002 Jeff Biggers on Regenerative Cities and Sustainability in Appalachia

A history of sustainability in Appalachia and life after coal.

 

Appalachian’s director of sustainability, Dr. Lee Ball, welcomes celebrated author, journalist, historian and playwright Jeff Biggers to the studio for a discussion of the history of sustainability in Appalachia, what a regenerative Boone, North Carolina, could look like and Biggers’ multimedia theatrical piece “An Evening at the Ecopolis: Envisioning a Regenerative City.”

    Transcript

Lee Ball: I’m here with Jeff Biggers the celebrated author, journalist, historian and playwright. He’s currently the leader of The Climate Narrative Project and he serves as Writer in Residence in the Office of Sustainability at the University of Iowa. Jeff is joining us on campus this week, meeting with faculty and students and performing his multimedia theatrical piece entitled, “An Evening at the Ecopolis: Envisioning a Regenerative City. So Jeff, thanks for being here. I’m really happy to talk about your work and am most interested in your story and your connection to Appalachia. You live in Iowa city, but you have some deep roots here in Appalachia. I would love for you to share with us a little about your story and how you came to do this work in the sustainability kind of space and specifically your connection to Appalachia.

Jeff Biggers: Great. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be back in Boone and Appalachian State, which I know very well. My family has deep roots in Appalachia, going back to before the American Revolution as Baptist descenders who came down and took an active part in the American Revolution even part of the Regulated Movement, which was of course a rebellion prior to the American Revolution. It sent a lot of people into the mountains. Soon after the American Revolution, my folks continued to go with that Western Migration. Going into Kentucky and the Cumberlands and then just following the sort of trails of woodsmen looking for other areas. They ended up, believe it or not, in Sutherland Illinois. Often when we think of Illinois we think of Chicago- we think of corn, we don’t realize that it’s very long skinny state that three hundred and sixty miles from Chicago is where my family lived. The beautiful place where the Wisconsin Glaciers stopped and we have these amazing upheavals. So we have a very similar mountainous region that you might find in the Cumberlands or even in the Ozarks. It’s incredible biodiversity. So that’s where my family lived for two hundred plus years. As a kid we were uprooted. It’s a community of coal mining. My family came from coal miners in a very rough area in the back woods. So as a young kid we packed up the old ‘64 Chevy and my folks moved us out west, continuing this migration. But we never forgot our roots. That was something that I felt I needed to go back and really discover at one point. A turning point for me, I had two turning points. One was that as a student, I was the University of California in Berkeley in 1981 and I ended up dropping out of school for various reasons and hitchhiking across the country. I was still just a teenager, a nineteen-year old freshman at that point, and I for some reason wanted to go back to Appalachia. I didn’t know quite why. I was hiking along the trail, working in communities. At one point I was working on a farm and I was camping in the woods and I had to hitchhike back to where I was camping. I waited for a long time, I had been bit by a dog that day on the farm that day, so I was really kind of frustrated. Somebody picked me up and I got into the car. I will never forget, I said “did you know that it takes forever to get a ride with a hillbilly back here” and he stopped his car and he said “get out.” And I was like you know I need to get to my campsite, I’m tired, I’m a kid, I don’t...and then I kind of shouted “I’m a hillbilly these are my roots so I can use that word.” He said “get out, we don’t have hillbillies back here, we have mountaineers.” I was kind of perplexed by that and I thought this is interesting. So I said “what do you mean mountaineers?” And he said “Hey if you’re real interested, let me take you somewhere.” This is just on the other side of the gap, Cumberland Gap. It was that nexus where Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky all come together. I hopped into the car and we went and got my backpack. Then he drove me hours into West Virginia and he dropped me off at this farm, this folk school. That really began this kind of long journey home. I stayed at a folk school at a farm all summer working at an incredible place that really wanted to look at the progressive role of Appalachian history. If was founded by the same person who had founded Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. He had gone on to do all sorts of things in his life. His name is Don West. He was a labor organizer, he was a poet and who had national fame. He was someone who had been an educator. He was sort of a godfathe