When Robbie Cox was a boy, the outdoors was his friend.
He spent countless hours tromping through the forest and honing his imagination in the woods, and along the banks of the Greenbrier River that flowed near his home in southeastern West Virginia.
His love of the natural world was formed there – but it was galvanized by his years as a graduate student in Pittsburgh, America’s “Steel City.” It’s also known for the Pittsburgh Coal Seam, the thickest and most extensive coal bed in the Appalachian Basin.
He learned a lot about coal, the coal industry and the people who relied on coal for a living. What he learned was startling.
“I saw that through the coal industry, through strip mining, we’re not only destroying the environment, but actually destroying our health as we do it,” Cox said.
Cox soon became associated with the Sierra Club, on a backpacking trip in his home state. Eventually, his passion for environmental causes led him to lead the Sierra Club as its president three times and to serve on its board of directors for 20 years.
He’s the keynote speaker for the Western North Carolina Alliance’s Annual Gathering, scheduled for 6:30-8:30 p.m. Saturday Sept. 15 at The Aloft hotel in downtown Asheville.
Cox, who is now Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill, works in the principal research areas of environmental communication, climate change communication, and strategic studies of social movements. He’s well aware that environmentalism, as a cause and a profession, carries with it stereotypes of elitism and a disconnect from poor and working-class community concerns.
He’s fought against that his whole career.
“For about 20 years, I was working with the very nascent environmental justice movement in the South,” he said. “As a result, I’ve seen how connections can be made and how partnerships can be formed. It works best when environmentalists understand how issues on the ground affect people where they live, and then link larger issues to local causes. We know that environmental racism – such as in Cancer Alley in Louisiana – disproportionately impacts poorer communities.”
Cox knows these coalitions aren’t always easy, and that they require working outside the comfort zones of our own cultures and class systems.
“When we work with others, and with groups like the Western North Carolina Alliance, our voice is magnified,” he said.
“Together we have much more influence and power than we have as individuals.”