Mountaintop-removal mines in Appalachia have demolished an estimated 1.4 million acres of forested hills, buried an estimated 2,000 miles of streams, poisoned drinking water, and wiped whole towns from the map.

Lindytown, West Virginia, once home to dozens of families, is now an isolated, lonely place, with only one original family remaining; everyone else sold out to Massey Energy (now Alpha Natural Resources), which was laying waste to a nearby mountain. West of Lindytown, a mountaintop-removal mine caused the population of Blair to fall from 700 in the 1990s to fewer than 50 today, according to the Blair Mountain Heritage Alliance.