Earth–world–planet: Rural ecologies of horror and dark green criminology
| Author | Bill McClanahan |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618819813 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618819813
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(4) 633 –650
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618819813
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Earth–world–planet: Rural
ecologies of horror and dark
green criminology
Bill McClanahan
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Abstract
This article responds to green criminology. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the
coal-producing region of Appalachia and the processes of mountaintop removal mining, the
article engages contemporary philosophy, ecocriticism, and “dark ecology” to suggest that
green criminology rethink its linguistic categories and epistemological assumptions. The
article employs an analysis of some examples of horror cinema to suggest criminological
engagement with “ecologies of horror” and the “horrors of ecology” that condition life
in the shadow of harmful modes of resource extraction. It concludes with some thoughts
on the potential of a “dark” green and green-cultural criminology.
Keywords
Ecology, green cultural criminology, horror, object-oriented ontology, resource
extraction
Introduction
Since its initial proposal in the 1990s (Lynch, 1990; South, 1998), green criminology has
focused the criminological gaze on a wide array of harms and crimes affecting humans,
animals other than humans, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. Those working
within green criminology have expanded our understanding of the effects, scope, and
meaning of environmental harm(s) and broadened the space for a theoretical examination
of the ways in which humans interact with the broader natural world, often to the detriment
Corresponding author:
Bill McClanahan, Eastern Kentucky University, 521 Lancaster Ave, 467 Stratton, Richmond, Kentucky
40475, USA.
Email: bill.mcclanahan@eku.edu
819813TCR0010.1177/1362480618819813Theoretical CriminologyMcClanahan
research-article2019
Article
634 Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
of the latter. More recently, Avi Brisman and Nigel South (2013, 2014) have called for the
development of a “green cultural criminology”, a turn that seeks to orient the curious gaze
of cultural criminology toward issues of environmental harm and its cultural dimensions
and representation(s). These calls have primarily, so far at least, brought forth some crimi-
nological interest in visual depictions of the intersection(s) of culture and environment
(see, generally, Carrabine, 2018; McClanahan et al., 2017; Natali and McClanahan, 2017),
a tendency that illustrates not only an increased interest in cultural issues within green
criminology, but also the simultaneous cross-pollination of visual criminology with green
and cultural criminological variants.
This article, in some ways, continues that trend: I am concerned here with the various
ways that rurality has been imagined and visualized as a landscape of horror, and the
ways that rural landscapes like Appalachia animate the green criminological imagina-
tion. The article engages with ecocriticism in order to read those spaces as “dark” ecolo-
gies, pushing green-cultural criminology into conversation with philosophical
frameworks which can inform eco-criminological readings of cultural productions. I
employ a case study of Appalachian coal extraction and place it into conversation with
horror cinema’s representations of the rural landscape in order to urge green criminology
to recognize what we might think of as ecologies of horror and the horror of ecology.
I begin, then, with a brief discussion of the problem of mountaintop removal coal
extraction in Appalachia. I then move into a discussion of the shared dialectical tensions
central to the cultural-material space of the rural and the cultural field of horror. The
article then describes some of the tropes and images that emerge from the visual register
of horror in order to characterize and construct a unique image of extractive rural spaces.
Finally, I consider some of the key questions surrounding green criminology’s epistemic
and philosophical tendencies in order to suggest new modes of ecological thought that
can offer green criminology new ways of thinking about the planet, culture, and harm.
Mountaintop removal in Appalachia
Despite their thematic differences, green and rural criminologies share significant con-
nective tissue (McClanahan et al., 2017). While there are many ruralities and definitions
of “the rural”,1 the one this article is centrally concerned with is the mountains of
Appalachia. The coal-producing region of Central Appalachia, between the peaks and
hollows of West Virginia, the rolling hills and bluegrass of central Kentucky and the
Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, is home to some of the oldest mountains and most bio-
diverse hardwood forests in the world. Central Appalachia, though—West Virginia,
Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, and Eastern Ohio—also hold the second largest recover-
able coal reserves in the world. After over 100 years of underground coal extraction,
mine operators in Appalachia, in the 1970s, turned away from the traditionally practiced
forms of underground “deep mining” in favor of the emerging technology of mountain-
top removal, an extension of surface strip-mining that promised the ability to substan-
tially increase the raw amount of extracted coal while simultaneously greatly reducing
the need for workers. Mountaintop removal entails the removal of up to 800 vertical feet
of a mountaintop or ridge in order to access deep coal seams. Practiced extensively in the
predominantly rural area of Southern Appalachia—primarily Kentucky, West Virginia,
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