Extractive industries are so entrenched in Appalachia that the region has been referred to alternatively as an internal colony, an internal periphery of the world capitalist system, and as a “national sacrifice zone.” As a concept, colonialism, in this sense, speaks to the broader set of relations in which a wealthy, settler nation extracts raw resources via exploitative labor practices from an external site for its own domestic consumption. In the case of Appalachia, the region’s abundant natural resources—first its land, then its timber and coal, and now its natural gas and leveled mountains—fueled the growth of the rest of the region, country, and world while leaving itself depleted. Speculators representing northern capitalist interests were able to acquire massive acreage and mineral rights through generous land grants provided by the state and other dubious methods. Generations of absentee landowners and financiers extracted immense sums of resources and money out of the region, leaving nothing behind but wages. Today, ownership of the land and its resources still remains the basis of wealth and power in the region. A 1982 foundational study of land ownership in Appalachia found that of the 4.8 million acres of corporately owned mineral acres in the surveyed region, 89 percent were absentee owned with 62 percent by out-of-state corporations. These imbalances of wealth and power, created generations ago, have left Appalachia impoverished and environmentally degraded. After over a century of extractive activity, Appalachia has become a place with “rich land and poor people.”

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