"Visit My Community": The Need to Extend Envirnmental Justice to the Countryside

Abstract

A friend in a university history department recently told me he agrees with some of his colleagues that history as a profession has become irrelevant to our society. In the context of Pennsylvania's environmental history I am forced to agree. How else to explain the regression of environmental policies dealing with the exploitation of natural resources in this Commonwealth over the past two decades, or the persistently low air and water quality in western Pennsylvania due to the manufacture of coke and the production of electricity at coal-fired plants? From the loosening of restrictions on longwall mining in the 1990s through the regulatory shenanigans surrounding development of the Marcellus shale today, the fact that Pennsylvania has been through this sort of thing before seems to have escaped everyone. There is no evidence that history has informed—let alone influenced—policies now in place or under consideration, whether due to willful ignorance by our government or a failure by historians to enter the debate.