This forum offers insights into the burgeoning subfield of Appalachian environmental history. In the introductory essay, Drew Swanson offers a thumbnail sketch of the subfield's historiographic development, paying particular attention to its major themes, to areas ripe for further exploration, and to its relationship to the field of Appalachian studies. Shorter response essays by Steven Stoll, Kathryn Newfont, Joyce Barry, and Timothy Silver take up various corners of the subfield, challenging some of Swanson's conclusions and pointing to particularly promising avenues of research. Intended to be accessible, even conversational, in style and tone, the forum's essays offer a broad consideration of the contours of current and future scholarship in the environmental history of an iconic region-and a timely one, given the recent boom in Appalachian environmental writing, the broad public interest expressed in works such as J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and national conversations about the region's natural resources, from coal to natural gas.
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