The Swedish artist and writer Fia Backström began traveling to the Appalachian region of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, in 2017. She returned yearly, and sometimes monthly, for nearly a decade. Backström was not only taken with the “incredibly friendly and welcoming” people she met there, and the strong labor history (“Blair Mountain is just up the mountain from the hollow of Buffalo Creek,” she tells me), but also with the area’s duskier history of mining and related ecological disasters. During one trip, she learned that on February 26, 1972, a coal slurry dam collapsed in the region and released an estimated 20-foot (~6 m) tidal wave of black sludge that swept down the 15-mile (~24 km) valley, killing 125 people and leaving 4,000 homeless. The mining company called it an “act of God,” and left the land toxic for decades.…