Abstract
The field of Environmental Communication has often critiqued the shortcomings of public hearings, noting their limitations in bringing about effective and equitable public decision making. While this work has been significant, it has tended to limit the deliberative field to public hearings themselves, sometimes going so far as to assume that public hearings are the only spaces in which significant deliberations occur. Using a field analysis of the “No Coal Plant” campaign in Surry County, Virginia (2008–2013), the authors illuminate some limitations of existing literature. Their analysis suggests that while public hearings can be extremely limiting, even “failed” public hearings can play a critical role in constituting, organizing, and pacing formal and informal deliberative spaces, which are necessary for communities as they manage the stresses and strains of the decision-making process.
Highlights
Surry County, Virginia is a prototypical target for the development of LULUs, or “Locally Undesirable Land Uses.” It is characteristic in its financial instability
At the time of the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative’s (ODEC) proposal for the production of a coal plant in 2009, Surry was on the tail end of an industry-provided grant that had been relieving some of these municipal burdens
We found that the literature’s existing characterizations of “deliberation,” which center the limitations of public hearings in environmental decision making, eclipse most of Surry’s actual deliberative field
Summary
Surry County, Virginia is a prototypical target for the development of LULUs, or “Locally Undesirable Land Uses.” It is characteristic in its financial instability (both in the income level of residents and the financial instability of the municipality itself). Surry County, Virginia is a prototypical target for the development of LULUs, or “Locally Undesirable Land Uses.” It is characteristic in its financial instability (both in the income level of residents and the financial instability of the municipality itself). The county was a generally low-income and racially-divided community, with restricted organizing potential and community cohesion It was embedded in the culture of “Coal Country,” in Southern Virginia, but had direct ties to energy monopolies in the area because of other developments. It was predictable that ODEC purchased land to construct the “Cypress Creek Power Station,” a coalfired power plant in Surry County. Had it been built, the 1500-MW facility would have been the largest coal plant in the state. Surry is haunted at every corner by Virginia’s ghosts: slavery, racial violence, industrial dependence, agricultural monopoly, and municipal debt
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