Mountaintop Removal Mining - Books and Films

Books and Films

Many personal interest stories of coalfield residents have been written, including Lost Mountain by Erik Reese and Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice From Big Coal by Penny Loeb. In April 2005, a group of Kentucky writers traveled together to see the devastation from mountaintop removal mining, and Wind Publishing produced the resulting collection of poems, essays and photographs, co-edited by Kristin Johannesen, Bobbie Ann Mason and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall -- Missing Mountains: We went to the mountaintop, but it wasn't there. In 2007, Ann Pancake released the novel Strange As This Weather Has Been, the first major fiction work about the subject. Mountaintop removal is a major plot element of the 2010 best-selling novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, wherein a major character helps to secure land for surface mining with the promise that it will be restored and turned into a nature preserve.

Dr. Shirley Stewart Burns, a coalfield native, has written an academic book on mountaintop removal, titled Bringing Down The Mountains, which is loosely based on the 2005 Ph.D. dissertation of the same name. Cultural historian Jeff Biggers has also published The United States of Appalachia examined the cultural and human costs of mountaintop removal.

In 2006, Catherine Pancake released the first comprehensive feature-length documentary on mountaintop removal, Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Search for Coalfield Justice, a selection in the Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art. The film features Julia Bonds who won the 2003 Goldman Prize. A 2007 documentary, Mountain Top Removal, focuses on Mountain Justice Summer activists, coal field residents, and coal industry officials. On April 18, 2008 the film received the Reel Current award selected and presented by Al Gore at the Nashville Film Festival. Another feature documentary, titled Burning the Future: Coal in America, was awarded the International Documentary Association's 2008 Pare Lorentz award for Best Documentary.

In 2011, the film The Last Mountain directed by Bill Haney detailed the effects on the land and people living near mountaintop removal and coal burning sites. Maria Gunnoe, the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others present the devastation, confront the politicians and corporate interests, and offer wind power as one solution for Coal River Mountain, WV.