Activism in Mountaintop Removal Films: Turn Off The Lights for Sustainability

             B.J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) opens with an assertion from anti-mountaintop removal mining (MTR) activist Julia (Judy) Bonds that restates one argument against MTR, its destruction of the Appalachian landscape. According to Bonds, “A sense of place pulls at you here. It’s a trait that makes Appalachians who they are,” and that sense of place is reinforced by pristine images of forest-covered hills, mountain streams, and wildlife seemingly untouched by the outside world. This is Appalachia, the images assert, and this view of Appalachia as a region, a place, and a way of life is validated with the accompanying mountain music in the background.

            This idyllic vision is shattered, however, when the scene shifts to reveal gruesome aerial shots of the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining in their end stages, showing mountaintops with browned, crushed tree strands, scattered like twigs. Other mountains, having lost their peaks, are as flat as billiard tables, their remains scattered down on the adjacent valleys as fill. From the distance, a 15 million pound dragline crane looks like a child’s Tonka toy, but the landscape is gray, brown, and completely barren. This is the perfect spot for Gomorra’s (2008) toxic waste dumping, except the coal companies have beaten them to the punch. As the film’s narrator explains, the mountains’ “guts [have been] blown out.”

            By effectively juxtaposing images of the pristine mountains that may become a memory with the hell mountaintop removal leaves in its wake, Rise Up! West Virginia successfully argues against MTR, but the narrator’s claim, “Coal mining hasn’t saved the state yet,” takes the argument further. Although all ten of the anti-mountaintop removal documentaries we viewed effectively demonstrate the disastrous effects of mountaintop removal mining, only B. J. Gudmundsson’s Mountain Mourning ( 2006) and Rise Up! West Virginia successfully support arguments against mountaintop removal mining while offering viable non-fossil fuel energy alternatives, alternatives that, according to the films, will eventually end America’s addiction to coal, and Appalachia’s over-reliance on a coalmining economy.

            Mountain Mourning and Rise Up! West Virginia succeed where other anti-MTR documentaries fail. Because Gudmundsson’s films support alternatives to coalmining, both MTR and underground, they provide a map toward a solution unbridled by hope in the face of hopelessness, destructive visions of progress, and perpetuation of our addiction to coal energy and the negative environmental and economic consequences associated with its mining and burning. You can read more in our upcoming article exploring anti-MTR films.