CHAPTER 5 DRAFT MODERN APPALACHIA: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW’S FAILURE AND THE BROADER REGIONAL LANDSCAPE e U.S. environmental law regime, as enacted in the 1970s and further re- fined over the decades, has proven a wholly inadequate paradigm. Chapter 5 details the profound ecological damage Appalachia has experienced since environmental law was enacted—and also the specific manner in which the environmental regime has failed the region. As discussed in prior chapters, the coal extraction industry, in particular, has wrought extensive devasta- tion in Appalachia since the late nineteenth century. And the transition to mechanization-intensive surface mining at the mid-century point rapidly ac- celerated such ecological destruction. As chapter 5 discusses, following the environmental revolution that swept through the United States in the 1960s and the subsequent enactment of the environmental regime, there was legiti- mate hope that statutes such as the CWA and SMCRA would provide new and substantial environmental protections for the region. Unfortunately, the op- posite transpired. Similar to prior Appalachian eras, the fossil fuel hegemony and allied governmental elites succeeded in thwarting the (already critically flawed) environmental law regime and in further degrading the region. In fact, industry-based damage reached disastrous new heights with the dra- matic rise of mountaintop removal mining in the 1990s—which, for three decades, has wrought extensive harms in Central Appalachia. is chapter next chronicles additional ecological issues—that environmental law has sim- ilarly failed to curtail—both in Appalachia and at the broader national and global scales. In the Appalachian context, the natural gas industry and related chemical industry resurgence are producing a new onslaught. And the broader global ecological crisis, as associated with notions of the Capitalocene, poses a true threat to the world at large. 113