This is the new face of coal mining in Central Appalachia. It is called mountaintop removal. Instead of extracting coal the old-fashioned way, by burrowing, the mountain is extracted from the coal – blown up sequentially to reveal each black seam. Everything left over – trees, soil, plants and rock – is considered “overburden.” It’s dumped into the valleys below, filling them up. Some say as many as 470 mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia have been flattened this way. For the industry, it’s a financial jackpot – fast, cheap and thorough. But for the mountains, and the communities nestled between them, it’s war.