentrated land ownership continue to shape the present. Landscapes reshaped by coal mining have become sites of struggle over prisons, AI data centers, and other extractive developments. And while Appalachia is not unique in this regard, it has long served as a testing ground for systems of power—and for movements developing ways to challenge them.

Curated by Red Natural History Fellow Lindsay Shade, “Who Owns Appalachia? Property, Extraction, and Land Liberation,” brought abolitionist scholar and organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore into dialogue with Sharon Fisher, Mary Cromer, and Tiffany Joy (Pyette)—organizers and advocates confronting prisons, data centers, land dispossession, and extractive development across Central Appalachia. 

We are excited to share some highlights from the event, a full transcript from Lindsay Shade’s clear-eyed introduction on the stakes of today’s land struggles in Central Appalachia, and a roundup of resources shared by the panelists and audience members in the chat. 

Roundtable Highlights

Exploring both the region’s history and its present-day struggles—and drawing out lessons for communities confronting land grabs and extractive development across the country—”Who Owns Appalachia?” asked how land ownership data can help communities challenge extractive developments, and what it would mean to transform the property relations that keep making them possible.

Sharon Fisher drew on her experience growing up in a coal mining camp in West Virginia and on decades of struggle against repeated cycles of extraction in the region. She offered a tour of the challenges facing people in Central Appalachia, where communities abandoned by the coal industry are now confronting dozens of proposed data centers. Sharon shared not only her deep knowledge of the terrain but also strategic lessons from organizing in places marked by sharp ideological and political divisions, emphasizing the importance of organizing around common interests—creating spaces where, regardless of their political affiliation, people could stand on the same side in defense of their safety, health, and love of the land.

Mary Cromer unpacked the legal constraints facing residents across Appalachia, particularly those stemming from the severance of surface rights from subsurface land and mineral rights. In Kentucky, she told us, anyone who owns even a fractional interest in the surface can lease the entire surface for strip mining. For more than a century, this legal structure has allowed coal companies to obtain the consent required to mine by securing the agreement of just one surface owner—even if that owner lives far away or owns less than one percent of the interest in the land. 

The private property system—codified in law in ways that have long lubricated the engines of extraction—can also, however, be mobilized against them. The Appalachian Rekindling Project, an Indigenous-led collective in eastern Kentucky represented on the panel by Tiffany Joy (Pyette), offered one inspiring example. Faced with a proposed prison development in Letcher County, Kentucky, the group raised funds to purchase a plot of land that was central to the prison’s construction, successfully blocking the project by turning the property regime against itself. Describing the group’s work of land rematriation and its campaign to restore bison to the region, Tiffany offered a clear picture of what “land liberation” can look like in practice.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore helped place this work within a wider systemic frame. She highlighted not only how, across the capitalist world, private property enables dispossession, genocide, and the ongoing wounding of people and the land, but also how abolitionist practice—which she influentially defines as “emancipation in rehearsal”—can guide us to wage our struggles not only against this or that harmful development, but also for the creation of a thriving, liveable world.

Transcript: Lindsay Shade’s Introduction to Property, Extraction, and Land Liberation in Appalachia

Data centers are on everyone’s mind these days. I don’t know exactly how many are slated for Central Appalachia, because how can we know? But thanks to Jim Branscome’s reporting, I can say there are at least 11 data centers planned for West Virginia, and through our grassroots work I know of about half a dozen planned in eastern Kentucky, and many others proposed in Appalachian Virginia and Tennessee.

Millions are being invested to build these data centers on former strip mines – which is a problem because oftentimes mined land has not been reclaimed in a way that can support major infrastructure. We saw this with some of the prisons built in the past two decades, like Red Onion State Prison in Virginia and USP Big Sandy in Kentucky, which had to be reinforced at taxpayer expense. Central Appalachia hosts 16 state and federal prisons, and we are currently working to stop another prison from being built in Letcher County, Kentucky.

At every turn, the plans for development in the region seem to go in the opposite direction of what people are asking for. Even nicer sounding ideas like tourism and conservation have been extractive in nature. We’ve seen people evicted from their homes on land that has been leased for generations from land companies so that ATV parks could be built. As the coal industry has entered its twilight in the region, the hope of breaking up larger parcels to create more opportunities for housing and work has been dashed by dubious for-profit conservation deals.

And that’s to say nothing of the many other extractive projects we are confronting, like fracking, blue hydrogen, nuclear, and so much more.

In this context, Mary Cromer, Tiffany Joy (Pyette), Sharon Fisher, myself, and many others came together as the Appalachian Land Study Collective – a loose and evolving configuration of people and organizations across the region, sharing information and strategies, with folks working on all of these fronts. We are documenting the structure of landholding, the unfair tax policies, and how the legacy of extractive industry – especially coal – is constraining our lives and futures. But we also came together to focus on the land because it is our home, it is our livelihood, and any possible future will be rooted in the land.

