Mining For Tourists? A Dubious Economic Savior In Appalachia

In some of the poorest, most remote counties, about the only alternative people can come up with is tourism — eco-, adventure, or, as with the Looneys, historical and cultural. Environmental degradation alongside unspoiled areas, a history of poor education that for decades didn't preclude high-paying jobs, an away-from-it-all feel partly caused by a lack of good roads and other infrastructure. Appalachia covers 205,000 square miles, encompassing 420 counties in 13 states, from northeast Mississippi to southwest New York, according to the official definition offered by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Sociologist Rebecca Scott, author of a book on mountaintop removal in her native West Virginia, says, It's important to really point out the situation of the state being caught between the condition of being an extraction economy, a sacrifice zone, and yet having most of its sort of long-term successes in tourism being around nature-based tourism. Gallaway, who did her doctoral thesis on tourism development in the region, found that while tourism and hospitality accounted for 16 percent of all jobs in the region, those sectors produced just 7 percent of the wages. Many rooms in the area's hotels are being occupied by workers drilling in the nearby Marcellus shale formation, as coal has been replaced by hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, says county commission president Ron Watson. According to the economic report, tourism-related jobs in the Hatfield-McCoy Mountains — the marketing label for a cluster of coal-producing counties — actually dropped from 1,400 to 1,300 from 2004 to 2012. For generations, the county, dominated by the Allegheny National Forest, was a popular vacation destination for blue-collar workers, earning it the nickname "Pittsburgh's playground." The trick, Morris and team wrote in their action plan, was for the county to stay "true to its heritage of 'the place to get away