Hello all. My name is Colleen O’Hare Barrows, and I am participating in this year’s Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative (ACRI) at Pitt. I am a senior majoring in Politics & Philosophy and Public & Professional Writing. I am also pursuing a certificate in Sustainability, which is how I got involved in this project. After college, I hope to attend law school. My goal is to one day work with environmental policy, whether that be in a law firm, government agency, nonprofit, or anywhere else doing environmental work.
At Pitt, I’m involved in a few different areas around campus. For work, I’m a peer writing consultant at the Writing Center. I really love tutoring there because it gives me the opportunity to help other students feel empowered through their writing; helping a student go from stressed at the beginning of a session to confident by the end is the most rewarding part of the job. Through tutoring, I’ve learned that if you write earnestly and not just to check a box, there’s no such thing as “bad writing”, only different ways of expressing yourself. Without the Writing Center, I don’t think I would have ever realized this.
When I’m not at the Writing Center or working on coursework, I try to get outdoors as often as possible. One way I do this is as business manager of the Outdoors Club. It is through the Outdoors Club that I’ve visited Fayette County and other parts of Appalachia. I’ve gone on trips to Ohiopyle, New River Gorge, and other beautiful places in the region. As great as these experiences were, I always had the nagging feeling that I was using the land and communities. We came into these places, set up camp, enjoyed the scenery, and left. Sure, we shopped at small businesses and ate at restaurants along the way, but I was never sure that was enough. The Outdoors Club, and therefore Appalachia, has been an irreplaceable part of my time at Pitt. When I graduate, I want to have given back in some way. In my head, it’s not just the right thing to do, buta simply fair.
As some of you reading this may know, the ACRI at Pitt is on its fourth year of the decade-long project. The goal of the ACRI is to add value to Fayette County through sustainable economic development. Of the students involved in this year’s cohort, I am in the sustainability group with Kelly Nguyen, Becca Jalboot, and Katherine Fazzini. This coming weekend, the entire cohort is going to Fayette County to meet with community leaders in Connellsville and Uniontown.
Our team has two avenues we are researching for how Fayette County could sustainably develop their economy. One is through the economic benefits that would occur if the government reclaimed the area in and around Phillips Discharge in Uniontown, the second largest abandoned mine discharge site in Western PA. Currently, the PA Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation is assessing the feasibility of a cleanup of Phillips Discharge in light of the new surge of funding for abandoned mine reclamation from the Bipartisan Investment Law of 2021. However, for reclamation to be possible in Uniontown, community members must be on board. When our group goes to Uniontown next weekend, we will be speaking with community members about their thoughts on the PA Department of Environmental Protection reclaiming Phillips Discharge. We want to hear how they feel about Phillips Discharge, and how they view reclamation – do they believe it’s possible? Do they believe the community could economically benefit from it? These and others are all questions we are hoping to ask community members to spur conversation on the subject.
The other opportunity for economic development in Fayette County that we are investigating is the aerospace industry. My group has talked to the program director of the Keystone Space Collaborative, a nonprofit that works to support the space exploration industry in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Between 2030 and 2040, the space economy is expected to grow to 1 trillion dollars, meaning Fayette County could economically benefit from entering the aerospace industry. The Keystone Space Collaborative’s narrative is that the space industry can be anywhere if you look at a community with an aerospace eye. This includes many sectors not traditionally thought of as space adjacent, such as agriculture and biomedicine, but also all those sectors that intersect will any business, like writing, advertising, etc.
In this project, I am primarily concerned with ensuring that bringing the aerospace industry to Fayette County will realize all three pillars of sustainability – social, economic, and environmental. Without all three, a project cannot be sustainable. Due to the projected value of the space economy, the industry has potential to add economic value to Fayette County. However, since the goal of our project is sustainable economic development, I want to find an avenue in which, through the aerospace industry, Fayette County can benefit both their economy and their environment. This is important because environmental degradation always hurts poor communities first and most deeply. No one understands this better than Appalachia, a region where the coal industry brought economic possibility in the short term and economic depression in the long term through degradation of the land. Whereas pollution has historically impacted this region, in more recent years we have seen how climate change due to fossil fuel emissions is destroying lives in Appalachia. As I write this, we still don’t know how many Appalachian people have died, and will die, due to Hurricane Helena. We can all agree that the Appalachian economic development, for the sake of its people, must be sustainable, both metaphorically (how long that economy can last) and physically (how the economy affects the climate).
This project has exposed me to a lot of actors within the environmental sector, such as ReimagineAppalachia, the PA Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, and scholars in the field. These conversations are really exciting for me as someone who hopes to work in law or government. It’s inspiring to speak to people who have made environmental protection their livelihood – they prove to me that it’s possible and a worthwhile endeavor.
