REVIEWS
The Last Mountain
Jovana J. Grbić, C&EN Contributing Editor
About a year ago, a little publicized, unheralded documentary named "Mountaintop Removal" attempted to deconstruct the environmentally devastating practice of the same name that was literally destroying the Appalachian geography of West Virginia's Coal River Valley. Honest, yet modestly shot and produced, the small-scale documentary needed a Hollywood touch to resonate on a human level and advance its powerful cause. It got what it needed in "The Last Mountain," a celebrated selection of this year's Sundance Film Festival. This important documentary succeeds in both relaying the urgency of halting a destructive coal-mining practice that is targeting one last undamaged mountain and forging a human connection with the townspeople who are battling to save it.
Most people don't think twice about where the electricity for their light bulbs comes from. Or if they know it primarily comes from coal, they are not aware of how that coal comes to see the light of day. In the valleys and mountaintops of idyllic Appalachia, according to the film, the coal industry every week detonates the explosive power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, in a process called mountaintop removal.
There is nothing scientific or technical about mountaintop removal. It is crude and cruel and its effects are nonreversible. First, trees and other natural ecology are removed from the tops of mountains. Then, dynamite splits the mountain open to unearth a layer of coal that is mined by brave people risking their lives in ungodly working conditions. When the layer is depleted, the next layer is blasted, until nothing is left but a hollow shell of a devastated mountain. In its wake, the process leaves toxic sludge piles containing arsenic, lead, and mercury; contaminated rivers and streams; fine-particulate airborne matter that creates an epidemiological health nightmare; and unlivable communities. Mountaintop removal has already destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains, decimated 1 million acres of forests, and buried 2,000 miles of streams.
In the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, mining corporations, such as Massey Energy (recently acquired by Alpha Natural Resources), are blasting the mountains of Appalachia into extinction, polluting the air and water with impunity, and amassing the kind of profits that allow them to wield massive lobbying power in Washington, D.C., to both repeal existing environmental regulations and obviate the ratification of new ones.
The small community of Coal River has had enough. Their only schoolhouse sits at the base of a silo where 28 million gal of toxic sludge left over from the coal mining are held back by a flimsy levee. Members of the community—ranging from five to 63 years old—are dying from strange tumor clusters. Water filters that should last three to four months get plugged up after two weeks. The very last mountain in Coal River, protecting the community from massive flooding after rainfall, is being targeted for blasting. And the people of Coal River are fighting back.
"The Last Mountain" is not just a standard environmental cautionary tale, but also an uplifting tale of citizens taking back their community. Helping the cause is noted environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who travels to Coal River, aligns with the community, and attends dozens of rallies that are held to protest the actions of Massey Energy. In one of the film's lighter moments, a humble West Virginian remarks, "I never thought I'd have a Kennedy in my living room!" It is these very human moments that ultimately connect the audience to a cause seemingly unrelated to their lives.
The most poignant scene of "The Last Mountain" is footage of Coal River residents who had traveled to the governor's offices in Charleston to present him with money raised through a local Pennies For Promise campaign to build a new, safer schoolhouse (an ultimately successful initiative). At first, the governor is touched, even amused, by the rural denizens. But when they bring up the actions of Massey Energy, and the governor's failure to stop the damage to their community, he is stunned, embarrassed, and even goes so far as to have the West Virginia government arrest the protesters—one of whom is a 91-year-old woman in a flag-draped wheelchair. "Why are our kids any different?" the protest leader shouts at the governor. "Because they're in the coal fields? They're on the wrong side of the mountain?"
As "The Last Mountain" eventually conveys, this is a tale about so much more than blasting off a mountaintop; it's about hubris and powerful people thinking they can do whatever they want while destroying lives in the process. It is not enough to simply be outraged anymore. We are all users of the electricity and power that is generated from the sacrifices of residents and miners in Appalachia. The imagery of environmental devastation is so shocking, the deregulation and egregious indifference of the coal-mining companies' various violations so appalling, that we begin to feel somehow complicit in perpetrating this modern American tragedy. Fixing it starts with watching "The Last Mountain" but also includes taking the kind of inspiring action as that of the small rural West Virginia community that the film portrays. Ordinary people, banded together in a common purpose, can indeed move mountains. And sometimes, they can even save them.
Jovana J. Grbić, Ph.D., is the creative director of ScriptPhD.com, which covers science in entertainment and media, and tweets as @ScriptPhD.