How often do you wonder, when you turn on the lights, where your electricity comes from?  Recently, I got a closeup look at the consequences of our addiction to coal for much of our power in this part of the country.  I joined a group of reporters on a trip to my home state of West Virginia to learn about the bitter feud there over mountaintop mining, and came away with much to ponder.

The field trip, organized as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference, took us first to Kayford Mountain, about 35 miles and a world away from where I grew up, in South Charleston, W.Va.  My father was born in Kayford, a small mining community on Cabin Creek at the foot of the mountain, where we were told as many as 4,000 people once lived  

All that remains now, though, is an abandoned brick building and a lonely white church by the road.  The community was bought out by a mining company, which has proceeded to take the top off the mountain to extract its thin seams of coal. 

In such mountaintop removals, after the coal is removed the excess rock and dirt is pushed down the slope, filling hollows or small valleys cut by seasonal streams. 

Some residents of the area, aided by environmental groups, have protested the massive terraforming taking place, and its impact on the environment and their health.  To date, the federal and state government have largely sided with the industry that the impact is negligible or acceptable - though court cases are pending.  In one case, a judge found that more than 700 miles of streams in West Virginia had been buried under the debris produced by mountaintop removal.

Our bus wound its way up the mountain to a ridgetop, where we were met by Larry Gibson and Julia "Judi" Bonds, two activists opposed to mountaintop mining.  Gibson refused to sell the last chunk of his ancestral family home to the company, so now has a panoramic view of the mining going on around him - a vast barren landscape denuded of trees, with giant earthmovers as small as ants in the distance.  The picture above, taken by me, captures just a small portion of the disturbance.  Bonds is with Coal River Mountain Watch, a group opposed to mountaintop mining.

"We went to war to find weapons of mass destruction," said Gibson, pictured at left.  "All we had to do was come here."   Millions of pounds of explosives have been used to blast the tops off hundreds of mountains in the state, he contends.

Gibson has a message for those listening to the presidential candidates debate energy, particularly for those touting "clean coal" as a less-polluting option.

"There is no such thing as clean coal," he insists.  I know; I've been living in it all my life."

Gibson, Bonds and other protestors complain that the blasting and excavation have turned their well-water black with coal particles and have caused other, less-visible contamination.  Along with the pollution has come a massive change in the natural world that they grew up with, one of foraging the surrounding forested mountain slopes for ginseng and hunting and fishing for food.

"They're destroying a mountain and a culture," said Bonds,

The mining industry, naturally, says there's another side to the story.  Our group left Kayford Mountain to visit nearby Four-Mile Mine, where the mining company's executives and the head of the state mining association told us they were restoring that mountain to its original contour after extracting the coal, and planting hundreds of thousands of trees to replace the ones uprooted.

"We are practicing environmentalists,'' said Andrew Jordon, president of Pritchard Mining.  "We're using the resource and then putting it (the mountain) back."