That said, we are careful not to conflate property and land. Property is not land. Property alienates people from the land and from each other. Like it or not, it’s the abstraction between us and the land, and the comforts and security of home. 

So as the “collective,” we are still asking who owns the land and how better policies can improve the lives of people who live in Central Appalachia today. And I say still asking because this work comes out of a long legacy of activism and research coming out of Appalachia, most notably the 1979-1981 Appalachian Land Study, which produced the landmark report Who Owns Appalachia? 

But we also recognize that our struggles in the region, and the struggles of people elsewhere, are interconnected through the property system, which, despite how much we take it for granted, often functions in a very opaque way. We have had a very hard time tracking land ownership and mineral ownership is even harder. Land records are technically public but they are available in piecemeal ways and/or behind paywalls.  So as we have gathered information we have tried to do so broadly and make it available. We recently launched a nationwide tool to help track land ownership called OpenLand, which you can register for a free account to get full interactive parcel data. 

The challenges in Appalachia are of course not unique. This is evident right away from OpenLand, which features a land ownership inequality index calculated for every county in the US. Very clearly, land ownership is highly unequal almost everywhere. More accessible data about land can be a resource for people working on local issues wherever they are. 

But also, hopefully, OpenLand is an entry-point to a larger conversation about solidarity across time and place, and about how we can engage critically and creatively with property to understand it and change it. Today we interrogate, what are the experiences of property in a resource extraction zone, where ownership has been consolidated for more than two centuries; where a property system that was once novel anchored the forced removal of Indigenous peoples – whose lands were characterized as “waste” because they were not privatized and fenced – to make way for loggers, railroads, mines and white settlers; where in the Jim Crow era, convict leasing was foundational to the southern coalfields; and where the same enforcers of Jim Crow for the railroads also violently suppressed striking miners on behalf of the coal operators? 

Often, these experiences have been met with resistance and solidarity, as in the Coal Creek War where striking miners in east Tennessee freed hundreds of convicts in 1891, whose labor had been leased to replace them, ultimately helping to end the convict leasing system in the state; or more recently when landowners in Letcher County and incarcerated people joined together in 2015 to successfully halt the Bureau of Prisons’ plans for the most expensive federal prison in history and sent them back to the drawing board. Unfortunately they did go back to the drawing board and we are still fighting that prison, and we are still going to stop it. 

What then, might we do with property, and access to information to intervene in the everyday bureaucracy of it, in this spirit of liberation?

Resources for Land Liberation

Research Tool

  • OpenLand, a people’s land records observatory that makes land ownership data accessible for community research and organizing, providing a view of nationwide trends, including measures of land inequality and absentee ownership.

Community Organizations & Campaigns

  • Appalachian Land Study Collective, a collaborative public research effort documenting patterns of land and resource ownership and the revenues they generate, as well as studying our own relationships to the land. 
  • The Clinch Coalition, a community-based environmental organization advocating for environmental protection and environmental justice across Southwest Virginia.
  • SWVA Watch, a grassroots initiative raising public awareness and organizing around proposed nuclear reactors and other emerging energy developments in Southwest Virginia, including blue hydrogen and carbon capture infrastructure.
  • Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center provides free legal services to people and communities impacted by the legacy of coal mining and extractive development in Central Appalachia.
  • The Appalachian Rekindling Project, an Indigenous, women-led initiative advancing ecological restoration, Indigenous land rematriation, and cultural revitalization across Central Appalachia.
  • Appalachian Rekindling Project’s Bison Belong Here campaign supports the return of bison to Appalachia as part of a larger project of ecological and cultural restoration.
  • Building Community Not Prisons Coalition organizes against prison construction and for investment in communities in Eastern Kentucky.
  • Critical Resistance, an abolitionist organization that has been working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and build abolitionist alternatives since 1997. 

Articles and Reports

Land Ownership, Dispossession & Energy Transition

Prisons, Property & Abolition

Appalachian Labor & Resistance History

  • West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s “Appalachia’s Gunmen of Capitalism and the Matewan Massacre” offers a short introduction to the 1920 Matewan Massacre and the violent struggle over union organizing in West Virginia’s coalfields.
  • The Zinn Education Project’s history of the Coal Creek War recounts the 1891–92 armed uprising by Tennessee coal miners against the state’s convict-leasing system.
  • The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum brings visitors into a powerful reckoning with the unique history of human labor in the privatized coal camps of Central Appalachia — and what it took to build dignity and respect where none was given.
  • Harlan County, USA, a 1976 Academy Award-winning film by Barbara Kopple, which documented the 1973 “Brookside Strike” in Harlan County, Kentucky.