Joe Hankins, Medium, 20 October 2016 – I work in West Virginia. That may seem an incongruous qualification for authoring a blog in a series uncovering and celebrating national connections to the Arctic. Some would point to the undeniable role of West Virginia as a fossil fuel producer and draw blaming ties to the warming of our globe’s most northern region. That is a connection, but there is plenty of science, politics and narrative already available on that one, so I’d like to take this opportunity to try to provide a different perspective. By looking more closely at these two places and using a little history — both the natural and the social kind — I hope to use this post to highlight where the Arctic and West Virginia have some common ground, and the challenges and opportunities they both face.

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