Aggressive buys prison site to re-focus the land »Yale Climate Connection

In a chilly cold in eastern Kentucky, Taysha Devaughan attended a small party at the foot of a recycled deprivation mine to celebrate his homecoming. “This is the return of ancestors,” Devon said. “This is the return of relatives.”

That relative was the land they stood on, a part of a plan in federal prison, and many in the crowd considered another injustice in the area they were bothering. The mine closed a few years ago, but the location near the town of Roxana still carries extracted scars. Devaughan, an admissions member of the Comanche Nation, joined about two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Reigniting Project’s purchase of 63 acres of land in the prison’s footprint.

“What we're going to do here is protect her and make a sound for her,” Devon said. “She's been on the top of the mountain. She's blown up, caught, injured.”

The Appalachian Re-igniting project she helped find last year hopes to re-establish the site with bison, native flora and fauna and open it to inter-tribal gatherings and hopes to stop the prison. The Environmental Justice Organization works with a coalition of local nonprofits, including building communities instead of prisons and institutes that end mass incarceration, to raise $160,000 to purchase the plot from homes that own the land. Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker owns the nearby land and considers buying it as a hunting ground, telling Grist that he is very supportive of him. “We will not have a positive attitude,” he said.

The prison has been a glittering glory for state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has been triggering a sharp split in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only quietly resurrected in 2022 last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clean up How to start buying land.

Some people in Letcher County, who left 5.2% of the population between 2020 and 2023 and worked at a 24% poverty rate, believe prisons will replace lost jobs and taxes due to coal decline. As mining falters, construction of federal prisons flourished in central Appalachia, where eight of the 16 prisons were built there, usually in Kentucky.

“These are expressions of the economic crisis that occurred due to the collapse of the coal industry and have proposed prisons and prisons,” said Judah Schept, a professor of Eastern Judicial Studies at the University of Kentucky. “In his book Coal, Cage, Crisis notes that mines are considered ideal locations for prisons or wasteful dumps, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have said. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-rooting with a forest that now avoids many rare species, including endangered bats.

Opponents believe that prisons will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County is one of 13 counties damaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation that has exacerbated mining in areas that have caused damage to local watersheds. The prison originally scheduled to be Roxana will exacerbate the problem. The Prison Bureau estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands. (The agency has committed to make up for the country.)

Devon said the purchase was also a step to correct the deprivation that began with forced evacuation and genocide by Indigenous peoples. Cherokee, Shawnee and Yuchi made houses in the region before, during and after colonization, and their thriving nations once roamed Appalachia, the bustling The state has planted crops, operated enterprises and hunted bison. Since then, coal, wood, gas and landholding companies have sometimes owned nearly half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons erupted from deals with coal companies, and many locals saw a continuation of the status quo.

Changing this dynamic is a priority for Appalachian reigniting the project, which hopes to purchase more land to protect it from the extractive industry and return its managers to indigenous and local communities. Devaughn said indigenous peoples throughout the region are welcome to use the land as a gathering place.

The Cherokee Indians, Cherokee National and Manchester United’s Eastern band did not respond to a request for comment.

Devaughan saw his work establish a new vision for the transition to the coalfield economy, a scene that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of land and the indigenous and other communities living there. She is in contact with some individuals in Cheyenne and Arapaho countries to get a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists and students to list the site’s flora and fauna.

The plot is located on the edge of the 500-acre site outlined by the prison, which will occupy more than 1,300 people in the main facility and adjacent campgrounds. Representatives of the Prison Bureau said that Grist land acquisition will continue.

This is not the first time the institution has encountered such a pothole. Six years ago, Lecher County Master Falconer Mitch Whitaker refused to sell nearly 12 acres of land, asking the agency to modify its plans. The prospect of doing so once again leads Hal Rogers, who represents the Congressional region, to become the main champion of the prison, Lambaste ARP and his allies.

“The purchase of such land is not surprising from outsiders and liberal-led groups in Kentucky,” he said in a statement.

But many of the people celebrating the deal Wednesday were local residents, such as Artie Ann Bates, who grew up in Letcher County and saw the wave of strip digging ruined the Her family's land. “It's really hard to see where you like being destroyed,” she said, adding that the purchase is a “sign of progress” and tied with neighbors at the foot of the mine.

Originally published by Grist, the story is part of Climate Now, a global news collaboration that enhances the reporting of climate stories.