Forbes

I first wrote about mountaintop removal mining – the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to excavate coal - about four years ago, and the shock of the reporting is still with me. On one of my first visits to a mountaintop site in West Virginia, I stood on the edge of a vast area under excavation. A mountainside had been rendered like a side of beef. You could spy thin, darker layers of coal amid the thicker shale. Trucks crawled over the makeshift roads, carting boulders to dump in a nearby valley. Suddenly, a huge demolition blast went off; the earth shook under my feet. As a companion and I walked away, noxious-smelling yellow smoke enveloped us. In short: you can’t truly understand the total war-like devastation that this does to mountains without...