In the middle of the night on August 30, 2004, a mining bulldozer, working in the dark, dislodged a huge rock. Gaining momentum as it went, the 1,000-pound boulder thundered down a mountain toward a small Appalachian town and smashed everything in its path. The boulder struck a house, where it crushed and killed a toddler, Jeremy Davidson, as he was sleeping peacefully in his bed. The tragedy punctuates a tyranny tightening over the region: Appalachian families are under siege by profit-crazed coal companies.

Mining blasts continue relentlessly, day and night. Some occur within the town limits, some even next to people’s homes. When the price of coal increases, the number of blasts skyrockets. On any given day, there can be thousands of explosions across Appalachia. The scale compares to war as “2,500 tons of explosives [are] detonated each day in West Virginia alone.”

To access the seams of coal buried deep underground, mining companies literally blow the tops off mountains. The ancient mountain peaks of Appalachia, gentle and picturesque, are disappearing fast. The coal companies have beheaded 500 mountains over the last 30 years. If they keep it up, Appalachia will appear an oddly buckled flatland, its forests razed and its landscape scarred with giant strip mines as far as the eye can see. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed after a flyover: “[I] saw a sight that would sicken most Americans. . . . I saw the historic landscapes that gave America some of its most potent cultural legends . . . the frontier hollows that cradled our democracy, the wilderness wellspring of our values, our virtues, our national character – all being leveled.”