Wildly Extreme: Navigating Risk and Rivers in Wonderful West Virginia in the Era of the Freedom Industries Chemical Spill

This paper will explore fundamental tensions and commonalities between adventure-seeking sports and extractive industries in the state of West Virginia. Specifically, this paper will examine how a tourism-generating outdoor sports industry, exemplified by whitewater river rafting, on the one hand, and potential contamination-generating industries based on natural resource extraction, exemplified by coal mining, on the other, must each confront and navigate risk. Even while at extreme odds in terms of land use, each are inextricably tied with place and the natural environment broadly—as may be expressed in river water. Beginning from the category of extreme as analytical trope evoking high pressure, for example, and performance of activities within conditions deemed hazardous, I will discuss how exposure to their extremes can be both willful in entailing personal choice to purposefully place oneself at risk for recreation, as well as hapless, by virtue of simply living downstream from dangers of drinking water contamination. Based on collaborative ethnographic and oral history research in West Virginia, as well as textual analysis of varied media, this paper is designed to help situate the West Virginia water crisis within social science studies of risk and risky events, such as disaster, that discuss and document relevant analytic and experiential elements. Through a basic comparison of related activities and events, my intent is to provide a simple set of conceptual tools through which we may, in particular, examine accounts of those affected by the Freedom Industries chemical spill into the Elk River at Charleston in early 2014