Healing Appalachia: Sustainable Living Through Appropriate Technology

Al Fritsch and Paul Gallimore University Press of Kentucky, 2007 (AGR) This is a good book on a great subject, the nuts and bolts of living compatibly with nature in a specific bioregion, the hills and hollows of central Appalachia. The authors define "central Appalachia" to include western North Carolina and mountainous parts of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia. Although much of what they discuss is widely applicable beyond this region, their book's great virtue is in its effort to not be generic, but instead to focus on ways of living that are appropriate for this particular place. The book focuses on 30 mostly small-scale "appropriate technologies" that the authors consider to be both well-suited for Appalachia's natural environment and "suitable ways to achieve a higher quality of life while using fewer resources." For a technology to be considered appropriate, the authors say, it must be affordable, Earth-friendly, community-enhancing and people-friendly: "An appropriate technology is not so exclusive and automatic that ordinary people are removed from its care and maintenance," but rather "can be learned and maintained by people with ordinary skills." The 30 technologies are grouped into several categories: electric energy (solar, wind, and microhydropower), energy efficiency and conservation (including heating with wood), food, forest, land (including reclamation), shelter, transportation, waste and water. In keeping with the authors' belief that good technologies are usable by non-experts, readers without much prior knowledge will find it easy to follow the authors' discussion. Chapters typically begin with basic and general information, then move into how the technology in question is applicable in Appalachia. Readers may wish, as I did, that topics were treated in more depth"but the book is already more than 400 pages long, so it can't be expected to cover much more than it does. Readers with more prior knowledge might prefer to skim at least some of the book's more basic and generic material. But even the most knowledgeable reader will find much of value here, both in the text and in the bibliography, which lists sources of more information about each of the technologies covered. Some of that value is in specific ideas for how to apply certain technologies here in Appalachia. Consider, for example, the book's description of a homemade solar-powered food dehydrator that in the winter can be connected to a south-facing window to become a solar room heater. This clever device is not only affordable and manageable by people with ordinary skills but also beautifully suited to Appalachian conditions. Summers here are so humid that it's hard to preserve food well by drying without help from heated, moving air (which the solar dehydrator is designed to provide), and winters are mild enough for a unit this size to be an effective space heater. There's also value in Appalachia-specific data about why certain technologies are good and should be more widely used. For example, the authors note that scientists in the early 1980s "looking at US Geological Survey stream-flow data and computing elevation differentials determined that the mountain counties in western North Carolina could become net exporters of electricity by simply tapping the potential microhydropower sites that could generate between 5 kW and 100 kW of electricity." This estimate did not include the many, many sites with smaller potential that could wholly or partly supply individual households with affordable, ecologically benign electricity. Nor did it include sites with larger hydropower potential. Given all this, arguments that we need to build new coal-fired and other fossil-fuel-burning power plants in the region (such as the plant recently nixed in Asheville) seem ludicrous indeed. Perhaps the book's greatest value is in its usefulness for thinking about sustainability in a systematic, practical way that suits both the land and the people of Appalachia. We tend to think about, say, microhydropower and food preservation as separate things"in large part because thinking about them and a host of other appropriate technologies all at once is an awful lot to think about. By bringing together 30 such diverse topics and extensively cross-referencing them, "Healing Appalachia" encourages thinking about sustainability as an integrated whole, a pattern of wholesome lives that sustain and are sustained by a healthy environment. "The time is right," authors Fritsch and Gallimore affirm, "for Appalachia to take the lead in appropriate technology. Our region is known for its resourcefulness, self-sustainability, and the ability to make do with very little. Ours is a region of great promise, a potential showcase of conversion." The challenge for all of us is to make that promise reality.