As a groundbreaking clean energy counterpart to this summer's extraordinary Food, Inc. documentary on the agribusiness, the long-awaited Coal Country film on the cradle-to-grave process of generating our coal-fired electricity will be hitting the theaters next week with the big bang of an ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive.

And Big...

Note: This is a guest post by Bo Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former businessman in the Coal River Valley, West Virginia, who has been one of the lead organizers in stopping mountaintop removal coal mining. Webb received notice last week that mountaintop removal operations in Clay's Branch, directly above...

Bloggers across the nation are making a joint request this Sunday: It is time for President Barack Obama and CEQ chief Nancy Sutley to make their first visit to a mountaintop removal moonscape and coal slurry impoundment and bear witness to the impact of the Obama administration's regulatory strip-mining policies...

In memory of Jeremy Davidson

"It hurled like a cannonball into Dennis and Cindy Davidson's house, right through the wall of the bedroom and onto the bed where 3-year-old Jeremy was sleeping. The huge boulder continued its path, crashing through a closet before finally stopping at the foot of 8-year-old...

Note: This blog will be updated during the day, with dispatches, video and photos being filed with Stephanie Pistello from the nonviolent march against mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley, West Virginia.)

"When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!" -- Mother...

A historic reckoning is taking place on Coal River in West Virginia this week--and in Washington, DC on Thursday.

On June 25th, U.S. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Water and Wildlife Subcommittee, will hold the first bipartisan hearing in a generation to...

Four daring protesters accomplished something today that no high ranking member in the Obama administration involved in the recent mountaintop removal mining policy decisions has ever bothered to do: These four American patriots made an actual visit to a mountaintop removal site.

They also went beyond the call of...

On the heels of a major Wall Street Journal report that we are reaching "peak coal," and revelations that the Bush administration buried a 2002 report on the cancer risks associated with coal ash, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu made a $1.073 billion down payment today on the construction of...

"Mountaintop removal is a crime--and ought to be treated as a crime," Al Gore, April 28, 2008

"Mountaintop removal is a crime against local people, nature, our children, and our planet," Dr. James Hansen, NASA

The Washington Post headline this morning cut to this chase: "Obama is Right to...

"Something like a shadow has fallen between the past and the present, an abyss wide as war that cannot be bridged by any tangible connection, so that memory is undermined and the image of our beginnings betrayed, dissolved, rendered not mythical but illusory. We have connived in the murder of...

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

Last month, as protesters from around the country converged in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia to protest Massey Energy's reckless mountaintop removal blasting operations within a short distance of a 7-billion...

Nestled into a lush farm in Manchester, Tennessee, the blockbuster Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival will roll out an impressive set of sustainability green goals as a backdrop for its amazing slate of shows next weekend, June 11-14. The great lineup notwithstanding--from Bruce Springstreen and the E Street Band to...

Off-Broadway will never be the same after this Friday.

With a revival of Tennessee Williams' first full-length play (about Alabama coal miners) under their belt, an extraordinary Brooklyn-based theatre group--New Mummer Theatre Collective--has just announced their plans to turn New York City's theatre district truly green.

They want to take...

In three separate direct actions in the West Virginia coalfields yesterday, nonviolent protesters launched the new phase of Operation Appalachian Spring, a growing national campaign to stop mountaintop removal mining and raise awareness of the catastrophic potential of government regulated blasting near a precarious coal sludge impoundment.

"The toxic...

"From a distance, we all have enough
And no one is in need
There are no guns, no bombs, and no disease
No hungry mouths to feed"

"From a Distance," Julie Gold

On any given night in New York City, an estimated 36,000 American...

As American citizens in Mingo County and other areas of the flood-stricken Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields continue to dig themselves out of the muck, indefatigable Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward is reporting on his Coal Tattoo blog that the EPA has "signed off on almost all (87.5 percent, to...

On the upcoming anniversary of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, President Barack Obama has the opportunity to declare an armistice in the polarized Appalachian coalfields, mend a 30-year mining policy of betrayal, and call an end to the most divisive and egregious human rights and environmental violation sanctioned...

Don't ever accuse the Sierra Club of being bad sports.

After the West Virginia Coal Association released a series of the worst cellphone ringtone coal songs ever recorded in history -- I mean, as in gag-me-with-a-spoon worst coal songs ever recorded since Thomas Edison pioneered the first coal-fired plant...

As three million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives continue to rip through the lush green Appalachian mountains and historic mountain communities every day, coalfield residents from West Virginia have issued an extraordinary letter today to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to assert primacy...

At the 2009 Annual Stockholders' Meeting of Massey Energy on May 19, 2009, board member and Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee will have an extraordinary opportunity to turn a public relations nightmare into a national teaching moment: As one of our nation's esteemed university presidents, he could provide...