West Virginia is one of many charming states with a lot of good rural land to explore. I’ve certainly enjoyed my road trips down there, and I will probably go back there this autumn. There is are two off-grid living channel I follow on the Youtube, and it’s wild and wonderful down there.

But I’m not sure I would choose the state to live in. For one, the summers are brutally hot even in the mountains and the winters are cold and icy. The roads are often steep, twisty and narrow which makes vacation fun, but probably not so fun when they are covered with ice and snow and you have to get other places.

The politics are strange in the state, while the people are friendly some of the laws are not. I am no fan of the idiotic boosterism for coal energy, that is literally tearing apart the land and leaving it with massive heaps of coal waste, ruining trout streams, and fouling with air with emissions — to say nothing of accelerating the harm of climate chgnage. Scrubbers help, but even the most basic of controls are often resisted at local levels, because coal is so uneconomic at this point compared to other generating plants and renewables.

West Virginia gun laws are good, but in many rural parts of state shopping opportunities are quite limited with even Walmart a distant trip away. Hunting and fishing opportunities are pretty good, especially in the mountain area around the National Forest are great. Restrictions on trash burning, and mandatory trash pick up go against my desire to live as close to zero-waste and zero-landfill as possible, reducing and managing the remaining waste by composting, reuse and burning on my own land.

Most people who live in West Virginia, especially rural West Virginia will tell you, they would never want to leave it — as it is truly is almost heaven. But the truth is, opportunities to make a decent living, outside of the dwindling jobs in the coal industry, is pretty darn hard.