Using Local Observations of Climate Change to Identify Opportunities for Community Conversations in Southern Appalachia

Climate change and exurban development present significant social, economic, and environmental challenges in Southern Appalachia. Addressing those challenges—whether to prevent them, mitigate them, or prepare for them—will require individual action and collective action at community and regional scales. However, the coordination necessary for such action will be difficult to achieve in a region long opposed to regulation, suspicious of newcomers, and characterized by increasing social diversity. One particularly salient difference that is likely to shape collective responses to climate change is the distinction between “newcomers” and “multigenerationals,” descendants of people who have lived in the region for generations. In this chapter, we draw on nearly 80 interviews to address three questions: What indicators and consequences of climate change do people observe in their everyday lives and view as relevant? How does one’s connection to this landscape shape the indicators and consequences they observe and care about? And what differences exist in how people theorize the causes of climate change? By examining this diversity of climate knowledges and climate cultures in Southern Appalachia, we hope to identify complementarities, bridges, and provocations that might help natural resource managers and community members identify effective and inclusive responses to climate change.