Abstract
A key challenge of the twenty-first century will be to combine post-carbon economic transition with socioecological healing of the legacy damages concatenating from the fossil fuel era. What political and knowledge structures do we need to create integrated solutions to both of these challenges? In this paper, we draw lessons from grassroots social and environmental justice movements in Appalachia that seek post-coal economic transition. This article is in two parts. The first part analyzes participatory action research on regional economic transition conducted by the economic transition team of the Alliance for Appalachia (a regional coalition of sixteen grassroots organizations) from 2013 through 2015. Part 2 of this article looks at the Alliance’s work from 2016 to the present (and will appear in a future issue of this journal).
