CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Fanon’s Rainbow: The Lithium Under Appalachia

Photograph Source: Shenandoah National Park from Virginia – Public Domain

Geologists have confirmed what preliminary surveys suggested for years: the Appalachian mountain corridor, running from Maine down through New Hampshire, Virginia, the Carolinas, and into Georgia, sits atop one of the largest lithium deposits in North America. The find is concentrated heavily in North Carolina and West Virginia, with significant deposits running the full length of the range. It could represent enough reserves to supply domestic battery production for decades. The timing is fortuitous. The United States has been scrambling to secure lithium supply chains for electric vehicles, grid storage, and defense technology. Turns out it was here all along. Right under the Appalachian Trail, which some optimists still hike end to end, Maine to Georgia, imagining a country that rewards persistence.

Appalachia has been here before. Not the lithium part, but the part where something valuable gets discovered underneath people who have been poor for a very long time. Coal built fortunes, just not locally. Timber came through like a haircut. Tobacco kept the Carolinas and Virginia in a kind of indentured agricultural grace for generations until the lawsuits arrived and the companies discovered that contrition, properly structured, is also profitable. Each boom followed the same basic script: outside capital arrives, extracts, departs, leaves behind a workforce with damaged lungs and a political class grateful for the attention.

I know something about the lungs part. I spent time as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, processing black lung cases. You read the files. You look at the X-rays. Van Gogh had the same reaction when he visited the miners in Belgium — the Borinage — early in his life, long before anyone knew there would be paintings. What Van Gogh wanted, more than anything, was to be a minister. Failing that, a writer. Painting was third on the list, which tells you something about how God allocates talent. He went down into those mines anyway, in his ministerial capacity, and came back a changed man.

The potato eaters he painted later have that same........

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