Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is perhaps best known as the home of the Pirates and the Steelers, and the birthplace of the mighty Ohio River. This week the city is trying to put on its best face for the International Coal Conference and the G20 Summit of world leaders, chaired...

Every day, coal companies in Appalachia use over 4 million pounds of explosives to blast the tops off densely-forested Appalachian Mountains.

That's more explosive power than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

What happens when coal companies flatten the mountains directly above Appalachian communities?

When it comes to entertainers, there is probably no American singer more wholesome, cheerful and relentlessly upbeat as country music star Dolly Parton. Raised in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee, Ms. Parton is the public face of Smoky Mountain tourism, exemplified by the popular Dollywood theme park in Pigeon...

On his Myspace page, "Friend of Coal" professional Bass fisherman Jeremy Starks says this about "clean coal":

When I talk to groups in West Virginia I tell them something that not everyone in my state gets. I tell them that the water around active and abandoned coal mines is...

West Virginia coal baron Don Blankenship is no stranger to controversy. His company, Massey Energy of Richmond Va., blasts the tops off of densely-forested ancient mountains in Appalachia, and he doesn't like the media asking questions about it. In the video below, he informs an ABC News cameraman investigating mountaintop...

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin is a Friend of Coal.

So when angry coal miners - allegedly from Massey Energy, which is chaired by notorious CEO Don Blankenship -- disrupted a peaceful Fourth of July picnic atop West Virginia's Kayford Mountain, home of...

Two weeks after actress Daryl Hannah and NASA climatologist James Hansen were arrested at a peaceful protest against mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, irate coal miners disrupted the annual 4th of July community picnic atop Larry Gibson's Kayford Mountain (video below).

Kayford Mountain, just east of the...

Forty years ago, the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, launching a wave of national concern about the environment. During the Nixon administration, the Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed, which spurred a decades-long cleanup of the river. Today, according to the New York Times, the Cuyahoga...

Kayford Mountain Action, May 23, 2009 - Images by antrim caskey

On top of West Virginia's Kayford Mountain, eight environmental activists with the groups Mountain Justice and Climate Ground...

The following is a letter from Bo Webb, of Peachtree, West Virginia, to Sen. Robert Byrd. Mr. Webb is a Vietnam veteran who now lives below a mountaintop removal coal mine, which uses huge explosives to blast away the tops of mountains.

Dear Sen. Byrd,

I write you today as...

Knoxville, Tennessee State Representative Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains) is the kind of guy who says what he thinks - no matter what the facts say.

For example, while introducing legislation in the 104th Session of the Tennesee General Assembly to combat the deadly scourge of eco-terrorism in south Knoxville, Rep....

The following is a letter from Bo Webb of West Virginia to President Obama:

Dear President Obama,

As I write this letter, I brace myself for another round of nerve-wracking explosives being detonated above my home in the mountains of West Virginia. Outside my door, pulverized rock dust,...

When it comes to coal company eco-villains, no one fits the bill better than Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.

Richmond, Virginia-based Massey is best known for its October, 2000 spill of 300 million gallons of coal waste into two pristine mountain streams in Martin County, Kentucky: Wolf Creek and Coldwater...

In West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, the people of the Appalachian coalfields are fighting for a basic human right: clean water to drink, cook, and bathe.

What would you do if your water looked like this?

If you have been closely following the two spills of coal waste by the Tennessee Valley Authority in Tennessee and Alabama, you may have noticed an inordinate amount of Orwellian language and doublespeak coming from the mouths of certain politicians and TVA officials.

TVA seems determined to bury the public...

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who has stated that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," walked out in the middle of Senate hearings today on the worst man-made environmental disaster in US history, TVA's colossal coal ash...

Just-released independent water sampling data from the Tennessee coal ash disaster has shown alarmingly high levels of arsenic and seven other heavy metals, including cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and thallium.

"I've never seen levels this high," said Dr. Shea Tuberty, Assistant Professor of Biology...

Its not all bad news at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) cleanup operation in Kingston Tennessee.

No, despite the spill of 5.3 million cubic yards of coal ash from their power plant -- over 1 billion gallons -- into tributaries of the Tennessee River, everything seems to be just fine...

This is a monumental and unprecedented environmental catastrophe. The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) disaster is now estimated at 5.3 million cubic yards of coal ash, or almost twice as large as the 2.8 million cubic yards generated by the World Trade Center collapse.

The most comprehensive aerial video of the...